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The significance of Aurora shootings? Maybe not much.
Another non-Muslim demonstrates how easy it is to inflict mayhem on American civilians. If we were teeming with home-grown (or immigrant) radicalised Islamists, as U.S. Representative Peter King and his orbiting neocon activists maintain, we should be seeing such attacks on a regular basis. Yet we’ve been saddled with an entire federal agency dedicated to protecting us against a threat that is even rarer than these occasional outbreaks of purely domestic insanity. Of course, the punditry class is going to go into overdrive interpreting the Aurora shootings as a symptom of their favorite cause. Until we see more of a trend in such sporadic shootings, however, I would chaulk the tragic loss of life up to random and meaningless awfulness that is very difficult to prevent.
I also don’t quite understand why we consider colocated deaths more noteworthy than serial deaths. About 80 people a day died in traffic collisions in 2010, yet no one bothers much about such predicatable loss of life. Do people assume a homicide risk more when they get on the road than when they go to a movie theater? Perhaps. But the death is the same.
Secular Right: http://secularright.org/
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