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Home > In U.S., Domestic Terror, Cop Killings and Violent Gun Deaths with
Suicides, Dwarf Anything "Jihadis" Have Produced
________________________________________
In U.S., Domestic Terror, Cop Killings and Violent Gun Deaths with Suicides,
Dwarf Anything "Jihadis" Have Produced
By Tom Engelhardt [1] / TomDispatch [2]
June 21, 2015
Consider this paragraph a holding action on the subject of getting blown
away in America. While I write this dispatch, I'm waiting patiently for the
next set of dispiriting killings in this country. And I have faith. Before
I'm done, some angry -- or simply mentally disturbed -- and well-armed
American "lone wolf" (or lone wolves) will gun down someone (or a number of
people) somewhere and possibly himself (or themselves) as well. Count on
that. It'll be my last paragraph. Think of it as, in a grim way, something
to look forward to as you read this piece on American armed mayhem.
National security officials and politicians have been pounding home the
message that the "greatest threat [3]" to Americans is an extreme and brutal
jihadist movement thousands of miles away and the videos and social media
messages its followers produce that make it seem close at hand. With that
in mind, let's take a look at a few of the dangers of armed life in these
United States, a quick survey of national insecurity in a country armed to
the teeth.
I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that, in the first half of 2015,
there's been a plethora of incidents to draw on. There's the killer still
on the loose in northern Colorado who shot at [4] people in cars or out
biking or walking late at night. There's the suspected serial killer [5]
who dumped [6] seven bodies behind a strip mall in New Britain, Connecticut,
and may now be in jail on unrelated charges. There's the ongoing trial of
James Holmes [7] who blew away 12 moviegoers and wounded 70 in a multiplex
in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. There was the mass killing [8] of seven
people in February in the tiny town of Tyrone, Missouri, by Joseph Aldridge,
an armed recluse who then killed himself. And don't forget Sudheer
Khamitkar [9], who shot to death his wife and two young sons and then
himself in Tulsa in April, or Christopher Carrillo [10], who murdered four
of his family members and then turned his gun on himself in a Tucson home in
May. And many others [11].
In such a list, there should be a special place for a phenomenon that,
though largely untabulated, has been gaining attention in recent years as
ever more Americans "carry" in ever more places [12]. This means ever more
loose guns lying around. I'm talking about the mayhem committed by toddlers
(or perhaps they should be thought of as American lone wolf cubs [13]).
Toddler shootings range from the two year old who killed his mother in a
Walmart in Idaho with the gun she was packing in her purse [14] as 2014
ended to the three year old who discovered a gun [15] in a purse in an
Albuquerque motel room in February and wounded his father and pregnant
mother with a single shot. Such a list for this year would have to include
the Florida two year old who found [16] his father's gun in the family car
and killed himself with it in January, the three year old who picked up [17]
an unattended gun and killed a one year old in a Cleveland home in April,
the Virginia two year old who found a gun [18] on top of a dresser and
killed himself in late May, and the four year old who, at about the same
time in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, picked up a shotgun [19] at a target
shooting range and killed his 22-year-old uncle. Toddler killings have been
commonplace enough in these pistol-packin' years that they now significantly
outpace [20] terror killings in the U.S.
The Big Leagues of Violence
While we're at it (before we get to the really big stuff), there is the crew
I think of as American-style suicide killers. They lack a political or
religious ideology like the suicide bombers of the Middle East, but they are
on missions for which killing yourself as well as others is the imagined
end. Think of them as informal American jihadis, in touch with no ISIS
social media types, watching no inflammatory terror videos, but all riled up
anyway, often deeply disturbed, armed, and on suicide missions in the
American homeland.
