How To Stop Terrorist Attacks
12/10/07 - Since this blog was first posted "Our Right to Know" has continued to kill and wound people all over the world. Most notable was the attack at Virginia Tech, where my granddaughter was a student, but, mercifully, not a victim. Most recent are the Omaha and Colorado attacks. There has been a report that one person who has carried out, or threatened to carry out, an attack said specifically that it would be done "Because I will be famous".
The goal among these attention seekers is now to exceed the carnage at Virginia Tech, and thereby achieve more Press coverage than any previous killer.
Geraldo interviews the father of one of the victims and expresses his heartfelt sympathy for the loss of the man's son, even while in the act of motivating some yet unkown killer to kill another man's son in the future.
Please, please do whatever you can personally do to stop the Press coverage of any and all of these killings that are done solely because there will be Press coverage.
-
This morning the terrorists exploded their usual bombs, except that today they were in London, instead of in Baghdad. This inevitably (and intentionally) leads to a feeling that its going to continue, until there is no place on earth that is safe. There seems that there is no way to prevent or control this madness, but that’s not true!
It is possible to put a stop to terrorist attacks, its just that it requires that we pay a price that we are not willing to pay.
In the late 1950s, the Limelighters had a song called Gunslinger, about a fellow that had killed 140 men, but the Limelighters counseled him to realize that it was just an attention getting device.
That’s really all we need to realize about terrorists. It is impossible to make any sense out of why they attack who they attack, or to attribute the motives of the bombers to animosity toward any particular individual, country, ideology, religion, or sect. The one thing that all of the incidents have in common is that they all make the news. The bottom line is that that is the why of the attacks. The perpetrators do not want to kill the victims because they want the victims dead – they kill the victims because that is the short cut way for the killers to do something that will make the world notice them, when they would otherwise never be noticed!
If, this morning, I had turned on the radio or TV, and got only the usual weather and traffic report, the scuttlebutt on the movie stars, various peoples’ opinions on who is going to be on the Supreme Court, and how the local teams did, instead of any word about the bombings in London, how long do you think it would be until the next bombing? They might try it one more time, just to see if they were losing their minds, but when there was no mention in the media of that second bombing, it would just no longer be worth their trouble (particularly if that "trouble" included blowing themselves up).
There you have it. The whole solution to the problem of terrorism. The media just has to give up ever mentioning it at all. No live pictures. No verbal reports. No mention of any kind, today, tomorrow, or next year. Would this mean that more people would be killed because they were able to do their killing in relative secrecy? That’s patently absurd. The activities of law enforcement would continue unabated (and hopefully aided by the fact that the top law enforcement leaders would have to spend no time preparing for and appearing at news conferences).
Certainly the people in the actual locality of a bomb blast would not be unaware of it, but the victims and their loved ones would not be adversely affected by the people of Kentucky being unaware of it. It would not be a matter of attempting to keep the occurance a secret – it is just that hundreds of people knowing about it, rather than millions or billions, has a huge effect on the incentive to engage in terrorism. Nobody, and no group, is going to spend millions of dollars, and risk or forfeit their own lives to terrorize dozens or hundreds of people.
But what, you say, of "the people’s right to know"?
Well, that is what I meant when I started out by saying that we are not willing to pay the price that must be paid to rid the world of terrorist activity. We would rather insist on our "right to know", and the Professional Media’s right to make a buck, than to have those hundreds and thousands of lives not be destroyed, and to have people throughout the world go about their daily lives free of the fear of sudden, terrible, horrifying death.
If, by some miracle of universal sanity, the people of the world declared that they would willingly give up "the right to know", in order to have peace, security, and order in the world, how would we go about it? On one end of the spectrum, we could enact Draconion laws invoking the death penalty on any reporter, editor, or publisher, printer, or technician who caused, aided or abetted any disemination of news of a terrorist attact. That wouldn’t work.
What might work, if people were serious about putting an end to this scourge, is public obloquy for any entity engaged in publishing any news of terrorism. Advertisers would pull their ads from such media, or risk the refusal by the public to buy what was advertised.
Another thing that would work, is liability in civil court for damage done in a terrorist attack which was the result of publicity given to a previous terrorist attack. A personal anecdote may illustrate this point.
I happened to be visiting in Colorado at the time of shootings by students dressed in long black coats at Columbine High School. A truly bizzare, as well as horrible, incident. We, by chance, went to dinner at a restaurant right by the high school, and saw some of the activity there.
A few weeks later, back home, I was talking to a neighbor, who was in high school. She told me about some students that had come to school wearing long black coats, and in other ways aping the Columbine killers. But I hadn’t said a word about what I had seen in Colorado to her, or to any one else in our small community! Yet those students knew!
Thankfully, nothing ever came of the local students who were influenced by the media reports of the Columbine tradgedy, but if they had acted, then it would be entirely just for all those involved in transmitting that information to them to be civily liable. By common tort law, anyone has a duty not to subject someone to terrorist attack, and it is reasonably foreseeable that increasing, by a millionfold, the number of people who have knowledge of an attack in one instance will greatly increase the chances that unbalanced people will react to that knowledge in a harmful way, and thereby be a cause of the injuries in a subsequent terrorist attack.
