Lone Gunmen and Social Gunmen

I'm embarrassed to say that, very time a story like this or this comes along about a gunman wreaking havoc, I grit my teeth and pray, "Please, please, don't be from the Middle East or my native Pakistan."

I will admit that, when I first saw the picture of the shooter of the Virginia Tech shooter, my reaction was, "Phew -- he's an Asian."

If a gunman is white or Asian or handicapped or so on, people will shake their heads about the inevitable risks of living in a chaotic society, and will wonder for a while whether we can do much more to intervene with lonely psychopaths and will then go back about our business. But if a person is of Middle-Eastern ancestry, some people will say, "A coordinated, sophisticated war has descended upon us -- maybe we should have invaded some more countries when we had the chance, to teach these folks a lesson."

That was the sort of reaction among neoconservatives when an Iranian-born man plowed an SUV into a crowd of students in 2006. That incident was seen by them as a strategic shot within a larger war of ideologies, when a sober assessment seems to indicate that the driver was simply a nut. However, viewing the war on terror as a matter of "nutcase management" is not as much fun as seeing it a grand, cosmic battle between barbarians and the enlightened. Politicians and religious leaders would not be able to exploit it nearly as well for their personal gain.