This week's piece on the extraordinary measures we might need to take to prevent future individual acts of terrorism has generated some interesting discussion. Dave Cullen comments:
Very interesting piece. You're also only the second other person I've seen (outside law enforcement people working the case) to see Columbine for what it was, an attempted terrorist act.
How did you grasp that?
No keen insight, Dave. I just read your stuff.
It would be easy to get caught up in the semantics of what is and what isn't a terrorist act. But even without their bombs, Kleybold and Harris managed to murder 13 people that day. If "terrorism" depends on body count, they did as much damage as some of the Palestinian suicide bombers do. If it depends on whether the target community is terrorized, they achieved that, too.
I think where we hang up on classifying an incident such as this as "terrorism" is motivation. Because they're kids, we don't think of them as acting for political reasons. And if it isn't political, it isn't terrorism. As Dave explains on his site, Columbine wasn't really the "revenge of the nerds" scenario that we were initially led to believe it was. My guess is that they were more inspired by Oklahoma City than they were by previous school shootings, and that the whole thing was motivated by some grotesque urge to do something really "big and important." If so, they were not too unlike the hackers who unleash computer viruses.
But it doesn't matter.
To my original point, irrespective of what motivated the killers, we know from their actions that they were attempting to kill as many people as they possibly could. How much damage they did was limited only by the means at their disposal and their execution thereof. What would they have done if they had had access to biological weapons or a tactical nuke?
Presumably, if a big piece of Littleton had disappeared under a mushroom cloud, people wouldn't be so slow to describe the act as "terrorism."
Speaking of Oklahoma City, FastForward Posse member Karl Hallowell opines as follows:
[W]e need to be more rational about our risks. The last large terrorist attack that could be considered "individual" on US soil was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Since then the US has lost around 25,000-30,000 people a year on the highways. Certainly, the extent of damage hasn't warranted the changes forced on society. Also, I imagine if one looks at the increased risk of HIV infection in US prisons (lower now than in the past), and the increase in prison populations due to new laws passed in a post-terrorist environment, I can see a valid argument for saying that the official reaction to a terrorist attack may kill more people from AIDS than died in the original attacks.
Excellent point. However, I think if there is a real risk that large-scale terrorist acts carried out by individuals will occur, the time to start thinking about it is now, while the body count is still relatively low.
AST has a different take:
The point is, what I want from government is, first of all, keep the peace and protect my life and the lives of the rest of us. If there are killers at large, I don't get upset that I'm told to stay off the streets for a while. When everything gets back to normal, I might get peeved if the cops told me that.
What I don't want is for killers to be at large and the cops are wasting time frisking grandmas and nuns and not using every available tool in an intelligent manner to CATCH THE BAD GUYS.
The reason all this surveillance stuff doesn't worry me is that I know that I'm just not that interesting. Only a few lucky souls are. So relax.
Finally, there's a lot of interesting discussion over at FuturePundit where this all started. In particular, Trent Telenko writes that changes have already begun.
These ... threats are why anyone who is anyone in the Pentagon transformation biz has started to realize the key American military transformation of the next five years is population control. All the stuff that I am seeing about military bandwidth needs seems to be only a enabling step towards the ultimate goal of developing an "infostructure" that allows positive control of people via invasive 'chipping' ala pet I.D.s of "people/populations of interest" and wide area biometric and visual populations/vehicle tracking nets of the rest.
Non-citizens and citizen criminal parolees will be invasively chipped first as conditions of long term entry and parole release. This is an administrative law end run on a large number of civil rights laws that will pass constitutional muster given who is being chipped.
The technology is going to be deployed over seas first in support of our population control efforts in the Arab world. Europe and Israel will follow. Then we will see it here in the States.
I think we can expect to see much more on these topics in the days to come.
Posted by Phil at September 19, 2003 06:15 AM | TrackBackExcellent point. However, I think if there is a real risk that large-scale terrorist acts carried out by individuals will occur, the time to start thinking about it is now, while the body count is still relatively low.
Thank you. However, I stick by my point. If the choice is between increasing government power and increasing individual power even though that means an increased risk of terrorist acts, I'll chose the latter. We know by demonstrated evidence that powerful governments are a threat to human welfare and life. The increased threat of individual terrorism in comparison is hypothetical.