That said, the the assumption that this was just a confused and panicked crazy person has nothing to do with her being a woman, though her being a woman certainly does throw weight on that side of probabilistic scale. Men are vastly more likely to be violent than women. That said, even if she had been a he, my gut reaction would be “confused crazy person”. This comes from the fact that she wasn’t brandishing a weapon or bomb, and her actions were that of someone trying (stupidly) to escape. When an unarmed person panics and escapes, yeah, I tend to assume that they had no intent to murder. Assassinating a president with a judo punch is kind of hard. If she had a car full of AK47 or something, I would be inclined to think that she had malintent. Unarmed, with a kid, and recent head injury? It sounds vastly more likely that this was just a confused and crazy person then a person actually trying to cause harm.
Thats cute, and flattering, but I assure you that we don’t.
Fair point on her being a woman and a mother though, I’m being naughty using that as some kind of defence, as id be just as quick to shoot down the opposite stereotype; that if it were a middle eastern man it would be any more likely. At the end of the day terrorism is such an insignificant threat in the US she could have been a 6 month old puppy and it wouldn’t make much difference to the odds.
So, their mandate is “shoot first, ask questions never” then, eh? Yeah, we’ll be skipping the DC visit until or unless sanity and the rule of law return to this country.
There seems to be some kind of unhealthy relationship to violence in the US society. Violence is glorified (militaristic tendencies, wild west mythos, american exceptionalism, gun cult etc.) and I got the impression that in the US violence is always the first option when it should be the last - it encompasses not only domestic problems like law enforcement and the prison system but also foreign politics. Many of the current problems the US has are exacerbated by this tendency: War on Drugs (War? on drugs? really?), Terrorism (killing innocents as collateral damages creates terrorists) …
That would be closer to true if the number of US citizens inside the US was the same as the number of terrorists inside the US. Since the number of terrorists inside the US is unknown, the computation is impossible to gauge accurately.
However, you can get a rough estimation of relative deadlyness by dividing the total number of citizens by the gun fatalities first, which went from 280 million in 2001 to 315 million today.
For simplicity, lets say 300 million is the average, divided by 364,000, is equal to 824.17 citizens per death.
Then dividing that by the 20 deaths caused by terrorism (this assumes the least number of terrorists possible, which is at least 1), you get 41.20, which is roughly 41 times more dangerous than a terrorist.
So the average gun-toting American is more likely to kill you than a terrorist, but not by quite so much.
I agree with you that the US is overreacting to a terrorist thread level. From that point of view, we’ve let the terrorists win.
On the other hand, the White House is a legitimate security zone; that’s why the traffic barriers are in place. (And, heck, lots of corporations have had lightly-disguised barriers in front of their buildings for decades, as a cheap investment to guard against either vehicle out of control or an employee “going postal” and deliberately aiming their car for the lobby – which has happened). I haven’t seen video, or heard a reliable accurate description, of what happened at the White House gate, but what I had heard didn’t sound unreasonable – if someone is acting oddly they get turned away.
After that… Car chase in a city is at least going to get you charged with reckless endangerment, and the police are going to try to stop you before you hurt someone. If you don’t pull over, they’re going to try harder… Least damage to most people. Admittedly, if you’re running because you’re paranoid and paniced, chasing/roadblocks might not be the optimal response – but how can they know that, and what else can they do?
So given what details I’ve heard, I don’t see this particular incident as overreaction to terrorist scare. I see it as escalating reaction to an escalating situation. I may change my mind as more detailed facts become available, but even in pre-9/11 days someone who appeared to be trying to gate-crash the White House would be taken into custody if at all possible, and someone who did that and then ran would be pursued.
We have some general problems, but I’m not sure that this particular incident is validly classified as a symptom of those. Again, I’m waiting for real facts – security camera footage, for example – to be analyzed before I draw conclusions.
In hindsight, she absolutely should have been arrested rather than shot, and I wish someone on the scene had had a cool enough head to make that decision. But consider that this woman had just tried to run over several cops for no reason and led them on a potentially deadly* high-speed chase through traffic. I’ve seen video of the car stopped, surrounded by police with guns leveled, then suddenly pulling out into a three-point turn as police jump out of the way, and they didn’t shoot her at that time even as she was actively resisting arrest and trying to run people over; there was at least some restraint being shown. Even discounting the possibility of a suicide vest (she was certainly acting like a person on a mission they were willing to die for), I’m not sure I can blame the police for being really damn antsy and afraid for their and others’ lives by the end of the thing. When you drive people to that point, they make bad decisions, and I really, really wish they had kept their heads a little better, but she was basically going down a checklist of “how to freak out the police enough to get shot.”
I am not gonna defend police brutality in general or DC police in particular, but in this one instance, it’s hard for me to call them wanton murderers.
*My mother’s church is currently dealing with a situation where a dude running from the cops in a stolen car flattened three pre-schoolers in a crosswalk. A high-speed chase means you are willing to murder any number of random strangers to get away from the cops. I have a hard time being sympathetic to that.
who knows if in a few years time terrorists with a bomb copy this. A kidnapped or “volunteered” child, and it all starts with what looks like a wrong turn. The terrorists counting on the cops to remember this incident and be more hesistant to fire
Information is rather lacking which may be accounting for our slight
variation in perspective. It’s not like I can’t see a situation in which
this was a ‘reasonable’ response, it’s more of a reasonable doubt situation
for me, plus I probably have trust issues with police and other gun toting
authority figures.
You can start all your phrases with “in this climate” too. That’s a specious statement. There is illegitimate paranoia throughout much of the country, agreed. Around the president, it’s legitimate concern.
