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.