I'm referring to a remarkably commonplace kind of killing that, as far as I
know, no one has taken the time to record or count up: men who kill their
girlfriends or wives (and sometimes others in the vicinity) and then take
their own lives. Here's an almost random list of just some of the reported
cases I stumbled across for 2015: In January, in the appropriately named
Nutley, New Jersey, a 38-year-old man shot [21] his 37-year-old girlfriend
and then killed himself; in January, in Lincoln, Nebraska, a 49-year-old man
shot [22] his 44-year-old girlfriend, called the police to report the
killing, and then killed himself; also in January, a 29-year-old man shot
[23] his 27-year-old pregnant girlfriend six or seven times in a hotel for
the homeless in New York City's Times Square before taking his own life; in
February, in Wading River, New York, a 44-year-old man shot [24] and killed
his 43-year-old girlfriend and her 17-year-old daughter before taking his
own life; in March, in Chicago, a 23-year-old man shot [25] and killed his
24-year-old girlfriend, then himself in the mouth, committing suicide; in
April, a 48-year-old Fort Worth man, who had a winning $500 lottery ticket
and refused to share the spoils with his 46-year-old girlfriend, shot [26]
her and then himself after they argued, then called the police to report the
crime before dying; in April, in Cleveland, a 48-year-old man shot [27] and
killed his 19-year-old girlfriend and then repeated the act two doors down,
murdering his 47-year-old ex-wife, before turning his gun on himself; also
in April in Montgomery, Alabama, a man shot [28] and killed his girlfriend,
subsequently killing himself; similarly in April, a 35-year-old doctor shot
[29] and killed his 39-year-old girlfriend in Fayetteville, North Carolina,
followed by a 32-year-old doctor in New Jersey, and then, when police
approached him, committed suicide; in May, in San Diego, a 52-year-old man
shot [30] his 28-year-old girlfriend and her 63-year-old mother to death
before committing suicide. As June began, in Cleveland, a 30-year-old man
shot [31] and killed his 24-year-old ex-girlfriend and her grandfather,
badly injuring her grandmother, then killed himself. And so it goes, and
mind you, this is just a starter list for such acts, which seem remarkably
commonplace.
Moving on to bigger things, one kind of killing has been much in the news of
late: police shootings. The figures the FBI has traditionally compiled on
them have proven to be way too low, so others have entered the fray. The
Washington Post, for instance, recently began compiling a database of "every
fatal shooting by police" in the U.S. in 2015 (deaths by Taser [32] not
included). Their figure so far: at least 385 [33] for the first five months
of 2015 or approximately one of every 13 [34] non-suicide gun deaths so far
this year.
"About half the victims," the Post reports, "were white, half minority. But
the demographics shifted sharply among the unarmed victims, two-thirds of
whom were black or Hispanic. Overall, blacks were killed at three times the
rate of whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the
census tracts where the shootings occurred." A Guardian study [35] adds
this detail: "Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed
when killed during encounters with police as white people."
According to [36] the Guardian, a recent Bureau of Justice report found that
over the last eight years an average of 928 Americans have died annually at
the hands of the police. (FBI figures: only 383.) In other words in those
years, there were 7,427 police homicides, the equivalent of more than two
9/11s. Compared to other developed countries, these figures are staggering.
There were, for instance, more fatal police shootings [37] in the United
States in the month of March 2015 (97) than Australia had between 1992 and
2011 (94). Similarly, there have been almost three times as many police
shootings in California alone in 2015 (72) as Canada experiences annually
(25).
And when it comes to armed dangers in a country in which there are estimated
to be between 270 and 310 million guns or, on average, nearly one firearm
[38] for every man, woman, and child, we haven't even made it to the major
leagues of death yet. Take, for instance, suicide by gun. In the last year
for which we have figures, 2013, there were 21,175 [39] such deaths [40] and
they seem to be rising. Deaths by firearm in this country totaled 33,636
[41] in that year and seem to be rising as well.
And just for the heck of it, maybe we should throw in one other kind of
weapon (even if it generally lacks the intentionality of firearms): cars,
trucks, and other vehicles. Many traffic deaths could certainly qualify as
assaults, however unintentional, with a deadly weapon. In 2013, there were
32,719 [42] such deaths, essentially equaling death by gun in America.
In all, then, we're talking about approximately 66,000 death-dealing
assaults with weapons or vehicles in this country yearly.
Armed Dangers and Meal Tickets
Now, let's leave those annual fields of carnage behind and turn to the
"greatest threat" of our moment -- or so the officials of the national
security state would have you believe. You know what that is, of course:
the Islamic State with its sophisticated propaganda skills that, according
to official Washington, regularly run circles [43] around whatever this
country and its allies can muster in response. Despite the nearly trillion
dollars [44] a year that goes into national security and the elaborate
surveillance [45] and monitoring systems that have been put in place, we
remain strangely defenseless against its wiles. Using social media, its
facilitators threaten to obliterate distance, reach across oceans, and rile
up displaced, marginalized, and often slightly unhinged young American
Muslims, and -- at least so the story goes -- prepare the groundwork for
unparalleled mayhem in "the homeland."
