General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Guardian: Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths? [View all]krispos42
(49,445 posts)People kill each other, and the reasons are personal, emotional, business, or some combination of the three.
Let's not forget that we're also ignoring the daily non-gun deaths, too. And the rapes, and the child molestation, and the beatings of children and spouses, and the animal abuse, and the stabbings and kidnappings and torturing and all the other non-political crime that is part of daily life in any concentration of humans.
Why? It's not political. When a man murders because of a cheating wife, it is most emphatically NOT because of the oppression of his people at the hands of the Pentagon, or because his family was wiped out in a drone strike, or because the CIA installed an oil-friendly brutal dictator that tortured his nation.
Motive matters. A drug dealer killed by a drug user was not the drug user waging war on the US government or the people that supports it and funds it.
A radialicalized Christian blowing up an abortion clinic, a radicalized Muslim blowing up a baseball game, a radicalized libertarian blowing up an IRS building, a radicalized anti-federalist blowing up a federal building, a radicalized racist blowing up a black church, a radicalized environmentalist blowing up an SUV dealership... those are all political, and we all fear those much more than drug dealers and betrayed lovers. Because political ideas can become movements that can grow to millions of people and affect everybody.
There's never going to be a mass movement of betrayed lovers slaughtering their cheating spouses, or of drug users rising up and slaughtering their drug dealers.
But a rising up of Christians or Muslims or libertarians or anti-federalists or racists or environmentalists? Yeah, that's a possibility. That kind of rising up can lead to prolonged campaigns of terror, insurgency, even revolution or civil war.