Tag: terrorism

Why Cars Intentionally Ramming Into Crowds Is A Relatively New Problem

It’s happened again. In Toronto, a suspect used a Ryder van to drive into a crowd, this time killing 10 people and injuring 15 others just trying to get through their Monday routine. It is yet another example of cars—one of the most high-profile symbols of independence and Western wealth—being used as weapons against civilian populations with increasing regularity, and not as bombs or deliveries for explosives, but on their own.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it’s also a byproduct of the other ways that we’ve cracked down on terrorism in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Of course, problems—including violent ones—involving cars are well-known and well-documented. Cars have been around for more than a century now and things like traffic, theft, and drunk driving crashes have been around for only slightly less time.

Why Cars Intentionally Ramming Into Crowds Is A Relatively New Problem

The media’s language about killers in mass shootings analyzed — Quartz

Less than 12 hours after the news of the Las Vegas shooting broke, the sheriff in charge of investigating it described the gunman as a “lone wolf.”

In short order, that terminology was denounced as a proxy for white privilege.

Shaun King writing for The Intercept, said that the language perpetuates a double standard: when the mass murderer is identified as white, he is seen as an individual (and called a lone wolf); when the killer is black or Muslim, the entire race or religion bears the blame. The sentiment echoed across social media as well.

news: someone did a violent thing
me: Lord I hope they weren’t black
news: shooter was a lone wolf
me: oh so they were white
— Brokey S. Pumpkins (@brokeymcpoverty) October 2, 2017

Are there ingrained racial biases that surface when TV news outlets report these tragedies? Is this double standard persistent, or merely anecdotal?
Keen to answer these questions, Quartz reviewed the language used to describe the killers of 27 mass shootings in the US, beginning with the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012.

The media’s language about killers in mass shootings analyzed — Quartz

Making a Killing

More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War. When an off-duty security guard named Omar Mateen, armed with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic rifle and a Glock 17 pistol, killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando, on June 12th, it was historic in some respects and commonplace in others—the largest mass shooting in American history and, by one count, the hundred-and-thirtieth mass shooting so far this year. High-profile massacres can summon our attention, and galvanize demands for change, but in 2015 fatalities from mass shootings amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up close, and apolitical.

None of that has hurt the gun business. In recent years, in response to three kinds of events—mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and talk of additional gun control—gun sales have broken records. “You know that every time a bomb goes off somewhere, every time there’s a shooting somewhere, sales spike like crazy,” Paul Jannuzzo, a former chief of American operations for Glock, the Austrian gun company, told me.

New Yorker