With that dire scenario in mind, here is 2015 in Islamic State terrorism in
the U.S. in terms of death and destruction: In May, evidently affected by
ISIS's social media presence, Elton Simpson [46] and Nadir Soofi, two young
American Muslims from Phoenix who were roommates, set out [47] to attack a
cartoon exhibit and contest in Garland, Texas, devoted to the Prophet
Muhammad and organized by Islamophobe Pam Geller [48]. Armed with assault
rifles and wearing body armor, they managed to wound an unarmed security
guard in the ankle before they were killed by an off-duty traffic officer,
also working security at the event.
Similarly, this month a 26-year-old black Muslim, Usaamah Rahim, was
reportedly involved in an ISIS-inspired plot in Boston to somehow behead
Geller [49]. He then supposedly abandoned that plan, deciding instead to
behead some local "boys in blue [50]." Approached on the street for
questioning by Boston police and FBI agents in plain clothes, he pulled out
a "military-style knife," they claimed, threatened them, and was shot to
death. (Some aspects of their account have been questioned [51].) And
that's it, folks. The greatest threat on the planet has, so far this year,
managed to inspire three marginal young men to get themselves killed. When
it comes to the dangers in American life, put that in the context of tens of
thousands of annual deaths by firearm, or even of the toddler killings.
Despite all the talk [52] of possible jihadist plots, this is the evidence
we have of the threat to the "homeland" which the Islamic State represents
at the moment and into which so much money and preventive activity flows (to
the exclusion of so much else). It is, we are told, a "new threat," utterly
unlike the normal dangers of our American world. In fact, such violence,
rare as it may be, shouldn't seem aberrational at all. It really should
strike us as more of the same -- even if the names of the perpetrators
sometimes have a different ring to them: men, often young, with access to
weapons, in some cases mentally unstable, and with a grudge, intent on
striking out. They should remind us of those American men who so regularly
kill their girlfriends and then themselves or of many of the mass killers
[53] of recent years [54].
Yet this is the lone danger that is constantly played up as the one worthy
of both fear and investment. Of course, jihadist terror is perfectly real
and if Americans lived in Syria or Iraq or Libya it would be a horrifying
problem. But whatever the present skills of ISIS's propagandists, such
violence has, since 9/11, proven more dangerous than shark attacks [55], but
not much else in American life. And when law enforcement agencies are
surveyed, according to [56] Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer, they, too,
see the dangers of Islamist terrorism as modest indeed in this country,
particularly in comparison to the homegrown far right-wing version of the
same.
It matters that we are still protected by two oceans and that the Islamic
jihadist heartlands are distant indeed. But let's be honest: the threat of
Islamic terrorism here is also a meal ticket for the national security
state. (Hence all those plots [57] that turn out to be essentially
instigated, funded, often essentially organized by FBI informers [58] and
then "cracked" by the FBI.) It's one major way that the officials of that
state-within-a-state ensure support and funding, endow themselves with
special privileges, including never having to appear in court [59] for
potential criminal acts, and entrench their anti-democratic methods [60] and
the blanket of secrecy that goes with them ever more deeply in American
life.
As for the real armed dangers in our world, nobody's likely to put much
money into protecting you from them and, despite those 66,000 deaths a year,
somehow the world continues to spin and the end is not nigh.
By the way, you do have one thing coming to you, don't you? I promised you
a last paragraph. So here goes.
