Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths?

Great Debates
21

This is one of those things that frustrates me, even as someone who generally supports second amendment rights. Why is it that there’s double and triple murders on a regular basis around the country, to the point that when they happen in DC, they get little more than a blurb in the local news, but when 3 people die in a bombing, it becomes a national crisis. I find it odd that how we feel nationally about murders depends almost entirely on the method of death and the motivation, and not just on the fact that people are dead. So, 3 people die in a gang related shooting, no one cares; 3 people die in an terrorist bombing, and suddenly everyone knows and has an opinion.

But we’ve spent the last 11 1/2 years conditioning ourselves to react to the term terrorism. We’ve spent those years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands of lives learning to hate anything marked as terrorism. In a way, terrorism has become the red scare of the 21st century and, as a result, we’re going to irrationally react to it. And so like, with the marathon bombing, it was immediately labeled a terrorist attack, and we had the expected reaction.

The other part is, particularly related to guns and bombs, is that there is calculated cost associated with each. Like or hate them, guns are a big part of our culture, and there’s going to be social, cultural, and political consequences, positive or negative, where guns are related. Sure, there are people who react to guns as extremely as terrorism, some just as negatively or moreso, but there are others who react as extremely but in the opposite way. So it creates a stalemate.

But you’ll NEVER see anyone, come out and support anything related to terrorism. There’s no active lobbyist groups that support explosive sports. There’s no political power to the hobbyists who collect vintage explosives. Even if there were, terrorism is SO taboo, that no one would dare to throw their name in in support of it. So, really, it doesn’t seem all that much different from gun deaths, except that there is no pro-terrorist side. That is, as easily as all the post 9-11 legislation and changes passed, we’d see the exact same reactions to guns if either the pro-gun or anti-gun lobby just flat disappeared.

But the other aspect is that the way we see terrorism and gun deaths are different. In any given year, there are many more gun related deaths than terrorism related ones, but the gun related ones tend to come in small doses, often without the public being aware of them, with a few shootings making regional or national news. Terrorism may claim many fewer lives, but they’re generally in fewer events and larger numbers, so the public is aware of every single case. According to wikipedia, the death count on 9-11 was 2996, and the worst single shooting incident was the VT massacre with a death count of 32; that’s a factor of almost 100. It’s no wonder that that incident has largely faded from the national consciousness, but 9-11 is still affecting national policy. Really, it’s only human nature that we pay more attention to those large events because they stick out so much as outliers.

22

Think of it as a re-enactment of the Blitz.

Of course, London is bigger than Boston, and they did shut down the entire tube system, Birmingham, and Burley.

Regards,
Shodan

23

swimming pool deaths…actually close to 650 per year for children, not 5000. Still, much higher than gun-related child deaths. The fact is, 100 times more (estimate mine) kids swim than play with their parent’s guns. Every swimming pool child death, is, I agree, a matter of parental negligence.

Minority kids, for some reason, are far more like to drown than white kids. Maybe 4 times as likely, based on exposure to pools.

6% of scientists are Republicans, and the other scientists can’t explain why the number is so high.

24

Why do some people make such a big fuss over a few thousand American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq over a number of years, when many times that number are killed on US roads each year?

25

I don’t think America lost it’s head over terror this time. This one was handled pretty well. We should do better at dealing with other problems, but this incident shows there’s some hope in accomplishing that.

ETA: Lindsey Grahm and John McCain not withstanding.

26

No they did not shut down Burnley and Birmingham.

‘Regards’

Someone who lived in the country as opposed to someone making stuff up.

27

It’s called a logical fallacy of false equivalence.

A bombing or mass shooting is a rare and high profile localized event. The aggregated statistics of pretty crimes being committed across the entire country isn’t.

28

In general the populace does not feel threatened by suicides, which account for nearly 2/3 of all gun deaths. Yes, way more than half of the gun deaths people cite are self inflicted. This alone takes the talking point of the OP from “10’s of thousands” to “Slightly more than 10 thousand”.

The general populace is not a member of a criminal gang, so are not potential victims of a couple thousand more killings. Of course the gangs sometimes kill bystanders, mistake identity, etc. but those are already accounted for in the remaining 9,000 or so deaths…about 1/3 of how many die in today’s cars, and about 1/5 of what died in yesteryears less safe cars.

Of course american’s DO freak out when someone goes on a random killing spree, whether it be with a gun, an airplane, or a bomb.

29

So in every household where a woman has just given birth we need to remove all guns and sharp pointy objects just in case she gets post-partum depression and kills everything around her?

Yup, that would go over real freaking great with the feminists and the like … I can hear the screams of sexist discrimination now … :dubious::smack:

People need to give up the fuzzy bunny huggy bullshit and realize that you need to take responsibility for yourself, and stop trying to legislate it.

30

Seriously. The Guardian can suck a dick. The reaction to the bombing of a major sporting event and the pursuit of the dangerous fugitives who perpetrated it was swift and effective. But it is a response to a single incident, not a systematic problem.

The Newton school shootings was a different matter because it touched on a fundamental and highly controvertial part of our countries culture - civilian gun ownership.

31

Yeah, I’m not sure I get the criticism of the city “shutting down.” I doubt most people would’ve been out the day after anyway, and I would guess it helped the cops catch the suspects.

So what’s the problem?

32

The average person thinks there are more murders than suicides thanks to the concept of “availability.” Murders are covered in the press more than suicides, so they become more available to our thought processes, so we think there are more. Same thing as airplane crashes.
Still. removing something which makes suicide relatively easy and effective does reduce the suicide rate also.

