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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

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Are you referring to students as minorities? I don't think that is accurate. Also, the study states attacks are more likely to spark other, similar attacks in the first 13 days on average. I think your statement is overgeneralizing here.

It is possible to radicalise anyone.

It is not about politics at all. You can convince even the hippiest left-wing peaceniks into terrible activity.

All you have to do is fixate the subject on either side of a dialectic argument involving force, violence, duress .. injustice. Or even better, all of the above.

The root of all radicalisation is individual responsibility.

Do you have evidence of a number of "leftist" activists that have approximately the same count of murders as right-wingers/white supremacists have?

I mean, something to balance and show some equivalence?

You don't.

Because the single biggest real threat to any US citizen today is an other US citizen that can grab a weapon at will.

And it happens that in the overwhelming number of cases, the person that becomes a mass-murderer is a white, conservative, pro-right, pro-weapon, pro-republican.

Not acknowledging this is either total denial - or total complicity.

And. This is totally about politics (how a government deals with its people). NRA politics; that serves a very specific ideology.

Look in Wikipedia this category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_shootings_by_cou... - then browse by country.

All countries, but the USA have sporadic sub-articles. USA has whole sub-categories.

USA are the _single_ country in the world where there are as many mass shootings, every year. When there are been more than 250 in the USA in 2019, there hasn't been even 10 in any other country in the world.

(to the down voters: downvote as much as you want guys - facts are facts - you are only deluding yourselves - you should look in the mirror more and stop considering the USA as the center/perfection of all things, because it's not)

The USA is also the worlds worst murderer of innocent people, in terms of illegal acts of war. It has been bombing innocent people at the rate of one bomb dropped every twenty minutes for the last 20 years.

So? The world knows that American's are okay with violence. We haven't been hiding ourselves from its victims, or at least .. a big portion of the world sees and knows all too well, what most American's don't or won't: a principle product of the USA is violence.

Leftists have obviously been radicalized in the past and they have a large body count in places where there have been left wing insurgencies and revolutions, but that is not what’s happening in the us right now.

Can you cite some evidence on this? I haven’t heard about any right-wing terror cells in the US. The attackers appear to be “lone wolves”. They may have been radicalised to be right-wing online, but I haven’t seen any evidence of some organised group arranging or encouraging these attacks.

Either way, the two (radicalisation and contagion) aren’t mutually exclusive. In my opinion a large part of the motivation behind these shootings is the potential for fame and for the actions to be seen by the whole world - regardless of whether they’ve been radicalised or not.

Just one point before i get down voted into obscurity. but an effective regulation of firearms would go a long way to resolve this issue.

I don't think you should get downvoted for sharing your opinion, but who do you really think would benefit from regulating firearms? There is a very good reason the constitution provisioned firearms and I think people are starting to forget.

All citizens that wouldn't be killed: * by mistake because it found one in a cupboard? * by someone who gets to discharge his feelings?

if you think people with automatic rifles are going to be anything other than a minor annoyance to an organized army you're in for a shock. On this very site there's been articles about the gorgon stare. Rifles don't compete against that technology.

All true if you think terms of taking and holding territory, not true at all if you step away from the geographic paradigm. The US military is very powerful against other states but ultimately it's a force that clings to Clausewitzian doctrine in a Boydian world.

You don't need an "organized group" (in the old meaning of "organized group") to consider a larger pattern.

And the fact you made an account specifically for writing what appears as rational arguments but aren't at all (and are in fact dog whistles), doesn't go in your favor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)#Stochast...

There isn't an organized group with a hierarchical chain of command saying 'launch an attack here' or 'units X, y, z, carry out an attack next Wednesday'.

But there is absolutely crowdsourced coordination on identification of targets, weapon platforms, and methods. And as everyone on HN already knows, crowdsourcing is a highly effective tool for getting things done. It works just as well for terrorism as anything else.

> I haven’t heard about any right-wing terror cells in the US.

Uh, have you heard about the KKK?

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