In the week-plus since I first began writing this piece, there was indeed
one Islamic State-"inspired" attack in the United States. A twenty-one year
old man lunged [61] at an FBI agent searching his home in Staten Island, New
York, with "a large kitchen knife." He was reputed to be part of another of
those ISIS-inspired terror "plots [62]" that seem unlikely to ever be
successfully carried out. There was also a mass killing. A
twenty-one-year-old white racist [63] walked into a historic black church in
Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire [64] in what, if he had been
Muslim, would have been called a terror attack [65], killing nine, including
the church's pastor who was also a state senator. As Reuters reported [66],
the massacre "recalled the 1963 bombing of an African-American church in
Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four girls and galvanized the civil rights
movement of the 1960s." There was as well at least one more grim toddler
shooting. A Cincinnati three year old found [67] his mother's gun in her
purse, shot himself in the chest, and died. There was also at least one
more fellow on a suicide mission: a Vermont man sought by the police in the
killing of his ex-girlfriend engaged in a high-speed car chase before
crashing and committing [68] suicide by gun. There were a number of police
homicides, including: a man on probation in a Hacienda Inn in South Lake
Tahoe [69]; a 28-year-old man in a high-speed car chase in Stockton [70],
California; a 28-year-old man, unarmed but "behaving erratically," in Des
Moines [71], Iowa; a man who stabbed a policeman trying to arrest him in
Brighton Beach [72], New York; and a man tentatively identified [73] as
African in Louisville, Kentucky, accused of violently threatening the police
with a flag pole (with the usual conflicting stories from police and
eyewitnesses about what actually happened). And in the smorgasbord that is
America's cavalcade of violence, we shouldn't leave out the off-duty
Neptune, New Jersey, police sergeant who chased [74] his ex-wife in his car,
caught up with her, and shot her to death in front of their seven-year-old
daughter before threatening to kill himself and being arrested by the
police; or the Iowa City mall security guard, evidently fired from his job
earlier that day, who went home, got a weapon, returned, and killed [75] a
20-year-old female employee of the mall's children's museum whom he had
previously been harassing. He fled, but was arrested by the police soon
after. Meanwhile, a mentally disturbed [76] young man with a grudge against
the police bought an armored van on eBay ("touted as [77] a 'Zombie
apocalypse assault vehicle' with 'gun ports' capable of 'drive-by mow-downs'
and full armor and bulletproof windows 'just in case someone might try to
take this bad boy from you'"). He then built pipe bombs, armed himself with
an assault rifle and shotgun, drove to Police Headquarters in Dallas, and
launched a full-scale attack [78] on the place. Miraculously, he managed to
kill no one, despite also crashing his van into several police cars, and was
finally killed by a police sniper. And last but hardly least, some gunfire
hit closer to home. Three young men in Brooklyn, New York, were shot and
wounded [79] in a housing-project playground complex (named after a
neighborhood 13 year old who had been killed [80] by a policeman in 1994).
Someone I know gives classes in that complex. The shooter remains on the
loose.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of
The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's [81] as well as The
End of Victory Culture [82], runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com
[2]. He is the author of, most recently, Shadow Government: Surveillance,
Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World [83]
(Haymarket Books, 2014).
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/us-domestic-terror-cop-killings-and-violent-gun-deat
hs-suicides-dwarf-anything-jihadis-have-produced
Links:
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d-shooting-african-man/71198208/
[74]
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-Shore-Woman-Injured-Philip--307671101.html
[75]
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der-friends-article-1.2258362
[76]
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_to_dallas_shooting_was_mentally_unstable
[77]
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-police-attack-suspect-got-an-armored-van/71204062/
[78] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/dallas-police-shooting.html
[79] http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/06/10/gowanus-houses-shooting/
[80]
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-1-dead.html
[81] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[82] http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[83]
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wer/dp/1608463656/ref=la_B001JP2OJK_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=14162679
39&sr=1-1
[84] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on In U.S., Domestic
Terror, Cop Killings and Violent Gun Deaths with Suicides, Dwarf Anything
"Jihadis" Have Produced
[85] http://www.alternet.org/
[86] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > In U.S., Domestic Terror, Cop Killings and Violent Gun Deaths with
Suicides, Dwarf Anything "Jihadis" Have Produced
In U.S., Domestic Terror, Cop Killings and Violent Gun Deaths with Suicides,
Dwarf Anything "Jihadis" Have Produced
By Tom Engelhardt [1] / TomDispatch [2]
June 21, 2015
Consider this paragraph a holding action on the subject of getting blown
away in America. While I write this dispatch, I'm waiting patiently for the
next set of dispiriting killings in this country. And I have faith. Before
I'm done, some angry -- or simply mentally disturbed -- and well-armed
American "lone wolf" (or lone wolves) will gun down someone (or a number of
people) somewhere and possibly himself (or themselves) as well. Count on
that. It'll be my last paragraph. Think of it as, in a grim way, something
to look forward to as you read this piece on American armed mayhem.