Plenty of innocent kids die as a byproduct of the easy availability of guns in places like Oakland. One or two days of coverage, and that’s about it. If they were all blondes we might have some more action.
Yep, people die in cars. Not surprising considering the amount of time spent in them at high speeds. Oddly enough, you have to be licensed to drive a car, there is a background check in a sense, you get tested, and there are tons of regulations. And we force people to buy car insurance. Gun insurance, not so much.

33

If we can invent a gun that only kills its owner, then you have a point. The kid in Oakland shot by accident during a gang shootout on the way back from the store isn’t irresponsible.

34

Cite.

:shrugs:

Regards,
Shodan

35

To be pedantic Burley and Burnley aren’t the same place.

36

It wasn’t Shodan who made the mistake.

37

That did not happen in reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing.

38

Neither are the kids who are killed every year by drunk drivers. You’d probably have a point if alcohol only killed those who drink it, but sadly this is the real world. We have laws against both things, however, and enforce them when we catch those who do such things.

As to the OP:

As noted, ‘daily gun deaths’ actually amount to a pretty small percentage of deaths in the US, but actual acts of terror are pretty rare in the US. We had the drama of two bombs detonated at a major sporting event, then the man hunt for those who did it, an additional almost assassination type murder of a police officer, a shoot out and continued manhunt. I’m guessing that, jaded as the Europeans are, something similar happening in London or Paris would have managed to get at least some attention from the press and public. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m sure. I didn’t read the article, but the irony of an English article talking about US obsession with guns verse terrorist is, maybe not off the scale, but pretty far up there.

We had this discussion recently in another thread, and the answer is the same…this country is huge with literally hundreds of millions of citizens. During an average day, literally thousands of Americans die every day…around 2.5 million each year. Unless we have a personal stake (or political axe to grind), no one can obsess or even consider each and every death. Since guns are fairly common in the US (there are more guns than people) and literally 10’s of millions of gun owners, gun shot death, while less common that some seem to think, it’s unheard of. Like drug abuse deaths, alcohol related deaths, and car accident deaths, they happen and people are used to it, unless as noted someone has a personal stake, a political axe to grind or the story is uncommonly tragic (such as the police woman who killed her boyfriend, her baby and herself)…or, if there is a mass attack element.

In this case, we had a terrorist attack at a major sporting event that had major news AND thousands of folks taking pictures and video that could be streamed to a mass viewer audience. This was tragic, and unlike many school shootings there wasn’t any immediate closure as the psycho whacked him or herself after perpetrating their crime. The people who did this were unknown, and no one knew if there would be more attacks. Then you had the killers tentatively identified, followed fairly quickly with pursuit, the death of a police officer, a shootout, the death of one of the criminals, interviews with the dead mans family and the pursuit and final capture of his little brother who was wounded and hiding out in a boat under a tarp. That’s all pretty spectacular stuff, from a media and public interest perspective, and it’s a story that would grip any nation it was happening in…even in the UK they might put down the tea (or the beer) and briefly consider events, I’m guessing.

39

That’s like saying, “why did we get upset about Pearl Harbor, when we had cancer and people drinking themselves to death?” To some level when you start talking about deaths from “cancer”, or “cigarette smoking”, or “alcoholism”, or “obesity related disease” what you’re really talking about is health and wellness. Health and wellness are the results of collective decision making of millions of people. There are not many tools in the toolbox for government to influence those, basically you can regulate, ban, tax when it comes to issues like that. If you look at “ordinary” gun violence by and large it bears a lot in common with any other health and wellness issue except that unlike eating yourself to death guns often have “collateral damage” (but that does not make it dissimilar from alcohol and tobacco.)

Also, health and wellness are only ever going to be so successful. On some level when you life expectancy is pushing 80 years and people are dying from various things that starts to just like like “human life” to me. People are always going to be dying of something.

But a major terrorist attack or a military attack like Pearl Harbor, unlike health and wellness issues, are exactly the sort of thing governments were created to handle and our toolbox there is far vaster.

40

Its mostly about control and partly because of the uniqueness of a terrorist event

Most people know and fear that if they are out and about somewhere, like in a stadium, a marathon, a restaurant, or just waiting in line at the post office, they can do absolutely nothing if someone decides to set off a bomb near them. This fear that they cannot prevent a terrorist from bombing you sets off a siren in most people’s heads and they overreact and try to do something, anything, to get the situation under control again like more restrictive laws, or harsher punishment

On the other than, people have an overly elevated opinion of themselves with a weapon. How many times have we heard, after a shooting, someone say if only the victims had a gun, the tragedy would have been avoided? People think the same for themselves too. If they had a gun, they reason, they could stop almost any attack. So daily gun deaths don’t happen to people like them, they happen to other people, people that didn’t have guns, or don’t support guns, or whatever. If only there was someone with a gun, they lament, then the situation would have been controlled

Look at the reactions to shootings vs. any kind of terrorist related activity. People said if teachers had guns, Newtown wouldn’t have happened. If more people carried, then Aurora wouldn’t have happened. If students had guns, then Virginia Tech would have been avoided, and so on. In each of these, people false attribute the possibility of controlling the environment to guns, but you could replace guns with any tool and it would be the same thing.

However, even when terrorists actually attack us, even our military personnel, people who have guns and are trained to use it, the reaction isn’t to arm people like it is in regular shootings. Nobody said that we need to be even more armed after Fort Hood. Nobody said that military men need to sleep with handguns under their pillows after that guy threw a grenade into a barracks in Afghanistan a few years ago. And when terrorists attack us like in the bombings, few are the people who say we need to be more armed, Nate Bell aside, and more are those who say we need to control things like immigration or Muslims, or whatever.

And really, most of this is coming from one side of the political spectrum. The next Eric Rudolph isn’t going to get the GOP to talk about curbing right wing extremism but the Boston case is already getting asshats to talk about delaying immigration reform as if those are related issues.