Terrorism: Big Brother will not save you.

Well, here we are. Last week a mass shooting atrocity in New Zealand, today another, smaller one in Holland.

I'm not going to bow to convention and put in the usual boilerplate. I believe, at this point, that the emotional response to terror attacks and the separate, moral attack from the media is getting in the way. People die and we feel bad. But we have to get past that and create a defense against it.

To that end, I have noticed some things.

1) We are the most surveilled, most planned, most regulated culture in history. The East German Stazi had nothing compared to the surveillance apparatus available to authorities at present. They can literally track people in real-time, read all their mail, and know their innermost thoughts by tracking internet use and purchase history. All of this is useless for catching mass murderers.

2) Mass murderers kill the most people when they are unopposed. As soon as anyone gets after them, they go down.

3) I'm seeing this statement a lot lately: "Nothing justifies the evil actions of [New Zealand shooter boy]." This shows that people are not thinking. The mass killers are getting exactly what they want. They want to kill people. Either over religion or politics, as a tactic in war or for an unknown reason due to a mental disorder, they are getting exactly what they want. They are successful, and as long as that continues, they will keep doing it. Mass shootings are now a successful tactic.

Therefore, we as a society are going to have to deal with it.

Currently our "leaders" are dealing with it by increasing regulation and surveillance, by disarming the public, and by using the atrocities to go after their political/religious opponents. That this isn't going to work is quite apparent to everyone, but the attraction of slagging your political opponents by saying they caused the slaughter is just too juicy.

Therefore, a new approach is needed. The nature of the problem is:

1) Attacks are random.

2) They occur against unarmed people.

3) They can't be predicted.

Israel already handled this. That's why the Palestinians switched from shooting attacks to suicide bombers, and now have settled on lobbing home-made rockets over a fence at the Jews.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader what we should do next. Maybe you can come up with something better than I did, or the Israelis did. However, may I suggest that as a first step that y'all should pull your heads out of your asses.

The Phantom

Update 1: Guy sets bus full of kids on fire in Italy, media silent because he's not white.

Update 2: While not-white guy is setting bus on fire and the other not-white guy was shooting up the streetcar, media weenies are blaming everything on Toxic Whiteness.

Kate McMillan did a nice juxtapose on these two.