National security officials and politicians have been pounding home the
message that the "greatest threat [3]" to Americans is an extreme and brutal
jihadist movement thousands of miles away and the videos and social media
messages its followers produce that make it seem close at hand. With that in
mind, let's take a look at a few of the dangers of armed life in these
United States, a quick survey of national insecurity in a country armed to
the teeth.
I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that, in the first half of 2015,
there's been a plethora of incidents to draw on. There's the killer still on
the loose in northern Colorado who shot at [4] people in cars or out biking
or walking late at night. There's the suspected serial killer [5] who dumped
[6] seven bodies behind a strip mall in New Britain, Connecticut, and may
now be in jail on unrelated charges. There's the ongoing trial of James
Holmes [7] who blew away 12 moviegoers and wounded 70 in a multiplex in
Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. There was the mass killing [8] of seven people in
February in the tiny town of Tyrone, Missouri, by Joseph Aldridge, an armed
recluse who then killed himself. And don't forget Sudheer Khamitkar [9], who
shot to death his wife and two young sons and then himself in Tulsa in
April, or Christopher Carrillo [10], who murdered four of his family members
and then turned his gun on himself in a Tucson home in May. And many others
[11].
In such a list, there should be a special place for a phenomenon that,
though largely untabulated, has been gaining attention in recent years as
ever more Americans "carry" in ever more places [12]. This means ever more
loose guns lying around. I'm talking about the mayhem committed by toddlers
(or perhaps they should be thought of as American lone wolf cubs [13]).
Toddler shootings range from the two year old who killed his mother in a
Walmart in Idaho with the gun she was packing in her purse [14] as 2014
ended to the three year old who discovered a gun [15] in a purse in an
Albuquerque motel room in February and wounded his father and pregnant
mother with a single shot. Such a list for this year would have to include
the Florida two year old who found [16] his father's gun in the family car
and killed himself with it in January, the three year old who picked up [17]
an unattended gun and killed a one year old in a Cleveland home in April,
the Virginia two year old who found a gun [18] on top of a dresser and
killed himself in late May, and the four year old who, at about the same
time in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, picked up a shotgun [19] at a target
shooting range and killed his 22-year-old uncle. Toddler killings have been
commonplace enough in these pistol-packin' years that they now significantly
outpace [20] terror killings in the U.S.
The Big Leagues of Violence
While we're at it (before we get to the really big stuff), there is the crew
I think of as American-style suicide killers. They lack a political or
religious ideology like the suicide bombers of the Middle East, but they are
on missions for which killing yourself as well as others is the imagined
end. Think of them as informal American jihadis, in touch with no ISIS
social media types, watching no inflammatory terror videos, but all riled up
anyway, often deeply disturbed, armed, and on suicide missions in the
American homeland.
I'm referring to a remarkably commonplace kind of killing that, as far as I
know, no one has taken the time to record or count up: men who kill their
girlfriends or wives (and sometimes others in the vicinity) and then take
their own lives. Here's an almost random list of just some of the reported
cases I stumbled across for 2015: In January, in the appropriately named
Nutley, New Jersey, a 38-year-old man shot [21] his 37-year-old girlfriend
and then killed himself; in January, in Lincoln, Nebraska, a 49-year-old man
shot [22] his 44-year-old girlfriend, called the police to report the
killing, and then killed himself; also in January, a 29-year-old man shot
[23] his 27-year-old pregnant girlfriend six or seven times in a hotel for
the homeless in New York City's Times Square before taking his own life; in
February, in Wading River, New York, a 44-year-old man shot [24] and killed
his 43-year-old girlfriend and her 17-year-old daughter before taking his
own life; in March, in Chicago, a 23-year-old man shot [25] and killed his
24-year-old girlfriend, then himself in the mouth, committing suicide; in
April, a 48-year-old Fort Worth man, who had a winning $500 lottery ticket
and refused to share the spoils with his 46-year-old girlfriend, shot [26]
her and then himself after they argued, then called the police to report the
crime before dying; in April, in Cleveland, a 48-year-old man shot [27] and
killed his 19-year-old girlfriend and then repeated the act two doors down,
murdering his 47-year-old ex-wife, before turning his gun on himself; also
in April in Montgomery, Alabama, a man shot [28] and killed his girlfriend,
subsequently killing himself; similarly in April, a 35-year-old doctor shot
[29] and killed his 39-year-old girlfriend in Fayetteville, North Carolina,
followed by a 32-year-old doctor in New Jersey, and then, when police
approached him, committed suicide; in May, in San Diego, a 52-year-old man
shot [30] his 28-year-old girlfriend and her 63-year-old mother to death
before committing suicide. As June began, in Cleveland, a 30-year-old man
shot [31] and killed his 24-year-old ex-girlfriend and her grandfather,
badly injuring her grandmother, then killed himself. And so it goes, and
mind you, this is just a starter list for such acts, which seem remarkably
commonplace.
