The simple answer is that America is The Greatest Country On Earth Given To Man By God, and he protects us for the most part, until we really deserve a bit of fatherly punishment! Don’t you guys know anything?
Agreed. You don’t even need a bomb to derail a train, and it’s happened before to Amtrak and pre-Amtrak passenger trains. Amtrak’s Sunset Limited in 1995 (one killed). Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco in 1939 (24 killed). For comparison, 47 were killed on the same Sunset Limited in 1993 due to the gross negligence of a tugboat operator, 11 were killed on the “City of New Orleans” in 1999 due to a reckless truck driver, and another reckless truck driver killed six on the California Zephyr just months ago.
However, unintentional derailments are (1) alas not rare and (2) the examples above notwithstanding, often kill nobody on the train and rarely kill more than a handful of passengers/crew. (More typical than the above were the recent crashes of the California Zephyr and the Downeaster, which killed nobody aboard either train.) Unless terrorists caused several derailments at once or in a row, it’s not the sort of frightening “everybody dies” spectacle that grabs the public’s attention and causes, umm, terror.
No, for solid impact, terrorists would need to set off a bomb (or bombs) aboard trains or in stations – London and Madrid – or walk into a busy main station and shoot the place up – Mumbai.
Read that! Good article!
I’ve been surprised that there haven’t been more terrorist attacks in the UK, too (since the IRA ceasefire, that is). What there has been has been pretty incompetent. Even the 7/7 attacks, which were horrific and killed lots of people, messed up in big ways. If you’re going to blow up a bus, why not do it on Tower Bridge or London Bridge? There’d be a huge landmark either damaged or at least in the background to all the pictures, and closing a bridge for days or longer would be incredibly disruptive.
The 21/7 bus ‘bombers’ were almost embarrassingly bad. Once again they chose soft targets (one was on my road), but this time they didn’t even manage to make the bombs properly.
The Glasgow airport carbomb attack was foiled in part by baggage handlers and passengers and - although I’m sure it was scary for those there on the day - it was a topic more for jokes than serious debate.
I guess one reason is that it takes more than average dedication, intelligence (I know it’s not exactly rocket science, heh, but it’s not something most people would be able to do just like that), time (they still have to keep at their college courses and jobs just in case the terrorism thing doesn’t work out) and resources to learn how to make a bomb, plan a bombing, and plan a getaway if you want to, and that’s precisely the opposite of the type of personality that cries ‘Westerners are all evil!’
I’m not saying OBL and other high-ups aren’t smart, but they get a lot of power out of their position; ordinary grunts don’t, especially if they’re dead. Note that OBL met his end via US forces, not by sacrificing his life for his cause; it’s almost as if he didn’t actually believe in what he was saying…