The Las Vegas Massacre Was Not A Terrorist Act — It Was A Result Of Our Untreated National Gun-Addiction

Want to meet the pushers of the drug that fuels the national gun-addiction? See the list of the Top 10 Recipients of NRA Political Contributions in Washington, DC. Take an anti-nausea pill before reading the report. And the following 'toon depicts the shameful hypocrisy:

If this is a (fair & balanced) wish that every recipient of NRA money would take a knee before speaking, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
Why We Should Resist Calling The Las Vegas Shooting “Terrorism”
By Masha Gessen


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act ariana attacked beliefs boston calling category charlottesville committed defendants definition demands enemy entire entrapment fact follow helps human important killed las man matters meaning motivated murder muslim people political potential president rather reality scientist seems sentences serve shooting special term terrorism terrorist trump used vegas victim violence war white

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In the wake of tragedy, the entire country, it seems, waits for the President to say the word. The word is “terrorism.” Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, the singer Ariana Grande, among countless others, demanded in a tweet that Trump “call this what it is.” After the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August, reporters got in a shouting match with the President in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan, demanding that he call the murder of Heather Heyer an act of terrorism. The longing is almost palpable—as though by saying the word, this President, who seems capable of experiencing neither human empathy nor political responsibility, will finally at least acknowledge painful reality.

But, the reality is, the Las Vegas shooting—at least as far as we know now—was not an act of terrorism. Nor was the killing in Charlottesville. There is no single definition of terrorism, but most scholars agree on several broad criteria. The Irish political scientist Louise Richardson, who now serves as the vice-chancellor at Oxford, has set out seven key characteristics of a terrorist act: it is politically inspired; it involves violence or the threat of violence; it aims to send a message rather than defeat an enemy; the act and the victim have symbolic significance; the act is carried out by “substate groups” rather than state actors; the victims of the violence are distinct from the audience for which the terrorist’s message is intended; and the act deliberately targets civilians. The FBI uses a much less precise definition of terrorism, but it, too, specifies that the perpetrator must be pursuing a political objective.

So far, no evidence has emerged that the Las Vegas shooter was motivated by political beliefs. The Charlottesville killer was, but he attacked his opponent directly: the victim and audience of the murder were one and the same. It was a politically motivated killing, but it was not terrorism.

Of course, “terrorism” is much more than a descriptive term that should be used in accordance with the definition dictated by a political scientist. Terrorism—or, rather, the war on terrorism—is a defining force of American political reality, and has been for sixteen years. This is precisely why the word seems so important, and so called for, in moments of national pain, fear, and horror.

Among other things, the war on terrorism has created a separate category of law enforcement in this country. Defendants in terrorism cases are treated as enemies rather than criminals. Prosecutors employ war rhetoric against them, and judges follow special sentencing guidelines in deciding their fate. Special isolation cells, entire special facilities, and special rules of imprisonment are used for inmates facing terrorism charges. According to a 2014 report by Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, nearly a third of these defendants were victims of entrapment, and the entrapment was fuelled by ethnic and religious profiling. Most of these defendants are Muslim, usually brown, often immigrants.

Demands that Trump apply the term “terrorism” to the Las Vegas shooting or the Charlottesville murder are attempts to assert something that should be obvious: armed white men pose a statistically greater threat to the safety and security of Americans than do Muslims, immigrants, or even Islamic militants. An even more obvious point is that people killed by a brown man, as during the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, are just as dead as people killed by a white man during a country-music concert in Las Vegas, and that eyewitnesses and many others are just as terrorized.

The argument confuses cause and effect. The fact that people are terrorized doesn’t necessarily mean that an act of terror has been committed. This matters, because language matters. When terms are used too broadly, or just sloppily, they lose their meaning.

Perhaps more important, consider the potential consequences of broadening the use of the term “terrorism” to include white men who express generalized rage by firing the guns so easily available to them. More people, potentially, would be subjected to entrapment, inflated sentences, and torture conditions—hardly a desirable outcome, even if the injustice would be spread a little more fairly. Worse, these killers would get to enjoy an entirely different profile after committing their crimes.

Part of the appeal of claiming an affiliation with, say, isis, is that it automatically raises a potential terrorist from thug to enemy combatant. When I was covering the Boston Marathon bombing trial, in 2014, I lost track of the number of times the assistant district attorney said the phrase “They attacked us”—meaning, the Tsarnaev brothers attacked America. In fact, though, they didn’t “attack us”: they killed people at random. That heinous act, whether committed by a Muslim in Boston or a (presumed) Christian in Las Vegas, should not be glorified as an act of war.

We fight terrorism all wrong. We elevate the accused terrorist and proceed to destroy him. Turning the inhumane, illogical, and often extralegal weapons of this war against yet more enemies would serve only to degrade our legal and political culture further. It may also heighten the appeal of senseless violence, by imbuing it with meaning.

The act of ascribing meaning is reassuring for the public, too. Calling an attack “terrorism” helps to distance it, by placing it in an intelligible category and helping to imagine the perpetrator as a superhuman monster. Viewing him as a regular person who needs no particular beliefs, affiliation, or label—or even a gun license—to kill dozens of people makes us feel utterly defenseless. We are. # # #

[Maria Alexandrovna "Masha" Gessen is a Russian and US journalist author, translator, and LBGT activist who has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump. Gessen writes primarily in English but also in her native Russian, and in addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, she has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and US News & World Report. Gessen also is the Russian translator of the TV show "The Americans." In 2004-2005, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.]

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