Moving on to bigger things, one kind of killing has been much in the news of
late: police shootings. The figures the FBI has traditionally compiled on
them have proven to be way too low, so others have entered the fray. The
Washington Post, for instance, recently began compiling a database of "every
fatal shooting by police" in the U.S. in 2015 (deaths by Taser [32] not
included). Their figure so far: at least 385 [33] for the first five months
of 2015 or approximately one of every 13 [34] non-suicide gun deaths so far
this year.
"About half the victims," the Post reports, "were white, half minority. But
the demographics shifted sharply among the unarmed victims, two-thirds of
whom were black or Hispanic. Overall, blacks were killed at three times the
rate of whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the
census tracts where the shootings occurred." A Guardian study [35] adds this
detail: "Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when
killed during encounters with police as white people."
According to [36] the Guardian, a recent Bureau of Justice report found that
over the last eight years an average of 928 Americans have died annually at
the hands of the police. (FBI figures: only 383.) In other words in those
years, there were 7,427 police homicides, the equivalent of more than two
9/11s. Compared to other developed countries, these figures are staggering.
There were, for instance, more fatal police shootings [37] in the United
States in the month of March 2015 (97) than Australia had between 1992 and
2011 (94). Similarly, there have been almost three times as many police
shootings in California alone in 2015 (72) as Canada experiences annually
(25).
And when it comes to armed dangers in a country in which there are estimated
to be between 270 and 310 million guns or, on average, nearly one firearm
[38] for every man, woman, and child, we haven't even made it to the major
leagues of death yet. Take, for instance, suicide by gun. In the last year
for which we have figures, 2013, there were 21,175 [39] such deaths [40] and
they seem to be rising. Deaths by firearm in this country totaled 33,636
[41] in that year and seem to be rising as well.
And just for the heck of it, maybe we should throw in one other kind of
weapon (even if it generally lacks the intentionality of firearms): cars,
trucks, and other vehicles. Many traffic deaths could certainly qualify as
assaults, however unintentional, with a deadly weapon. In 2013, there were
32,719 [42] such deaths, essentially equaling death by gun in America.
In all, then, we're talking about approximately 66,000 death-dealing
assaults with weapons or vehicles in this country yearly.
Armed Dangers and Meal Tickets
Now, let's leave those annual fields of carnage behind and turn to the
"greatest threat" of our moment -- or so the officials of the national
security state would have you believe. You know what that is, of course: the
Islamic State with its sophisticated propaganda skills that, according to
official Washington, regularly run circles [43] around whatever this country
and its allies can muster in response. Despite the nearly trillion dollars
[44] a year that goes into national security and the elaborate surveillance
[45] and monitoring systems that have been put in place, we remain strangely
defenseless against its wiles. Using social media, its facilitators threaten
to obliterate distance, reach across oceans, and rile up displaced,
marginalized, and often slightly unhinged young American Muslims, and -- at
least so the story goes -- prepare the groundwork for unparalleled mayhem in
"the homeland."
With that dire scenario in mind, here is 2015 in Islamic State terrorism in
the U.S. in terms of death and destruction: In May, evidently affected by
ISIS's social media presence, Elton Simpson [46] and Nadir Soofi, two young
American Muslims from Phoenix who were roommates, set out [47] to attack a
cartoon exhibit and contest in Garland, Texas, devoted to the Prophet
Muhammad and organized by Islamophobe Pam Geller [48]. Armed with assault
rifles and wearing body armor, they managed to wound an unarmed security
guard in the ankle before they were killed by an off-duty traffic officer,
also working security at the event.
