Guess they'll have to ban booze too, now

[luzribeiro]

Car plows into crowd at Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, 28 revelers injured

Well, they said it's not terrorism. Just some drunken guy acting like crazy. Shit happens, you know.

I don't know how you'd define terrorism, but someone plunging with a car into a crowd of peaceful citizens and causing pain, destruction and even death, pretty much has

Comments

[ddstory]

You can add the similar incident involving a psychopath in Germany.

[peamasii]

Ban cars, too dangerous.

[abomvubuso]

Also, people gathering in crowds on sidewalks.

[dreamville_bg]

Maybe just rename them and this would make the problem go away. Poof!

[chron_job]

Terrorism isn't just causing terror. We presume terrorism has a particular type of motivation (political), just like we presume hate crimes have a particular type of motivation (bigotry).

Why we are so interested in punishing certain crimes according to their motivations, more than according to their absolute effects, is still an open question in my own mind, but I think it mostly has to do with our intuition that certain classes of motivation are especially apt to cause chaos if they are let out of hand. That the nature of some motivations makes them especially repeatable, that they, if successful, are especially apt to inspire copycats.

Another possibility, is the idea that being struck by lightning sucks, but it contains no especial dread. The idea of being hit by a crazy man in a car, because he is crazy, feels like being struck by lighting.

But to be killed to send a political message, or to enforce some backward racial or sexual norm, is to be intimately mis-used, to become someone else's tool, in a way that is especially