MASS MURDER AMERICAN STYLE

America's brand of terrorism
By Kelvin Wade January 13, 2011

Last weekend's shootings in Pima County, Ariz., have sparked a firestorm of debate on the vitriolic political discourse in this country. Republicans have accused Democrats of exploiting a tragedy for political purposes. The accusation is amusing coming from them: 9/11, anyone?

But in the back and forth over the political climate and the inevitable focus on gun control, the one truly frightening thing is the relative commonness of this kind of attack. While we're succumbing to enhanced pat downs to thwart airborne terrorist attacks, America's most popular, homegrown terrorist attack, the mass shooting, goes on unchecked.

Forgotten now, but it was just 48 hours before the Arizona shooting that a teen in Omaha, Neb., killed his assistant principal, wounded his principal and killed himself.

Rep. Peter King, R-NY, has proposed legislation that would bar anyone from knowingly carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of a federal official. While it's a good idea to prevent people from carrying weapons to things such as presidential events like we've seen in the past, such a law would mean nothing to a Jared Loughner. If the law had been in place, would Loughner have heeded it? Please.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-NY, is proposing a ban on extended magazines like the one Loughner allegedly used. In the Arizona case, a woman engaged the shooter while he was changing magazines. If the shooter had a 10-round magazine instead of a 30-round magazine, he would've done less damage. But, then again, if he had a 10-round magazine, he may have done what other mass shooters have done and show up with multiple handguns.

These incidents leave more victims than just the ones killed and wounded. Just this past week a friend shared with me that she had been working in the high rise office building at 101 California St. in San Francisco in 1993 when a gunman entered the building and killed eight people and wounded six others. She'd hidden in an office with coworkers most of the day. The Arizona shootings brought the horror of that day back in sharp focus.

I mentioned my own brother who walked into a public lounge and murdered someone before killing himself. This type of horrific crime has been on my radar ever since. We reflected on each other's perspective.

My friend's answer to this problem is to get rid of the guns. It's a fanciful notion but entirely unworkable as well as unconstitutional. Even more stringent gun laws would've had no effect in my brother's case as he was a peace officer at the time and could legally carry a firearm.

We're shockingly vulnerable to this kind of attack. We can ban extended magazines, limit where we can carry firearms, close the gun show loophole and do a better job of background checks and intervention for mentally disturbed people. And it won't hurt us to ratchet down our rhetoric.

But in the end, the thing that would've made a difference in the Arizona shooting is the presence of law enforcement. Last month, when a gunman held the school board hostage in Panama City, Fla., it was a security guard who engaged him and brought the situation to a swift end. Likewise, in many of these mass shootings, once the subject is engaged by law enforcement, they frequently take their own lives.

To my mind, this is the real American terrorist threat. Peace.

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ADDITIONAL NOTES: I wanted this column to be disturbing. The reality is, to a large extent, we're held hostage to this particular crime.

On Monday of this week, my neighbors had a loud argument on their front lawn with other neighbors. There were about a dozen people screaming at each other. One of the people said that he could go home, get his gun and come back and shoot everybody. I called 911. But that's the world in which we live.

We don't know when we go to some place of business if some disgruntled former employee will choose that day to walk in shooting, enacting whatever sick revenge fantasy he has going on in his head. It can happen so quickly.

I know those from other countries look at us like we're insane. They wonder why we don't just ban guns. It's not nearly so simple. We have a, recently affirmed, 2nd Amendment right to own firearms. Even if we stopped manufacturing weapons and ammunition today, we have more than enough firepower to continue killing for at least another century. It would be like banning production of eating utensils. Americans would still be eating a long time from now. Utensils like guns have a looooong shelf life.

But another point of my column is that for ten years we've been afraid of the terrorist threat. And we keep looking at airliners for that threat to materialize. Yet in that ten years, we've seen this particular crime occur over and over. Kids shooting in schools. People shooting in office buildings. Shootings in churches. People killing their families. Often these are murder-suicides. Mass killings followed by the suicide of the shooter. These incidents are covered but we hear about them so frequently, they barely register unless there's a high body count like VA Tech or a child or person of interest is shot or killed, such as in Arizona. Yet we don't view these attacks like terror. And while your odds are falling victim to a mass killer is remote, it's far more likely than your odds of being killed by a terrorist on an airplane.

We don't have IEDs here exploding. Thank God we don't have people getting on buses or walking into nightclubs and pizzerias with explosive belts strapped to them. But what we do have is Joe Schmoe who was laid off from his job, whose wife has left him and he feels like he needs to take his 9mm to his former place of employment and get some payback. That's what we have.

In fact, the November 2009 Ft. Hood shootings where Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly killed 13 people and wounded 32 others appears to be a one man jihad. Some critics charge that Hasan's radical Islamists views were downplayed for politically correct reasons. That may be. But I think mass shootings are so commonplace that we wouldn't associate them with terror. It would be the easiest, most economical terrorism for Al Qaeda to pull off in this country.

The bottom line is when the bullets are flying, victims don't care about the shooter's motives. Whether he's doing it for Allah, because he lost his job, girlfriend left him, or he's just batshit, people just want to avoid getting hit. And how do we defend against it? More metal detectors in states and federal buildings? More laws? Better enforcement?

Some have advocated we need an armed population. That can't be the answer. More bullets whizzing can't be the answer because too many of the people armed won't have the training to make an effective difference. If there are untrained people shooting, more people are going to get hurt. There's no question public officials need security. Trained, armed security, preferably police officers.

But this threat is real. Watch the papers. Another mass shooting is coming. What will we do about this?