A couple of thoughts on John Patrick Bedell’s shooting spree outside the Pentagon Metro Station yesterday.
One is that we’re very fortunate he picked this particular station where, because of the Pentagon connection, armed police officers were standing right nearby. I’ve spent years being worried about what kind of damage a lone man with a gun could do on a crowded subway platform, and this was the closest we’ve yet come to something like that.
The other is that it’s striking how differently the country behaves when you a non-Muslim individual attempt or succeed at killing some people based on quasi-political motivations versus when it’s a Muslim who does it. And the important thing, I think, is not merely to make a pure hypocrisy argument but to point out that the country’s response to non-Muslim killers ranging from Bedell to the IRS plane crasher to the Holocaust Museum shooter is much, much, much better and smarter. In the wake of an incident involving a non-Muslim we of course look back and try to see if there’s any reasonable preventive steps we could have taken to prevent the murders. But wild overreactions and wholesale reconfigurations of the constitution, of US foreign policy, or of daily life are considered off the table by definition. And rightly so!
Unfortunately, not every bad thing can be prevented and it’s important to deploy resources in smart ways and not give in to panic.
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