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Why Mass Shootings Should be Handled More Like Fatal Car Crashes 🔫
Why Mass Shootings Should be Handled More Like Fatal Car Crashes 💥
It bothers me a lot how the politicians and the mass media love to belabor mass shootings to no end. The hours of television with the grieving parents and interviews with police really serve no purpose but as a the interruption to commence, education and every day life.
I was reading the other day how Israel handles terrorism – they arrest and prosecute the perpetrators – but also emphasize returning to normalcy after a terror event. People get blown up and killed, their bodies hauled away, families notified and the scene quickly restored to its prior status – blood cleaned up, bullet holes patched, damaged walls repaired. Life returns to normal within hours of a terrorist attack.
In America on contrast businesses often remain closed for an extended period, memorials are constructed, scars left exposed for the maximum time. It plays to the terrorists’ or shooter’s advantage – as they are able to extract their maximum harm to the public.
America does know how to quickly restore infrastructure and normalcy after many types of death and destruction. Fatal automobile crashes are often cleaned up and the highway fully reopened and restored within hours of the crash. The ambulance comes and takes away the deceased, the firefighters put out the fire and sweep up the broken glass, the tow truck tows away the junked car and the DOT replaces the smashed guard rail. The families who have lost grieve in private. Often news coverage is limited to reporting traffic delays due to lane closures – the fatality if reported at all is in passing.
Fatal car crashes aren’t completely forgotten even as normalcy is quickly restored. Every one is carefully logged by police and placed in the FARS database – which is carefully examined for highway safety improvements and potential changes to the design of automobiles to enhance safety. FARS is also used in a thoughtful way to decide if changes are needed to laws to make roads safer. But FARS isn’t emotional, it doesn’t glorify crashes or their victims. It’s statistics gets news coverage but doesn’t make profits for news media or the police.
Losing a loved one is sad. People should grieve in private and be taken care of to make sure their needs are met. But instead of glorifying terrorists and shooters, the priority should be normalcy and quickly restoring order rather than belaboring private tragedies.
No, We Do Not Need New Anti-Terrorism Laws to Combat Right-Wing Extremists | The Nation
To understand why, we must first contend with the reasons this issue exists in the first place. It may come as a surprise, especially considering that we’re approaching the 20th anniversary of 9/11, that there is no generic federal law punishing domestic terrorism. While the USA Patriot Act did redefine terrorism to include its domestic variety, it did not create a specific set of penalties for such acts. Instead, prosecutors can use many of the broad terrorism laws that are on the books to prosecute acts of domestic terror (the majority of which have been committed by far-right actors). The problem is, they simply don’t. As the Brennan Center’s Mike German writes, “The Justice epartment’s inattention to far-right violence is a matter of longstanding policy and practice, not a lack of authority.ȁ As a result, the term “domestic terrorismȁ has been rendered “practically inconsequentialȁ from a legal perspective according to the legal website JustSecurity.org.
The situation is vastly different when talking about foreign terrorism. As soon as the government establishes a person’s connection, no matter how tenuous, to one of the 69 US-designated foreign terrorist organizations, that person can be subjected to all kinds of dubious law enforcement practices, often leading to more severe criminal chargers, and triggering enhanced penalties upon conviction. Since most of the organizations on this list operate in Muslim-majority countries, the connection between Muslims and terrorism has become cemented in our legal thinking, to say nothing about our larger political and social imaginations. Even in cases when there is no direct connection to a foreign terrorist organization, American Muslims are still characterized as international terrorists by the Justice epartment.