Thus, something can be done to immediately bring an end to terrorist attacks, but it won’t be done, because we will not give up our "Right to know".
The goal among these attention seekers is now to exceed the carnage at Virginia Tech, and thereby achieve more Press coverage than any previous killer.
Geraldo interviews the father of one of the victims and expresses his heartfelt sympathy for the loss of the man's son, even while in the act of motivating some yet unkown killer to kill another man's son in the future.
Please, please do whatever you can personally do to stop the Press coverage of any and all of these killings that are done solely because there will be Press coverage.
-
This morning the terrorists exploded their usual bombs, except that today they were in London, instead of in Baghdad. This inevitably (and intentionally) leads to a feeling that its going to continue, until there is no place on earth that is safe. There seems that there is no way to prevent or control this madness, but that’s not true!
It is possible to put a stop to terrorist attacks, its just that it requires that we pay a price that we are not willing to pay.
In the late 1950s, the Limelighters had a song called Gunslinger, about a fellow that had killed 140 men, but the Limelighters counseled him to realize that it was just an attention getting device.
That’s really all we need to realize about terrorists. It is impossible to make any sense out of why they attack who they attack, or to attribute the motives of the bombers to animosity toward any particular individual, country, ideology, religion, or sect. The one thing that all of the incidents have in common is that they all make the news. The bottom line is that that is the why of the attacks. The perpetrators do not want to kill the victims because they want the victims dead – they kill the victims because that is the short cut way for the killers to do something that will make the world notice them, when they would otherwise never be noticed!
If, this morning, I had turned on the radio or TV, and got only the usual weather and traffic report, the scuttlebutt on the movie stars, various peoples’ opinions on who is going to be on the Supreme Court, and how the local teams did, instead of any word about the bombings in London, how long do you think it would be until the next bombing? They might try it one more time, just to see if they were losing their minds, but when there was no mention in the media of that second bombing, it would just no longer be worth their trouble (particularly if that "trouble" included blowing themselves up).
There you have it. The whole solution to the problem of terrorism. The media just has to give up ever mentioning it at all. No live pictures. No verbal reports. No mention of any kind, today, tomorrow, or next year. Would this mean that more people would be killed because they were able to do their killing in relative secrecy? That’s patently absurd. The activities of law enforcement would continue unabated (and hopefully aided by the fact that the top law enforcement leaders would have to spend no time preparing for and appearing at news conferences).
Certainly the people in the actual locality of a bomb blast would not be unaware of it, but the victims and their loved ones would not be adversely affected by the people of Kentucky being unaware of it. It would not be a matter of attempting to keep the occurance a secret – it is just that hundreds of people knowing about it, rather than millions or billions, has a huge effect on the incentive to engage in terrorism. Nobody, and no group, is going to spend millions of dollars, and risk or forfeit their own lives to terrorize dozens or hundreds of people.
But what, you say, of "the people’s right to know"?
Well, that is what I meant when I started out by saying that we are not willing to pay the price that must be paid to rid the world of terrorist activity. We would rather insist on our "right to know", and the Professional Media’s right to make a buck, than to have those hundreds and thousands of lives not be destroyed, and to have people throughout the world go about their daily lives free of the fear of sudden, terrible, horrifying death.
If, by some miracle of universal sanity, the people of the world declared that they would willingly give up "the right to know", in order to have peace, security, and order in the world, how would we go about it? On one end of the spectrum, we could enact Draconion laws invoking the death penalty on any reporter, editor, or publisher, printer, or technician who caused, aided or abetted any disemination of news of a terrorist attact. That wouldn’t work.
What might work, if people were serious about putting an end to this scourge, is public obloquy for any entity engaged in publishing any news of terrorism. Advertisers would pull their ads from such media, or risk the refusal by the public to buy what was advertised.
Another thing that would work, is liability in civil court for damage done in a terrorist attack which was the result of publicity given to a previous terrorist attack. A personal anecdote may illustrate this point.
I happened to be visiting in Colorado at the time of shootings by students dressed in long black coats at Columbine High School. A truly bizzare, as well as horrible, incident. We, by chance, went to dinner at a restaurant right by the high school, and saw some of the activity there.
A few weeks later, back home, I was talking to a neighbor, who was in high school. She told me about some students that had come to school wearing long black coats, and in other ways aping the Columbine killers. But I hadn’t said a word about what I had seen in Colorado to her, or to any one else in our small community! Yet those students knew!
Thankfully, nothing ever came of the local students who were influenced by the media reports of the Columbine tradgedy, but if they had acted, then it would be entirely just for all those involved in transmitting that information to them to be civily liable. By common tort law, anyone has a duty not to subject someone to terrorist attack, and it is reasonably foreseeable that increasing, by a millionfold, the number of people who have knowledge of an attack in one instance will greatly increase the chances that unbalanced people will react to that knowledge in a harmful way, and thereby be a cause of the injuries in a subsequent terrorist attack.
Thus, something can be done to immediately bring an end to terrorist attacks, but it won’t be done, because we will not give up our "Right to know".
posted by Sam Simpson | 3:18 PM
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