Similarly, this month a 26-year-old black Muslim, Usaamah Rahim, was
reportedly involved in an ISIS-inspired plot in Boston to somehow behead
Geller [49]. He then supposedly abandoned that plan, deciding instead to
behead some local "boys in blue [50]." Approached on the street for
questioning by Boston police and FBI agents in plain clothes, he pulled out
a "military-style knife," they claimed, threatened them, and was shot to
death. (Some aspects of their account have been questioned [51].) And that's
it, folks. The greatest threat on the planet has, so far this year, managed
to inspire three marginal young men to get themselves killed. When it comes
to the dangers in American life, put that in the context of tens of
thousands of annual deaths by firearm, or even of the toddler killings.
Despite all the talk [52] of possible jihadist plots, this is the evidence
we have of the threat to the "homeland" which the Islamic State represents
at the moment and into which so much money and preventive activity flows (to
the exclusion of so much else). It is, we are told, a "new threat," utterly
unlike the normal dangers of our American world. In fact, such violence,
rare as it may be, shouldn't seem aberrational at all. It really should
strike us as more of the same -- even if the names of the perpetrators
sometimes have a different ring to them: men, often young, with access to
weapons, in some cases mentally unstable, and with a grudge, intent on
striking out. They should remind us of those American men who so regularly
kill their girlfriends and then themselves or of many of the mass killers
[53] of recent years [54].
Yet this is the lone danger that is constantly played up as the one worthy
of both fear and investment. Of course, jihadist terror is perfectly real
and if Americans lived in Syria or Iraq or Libya it would be a horrifying
problem. But whatever the present skills of ISIS's propagandists, such
violence has, since 9/11, proven more dangerous than shark attacks [55], but
not much else in American life. And when law enforcement agencies are
surveyed, according to [56] Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer, they, too,
see the dangers of Islamist terrorism as modest indeed in this country,
particularly in comparison to the homegrown far right-wing version of the
same.
It matters that we are still protected by two oceans and that the Islamic
jihadist heartlands are distant indeed. But let's be honest: the threat of
Islamic terrorism here is also a meal ticket for the national security
state. (Hence all those plots [57] that turn out to be essentially
instigated, funded, often essentially organized by FBI informers [58] and
then "cracked" by the FBI.) It's one major way that the officials of that
state-within-a-state ensure support and funding, endow themselves with
special privileges, including never having to appear in court [59] for
potential criminal acts, and entrench their anti-democratic methods [60] and
the blanket of secrecy that goes with them ever more deeply in American
life.
As for the real armed dangers in our world, nobody's likely to put much
money into protecting you from them and, despite those 66,000 deaths a year,
somehow the world continues to spin and the end is not nigh.
By the way, you do have one thing coming to you, don't you? I promised you a
last paragraph. So here goes.
In the week-plus since I first began writing this piece, there was indeed
one Islamic State-"inspired" attack in the United States. A twenty-one year
old man lunged [61] at an FBI agent searching his home in Staten Island, New
York, with "a large kitchen knife." He was reputed to be part of another of
those ISIS-inspired terror "plots [62]" that seem unlikely to ever be
successfully carried out. There was also a mass killing. A
twenty-one-year-old white racist [63] walked into a historic black church in
Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire [64] in what, if he had been
Muslim, would have been called a terror attack [65], killing nine, including
the church's pastor who was also a state senator. As Reuters reported [66],
the massacre "recalled the 1963 bombing of an African-American church in
Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four girls and galvanized the civil rights
movement of the 1960s." There was as well at least one more grim toddler
shooting. A Cincinnati three year old found [67] his mother's gun in her
purse, shot himself in the chest, and died. There was also at least one more
fellow on a suicide mission: a Vermont man sought by the police in the
killing of his ex-girlfriend engaged in a high-speed car chase before
crashing and committing [68] suicide by gun. There were a number of police
homicides, including: a man on probation in a Hacienda Inn in South Lake
Tahoe [69]; a 28-year-old man in a high-speed car chase in Stockton [70],
California; a 28-year-old man, unarmed but "behaving erratically," in Des
Moines [71], Iowa; a man who stabbed a policeman trying to arrest him in
Brighton Beach [72], New York; and a man tentatively identified [73] as
African in Louisville, Kentucky, accused of violently threatening the police
with a flag pole (with the usual conflicting stories from police and
eyewitnesses about what actually happened). And in the smorgasbord that is
