An AMAZING Article: "A reminder: Terrorists want us to be terrorized"

[Logical]

By definition, terror attacks are designed to sow fear. They’re not intended to overthrow a government, to defeat an army or to take over a country. The aim of terrorism is to inflict high-profile damage on soft targets in order to maximize fear, ostensibly to effect a change in public policy. The best way to enable terrorists is to overstate the effect and magnitude of their attacks — and to overreact to them.

Mass shooters often seek fame or infamy. They’re looking for significance — to be remembered, even if for the worst reasons. It’s why they often leave behind manifestos and political diatribes. We give them exactly what they want. It’s probably not realistic to suggest that we stop covering mass shootings altogether. Or even that we refrain from mentioning the shooters’ names. But we do much more than that. We obsess over them, elevate them and give them far more significance than they deserve. And there’s good evidence that this in turn inspires more mass shooters, in the same way that coverage of suicides inspires more suicides.

The San Bernardino, Calif., attack represented the intersection of the two phenomena. It was a terrorist attack in the form of a mass shooting. It’s probably is of no surprise, then, that it inspired our worst reactions to both. In short, we’re scaring the hell out of ourselves. And there’s little reason for it.

--------------------------------------------------

The San Bernardino shootings came shortly after the shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, and both came about a month after the attacks in Paris. San Bernardino and Paris have conservatives demagoguing the threat of radical Islam. The Colorado Springs shooting had progressives raising alarms about the threat of right-wing violence. Together, the incidents have sparked calls for more gun control (though nothing short of an outright ban on guns would prevent these kinds of attacks), more mass surveillance (though nothing short of a panopticon could have prevented the San Bernardino shootings), more marginalization of Muslims (a surefire way to create more isolated, angry and radical factions within America’s overwhelmingly peaceful and well-integrated Muslim population) and the mentally ill and more police militarization (though few object to the use of SWAT teams and armored vehicles in response to genuinely violent scenarios — the objection has been to the unnecessarily militaristic imagery projected with their use and to using them to serve search warrants, to respond to protests and for other routine policing).

-----------------------------------------------------

That line “Instead of spending so much money on solving the problems of the Third World” is ugly. There are a little over 12,000 homicides per year in the United States. Diarrhea alone, a mostly preventable disease, kills 760,000 children under 5 each year. In 2013, 289,000 women died in childbirth. The vast majority of those deaths were preventable, too. Bill Gates alone is estimated to have saved nearly 6 million lives so far. The idea that he should scrap those efforts in order to create new and better ways to spy on Americans on the unlikely chance that doing so might prevent a few or a few hundred or even a few thousand homicides is first-world arrogance at its worst.


Much more at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/12/09/a-reminder-terrorists-want-us-to-be-terrorized/

WORTH THE READ!

We scare easily!

[peacebird]

1. Some scare easily. M$M tries its best to keep us in fear because that makes us easier to control

I am not afraid. I refuse to be.
My father went into WWII at 17, then served in Korea & Vietnam. What he saw and went thru was hell, it is highly unlikely that a terrorist event will happen where I live and I will be damned if I am going to besmirch my fathers memory by living in fear.

[Logical]

3. + 1000!! nt

[LiberalElite]

2. Kick! nt

[JonathanRackham]

4. Terrorism is not what you know it's what you think.

It's psychological warfare.

Don't think about elephants.

[Logical]

5. True! nt