Of course there were some at least nominally terrorist mass killings too -- the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three or four depending on whether you count the killing of a police office during the later manhunt part of the deal, the 2014 attack at Fort Hood by a deranged Army psychologist, the 2015 San Bernardino rec center attack, and the 2016 murder of 49 at a disco in Orlando, but in most of these cases the link to organized terror was tenuous at best, and in the Orlando case in particular, which was touted at the time as the worst mass killing in modern US history (at least until this latest Las Vegas incident), the killer appears to have had no connection to ISIS and was probably just claiming a link in order to ensure that he would be killed by police, and not captured (he succeeded in that plan). We know these were acts of terrorism not just because the government calls them that, but because, well, they were committed by Muslims.
The few actual or supposed "terrorist' attacks aside, what all these mass murders in the US not committed by Muslim terrorists have in common, along with many more that I did not list either because the number killed was less than 10, or because the cause was so mundane -- worker laid off, family dispute, road rage or whatever -- is that they were the work of lone usually deranged (and usually white) men using guns -- and often guns designed for killing people.
The New York Times reports that since 2000, mass shootings and the deaths caused by mass shootings in the US have been on the rise, with the rise being especially sharp in the last six years ended in 2014 when the article was published (and when Homeland Security was supposedly fully staffed up and running like a finely oiled machine), and that rise has continued since over the next three years, especially with the help of this week's epic Las Vegas slaughter.
So what has all that money spent on "homeland security" gotten us? What has the surrender of our right to private phone and internet conversation, our right to be left alone in our homes, our right not to be monitored in our travels, and our right not to have massive dossiers gathered on our lives, what has the militarization of our local police forces, and the training of cops to behave as occupiers and centurions instead of peace officers gotten us?
Are we more safe now?
Actual terrorist attacks have occurred, or at least the government is calling them that, while most of the alleged planned terror attacks the FBI says it "foiled" have turned out to be the creations of FBI "informants" -- that is, people paid and planted among unfortunate low0-wattage or psychologically vulnerable people the Bureau hoped to induce into attempting some act of terror that the FBI could then swoop in and bust up, then claiming to have saved the day. That means that for all its awesome invasive technology and its multi-billion-dollar assets and interlinked law enforcement personnel, America's Homeland Security Industrial Complex has been remarkably unable to prevent terrorism.
And meanwhile, mass shootings -- terrible even if they don't get called terrorism because they are committed, for the most part, by American white men like Stephen Paddock-- are becoming increasingly common and also increasingly deadly.
To me, it appears obvious that the War on Terror has been a spectacular bust -- and not just the $40 billion a year spent on Homeland Security, but the $10 billion a year (at least) that we are told is spent on the National Security Agency, as well as a fair amount of what is spent on both the FBI the CIA, the National Security Council's Office of Counterterrorism, and of course all the anti-terror budgets of state and local police.
What is really making this country unsafe, let's just face it, is the ready availability of really deadly firearms -- let's call them Guns of Mass Destruction (GMDs).
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