In a world where all terrorist attacks are not equal | Hacker News Reader

In a world where all terrorist attacks are not equal

stateofmind13.com

20 pointsyinghang13 comments

>When my people died, they did not send the world in mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.

I think the author fails to understand the close relationship that France has with most of the western world.

It's not that the west doesn't care about a terrorist attack that happened in Lebanon (I certainly heard about it the night of on my national news channel), it's just that we tend to care more about attacks in locales that we and other people we know have frequented more often.

I don't know anybody from Lebanon or anybody who has ever been to Lebanon. Personally, I have been to Paris. My entire family and my wife's family have been to Paris. My wife's bosses were just in Paris last week.

The attack on Paris just hits closer to home, that's all.

Its true. The perceptions are not equal. If a multiple gang shooting happened in Chicago it wouldn't make international news as much as it would if it occurred in London. People are desensitized to things that become "normal".

It's also the context, the act in Beirut while not any less heinous was an attack in the Dahieh which is a Hezbollah stronghold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahieh The perception in this case is like the horrible almost out war drug cartel violence in Mexico, you can have an incident where 50 people get gunned down in a day and it would be barely get reported, 20,000 people die a year to the current escalated violence and it barely gets reported anywhere. Not to mention that most news is Europe/US centric to begin with, as well as very narrative oriented, one about every 50-100 US drone strikes is actually gets reported, usually as side news, while virtually every Israeli strike doesn't matter if it's Gaza or Syria gets pretty much "front pages" news as far as online news sites go.

I'm tired of reading this type of analysis because it's simply stupid. And I am pretty convinced the author knows it himself.

Here is why - islamic terrorists killing a few hundred people in Beirut (or anywhere in the Middle East, really) is normal. Not in a sense of 'what the world should be like' but in a sense of 'this is not an unexpected occurrence'.

Same way that Christian terrorists (even though they weren't called that) killing 20 thousands people in Paris 443 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massac...) was normal back then. That's what the Christian world was going through.

However in the last few hundred years Paris didn't really have religious terrorism - that's why it coming back is a big deal.

I learned a little while back that there are 250 gun deaths every day in the U.S. That's the equivalent of 2 of the Paris attacks, every single day. A staggering figure of close to 100K gun deaths every year, or 30x the 9/11 deaths. So while they aren't necessarily "terrorist"-related in the common sense of the term, they certainly bring terror to many families and neighborhoods.

Source? Even the most extreme number I could find (in the conservative news section of About.com) made a more conservative estimate: http://usconservatives.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/a/Putt...

It was on the T.V. news, I think a CNN report that I saw that, in October. 250 gun deaths per day they reported.

Edit: I was referring to a report by the Brady Campaign that in 2012 there were over 90K gun deaths in that particular year. I saw this recently on the news, and the stats stuck in my head for obvious reasons.

The US has about 16,000 gun deaths per year. (with a bunch more deaths by suicide). That's about 40 per day.

In 2013 CDC say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

> in 2013, firearms (excluding BB and pellet guns) were used in

> 84,258 nonfatal injuries (26.65 per 100,000 U.S. citizens) [2] and

> 11,208 deaths by homicide (3.5 per 100,000),[3]

> 21,175 by suicide with a firearm,[4]

> 505 deaths due to accidental discharge of a firearm,[4] and

> 281 deaths due to firearms-use with "undetermined intent"[5] for a total of 33,169 deaths related to firearms (excluding firearm deaths due to legal intervention).

That would be about 90 per day. US police shoot and kill about 1,000 people per year, but weirdly they don't count so we don't have robust numbers.

I was referring to a report by the Brady Campaign that in 2012 there were over 90K gun deaths in that particular year. I saw this recently on the news, and the stats stuck in my head for obvious reasons.

There wasn't a single year with 90K gun related deaths, especially not in 2012, they might have had numbers for total "gun related casualties" which includes injuries, homicides, suicides and accidental discharges which might be closer to the actual figures. These are the FBI figures https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/... so shy under 9K crime related gun death.

With all honesty that figure should've made any sensible person give it the sniff test even if it was released by the NRA yet alone by the Brady Campaign. So either the total report is BS, the figures weren't for fatalities but for all casualties or your memory isn't as good as you think it is or any combination of all of the above.

Not Hacker News. Flagged.

Official HN guidelines classify as "on topic":

>anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

So while this article isn't literally "hacker" related, it is not considered off-topic necessarily, and a high percentage of articles on HN are not directly related to technology, software, etc.

IMHO just as relevant to HN as the actual news of the attacks happening

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