Ask HN: How come the US has low domestic terrorism?

4 points by phoenixhaber 273 days ago | 6 comments

I'm surprised, given the level of poverty, that there are as few incidents of people blowing up major pieces of infrastructure or bombing busses and trains as in other countries with similar levels of poverty. We tend to go in for mass shootings. Why is that?

baobun 273 days ago |

Why do you not consider mass shootings as terrorism? Why would poverty be the major contributing factor? What statistics are you basing your observation on?

BTW, did you see my replies to your other recent AskHN threads? Please take a look.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454270

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444561

PaulHoule 273 days ago |

It takes actual skill to use explosives effectively. The unabomber was a math PhD and it took him more than a decade to make mail bombs that could kill consistently. Mass shooting is within the reach of more people.

WarOnPrivacy 273 days ago |

US had historically high rates of of domestic terrorism in the late 1960s, approaching 400 reported domestic attacks a year by 1970. It fell sharply by 1980 and has been historically low ever since.

Notably, domestic terrorism rose when US Gov increased it's surveillance of Americans. And terrorism fell when agencies were ordered to stop unconstitutional spying.

Domestic terrorism falls under the FBI's purview. While terrorism rose in the US, the agency was famously engaged in widespread domestic surveillance of it's enemies. Specifically, the agency dedicated it resources to compiling all possible evidence about Americans that Hoover (the thin-skinned autocratic director) decided were enemies. Very few of these enemies had any tie to terrorism.

And throughout the early 1970s, a series or articles revealed that warrantless surveillance wasn't limited to the FBI. US citizens were spied on by the US Army, the CIA, the NSA and other agencies. The Church Committee was eventually created to determine the scope of US Gov's domestic surveillance operations and curtail them.

One of the outcomes of that was that the FBI was directed to cease illegal surveillance of Americans and return to it's law enforcement mandate. It was during this period that domestic terrorism finally stopped rising. Over the next decade domestic terror rates fell to about as low as could be.

To this day, Americans continue to be safe. Some attacks are inevitable in a civilized country. But we can't be much safer than we've been - not without gifting massive power to governments and living with their severe and punitive measures (ex:North Korea).

But we've been gifting power to governments since 9/11 and this administration adores severe and punitive measures.

nis0s 273 days ago |

I am surprised that you think lack of poverty is the only thing which keeps such factors at bay. But to address the main premise, only about 32% of the population makes $50K or less, that’s counting individuals not couples. A couple with $35K each clears about 70K, whereas the median cost of living is about $61K. So, on average the U.S. population is not that poor. But no one is climbing the social ladder with these numbers, which raises a lot of concerns from various groups, but there’s no real poverty per se. But of course, that varies by state, and whatever they have going on locally in each county, and so on. Feel free to correct me.

Rzor 273 days ago |

Are you comparing the US to which countries?

jim-jim-jim 273 days ago |

The classic ideal of terrorism—an underground cell engaged in asymmetric warfare for concrete political gains—hasn't existed since what, the IRA?

All "terrorism" in the US occurs with varying degrees of foreknowledge and encouragement from its own intelligence community. That's not to say that everything is an "inside job" as much as a strange fungal ecosystem with overlapping responsibilities and incentives has bloomed that no one actor can possibly hope to contain. OKC was probably the system at its most chaotic, while post-9/11 they've seemed to stabilize things into a "groom a loner, catch, repeat" cycle with a few oopsie shooties here and there.

While it doesn't have the best track record preventing civilian deaths, this approach has arguably been very successful at redirecting all the energy that could go into coherent resistance towards nihilistic slaughter. As I alluded to in a recent post, there's no way that a platform like Discord isn't riddled with feds egging some of this shit on.