America's cavalcade of violence, we shouldn't leave out the off-duty
Neptune, New Jersey, police sergeant who chased [74] his ex-wife in his car,
caught up with her, and shot her to death in front of their seven-year-old
daughter before threatening to kill himself and being arrested by the
police; or the Iowa City mall security guard, evidently fired from his job
earlier that day, who went home, got a weapon, returned, and killed [75] a
20-year-old female employee of the mall's children's museum whom he had
previously been harassing. He fled, but was arrested by the police soon
after. Meanwhile, a mentally disturbed [76] young man with a grudge against
the police bought an armored van on eBay ("touted as [77] a 'Zombie
apocalypse assault vehicle' with 'gun ports' capable of 'drive-by mow-downs'
and full armor and bulletproof windows 'just in case someone might try to
take this bad boy from you'"). He then built pipe bombs, armed himself with
an assault rifle and shotgun, drove to Police Headquarters in Dallas, and
launched a full-scale attack [78] on the place. Miraculously, he managed to
kill no one, despite also crashing his van into several police cars, and was
finally killed by a police sniper. And last but hardly least, some gunfire
hit closer to home. Three young men in Brooklyn, New York, were shot and
wounded [79] in a housing-project playground complex (named after a
neighborhood 13 year old who had been killed [80] by a policeman in 1994).
Someone I know gives classes in that complex. The shooter remains on the
loose.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of
The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's [81] as well as The
End of Victory Culture [82], runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com
[2]. He is the author of, most recently, Shadow Government: Surveillance,
Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World [83]
(Haymarket Books, 2014).
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [84]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[85]
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http://www.alternet.org/us-domestic-terror-cop-killings-and-violent-gun-deat
hs-suicides-dwarf-anything-jihadis-have-produced
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rime/
[60]
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175970/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_is_a_new_polit
ical_system_emerging_in_this_country/
[61] http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/17/us/new-york-isis-investigation/
[62]
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/queens-college-student-accused-of-plotting-terro
r-attack-in-nyc/
[63]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/on-facebook-dylann-roof-charleston-susp
ect-wears-symbols-of-white-supremacy.html
[64] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting.html
[65]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-shooting-terrorism-or-hate-c
rime.html
[66]
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/18/us-usa-shooting-south-carolina-idU
SKBN0OY06A20150618
[67]
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/3-year-old-ohio-boy-kills-self-with-gun-found-in
-moms-purse/
[68]
http://www.wmur.com/news/police-vermont-man-sought-in-exgirlfriends-death-ki
lls-self-after-chase/33521950
[69]
http://www.kcra.com/news/local-news/news-sierra/officers-police-shoot-kill-m
an-at-tahoe-hacienda-inn/33590860
[70]
http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/06/14/stockton-police-shoot-and-kill-man
/
[71]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/11/ryan-bolinger-des-moines-police_n_7
560874.html
[72]
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Police-Involved-Shooting-Stabbing-Brigh
ton-Beach-New-York-Coney-Island-308215221.html
[73]
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/06/13/louisville-police-defen
d-shooting-african-man/71198208/
[74]
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Police-Officer-Involved-Shooting-Jersey
-Shore-Woman-Injured-Philip--307671101.html
[75]
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/mall-security-guard-harassed-woman-mur
der-friends-article-1.2258362
[76]
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/national/2015/06/relatives_man_tied
_to_dallas_shooting_was_mentally_unstable
[77]
http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local/dallas-county/2015/06/13/how-the-dallas
-police-attack-suspect-got-an-armored-van/71204062/
[78] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/dallas-police-shooting.html
[79] http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/06/10/gowanus-houses-shooting/
[80]
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/29/nyregion/police-youths-and-toy-guns-1-hurt
-1-dead.html
[81] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[82] http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
[83]
http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpo
wer/dp/1608463656/ref=la_B001JP2OJK_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=14162679
39&sr=1-1
[84] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on In U.S., Domestic
Terror, Cop Killings and Violent Gun Deaths with Suicides, Dwarf Anything
"Jihadis" Have Produced
[85] http://www.alternet.org/
[86] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
