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Comment by jphw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

There is no KKK. There are several dozen. They generally aren't very organized and don't really Burn buildings and flip over cars like Antifa and BLM. You of course know that they aren't classified as a terrorist organization. Some call them that, yet these same people often won't say the same about left wing groups we see doing 95% of the violence and destruction.

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