Since nearly no one is talking about it...

[OakLeaf]

I actually think the coverage has improved, because they're finally calling it terrorism.

In the past, the mass media has only been willing to apply that word to a narrow subset of crimes. If the perpetrator was a white person/group targeting women, members of a minority religion, or governmental agencies, it was never called terrorism.

Should it have been the top story on every website/paper this morning? Should the Joplin mosque arson have shared the headlines? I don't know. I think good arguments can be made either way.



Also, I can't disagree that health care, including mental health care, needs to be much more widely available in the USA. Nevertheless, would mental health care have identified or stopped these attacks? For all the controversy over DSM-V, no one has even remotely proposed that racism (or religious hatred) should be a psychiatric diagnosis. It used to be a truism among people who work with victims of domestic abuse, that wife-batterers typically have the most "normal" psychological profiles out there. Just like the refusal to provide health care, the sickness is much more in our culture than it is in any individual...