Apparently, it was not an act of terrorism, but I woke up this morning to news of an active shooter situation around the corner from where I live. Nine people were shot, one critical, as they drove to work this morning. The shooter (who had parked his Porsche around the corner and that contained Nazi materials), was a “disgruntled lawyer” and was killed by the police. So scary. I had gone to that same shopping center about 12 hours earlier to pick up a prescription for my mom. What has this world come to that someone thinks shooting people at random is something that they should do?
I know. Awful. It seems to be a mall, a street corner or schools etc. It deeply saddens me that my children are not growing up and living in a world of assumed safety. The fact that we have talked about, “know your exits”, “what are you options if there was a shooter in your school?” Talking about survival skills in the face of violence is never something I imagined we’d be doing as a family. Worst of all, I feel as if things will never return to the way life used to be.
I’m confused as to how this isn’t terrorism.
If it had been Daesh or al-Qaeda materials instead of Nazi stuff, it would be labeled terrorism instantly.
It’s sad. It’s expected.
Since the suspect died in a shootout with the police, we may never know for sure whether his motive was political (the definition of “terrorism”). Material from extremist political groups like Nazis (or Daesh, etc.) could strongly suggest a political motivation, but political extremists could get violent for non-political reasons. (Of course, if he left a note or other evidence showing political motivation for that act, then it would be much more certain to be terrorism.)
The way life used to be in the late 1980s and early 1990s included crime rates (including homicide rates) much higher than they are now.
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Report-Active-shooter-on-Weslayan-Street-near-9284493.php
http://www.houstonpress.com/news/police-find-nazi-emblems-few-answers-in-probe-of-lawyer-who-they-say-shot-nine-8805534
http://www.click2houston.com/news/large-police-presence-reported-in-southwest-houston
Police have identified the dead suspect, and said that he “was wearing a vintage military uniform and had Nazi emblems on him.”
That is a new definition of terrorism. I was on a jury once for someone accused of making a “terroristic threat” – the legal definition is the threat to commit bodily harm to another person. This was pre-9/11. No politics involved, two white US citizens involved (one threatened the other). Terrorism has no boundaries of race, ethnicity, legal status, or religion. The news media regularly falls down in this, though.
Terrorism throught its basic definition is the threat of using harm to get someone to do what you want or actually doing something as far as I know. We are used to terrorism on a more mass scale, a suicide bomber blowing up a cafe, someone shooting a number of people, where there is some specific ideology involved. But for example, let’s say I told my neighbor that I would hurt his wife and family, I would blow up their house, etc, if he didn’t pay me 10k. Obviously, it is extortion, but couldn’t that also be terroristic threats, even though it was about money, not ideology?
In something like this, the question I guess is did his ideology make him shoot people, if he was dressed in nazi regalia and targeted groups Nazis don’t like (non whites, Jews, gays, etc), it would seem to be terrorism to me, whereas if he just started shooting anyone that moved, that sounds more like someone angry just taking it out on other people. With terrorism, if you can’t identify a motive, would that even be terrorism, if you shoot a seemingly random group of people, with no common ties other than being in that place and time, unless you can find some reason (like the guy was anti american and out to kill americans), to me that isn’t terrorism.
Unfortunately they likely didn’t keep numbers, but I wonder how many shootings happened in the past and because no one kept statistics, there is no way to know if in fact we are safer or not. How much of what we see as ‘danger’ is that we are more aware of these issues? Reminds me of the 1980’s hysteria over missing kids, the citing of 50,000 children missing each year made it sound like kids were being snatched left and right, and more importantly, it was something new, when statistics showed a)that as in the past, most of those kids were taken by a parent or relative, usually in a custody dispute and b)that the numbers being cited didn’t tally with reality, and pretty much the numbers hadn’t changed, only that people were aware of it.