Not all attacks are terrorism, but all must be taken seriously

opinion

Not all attacks are terrorism, but all must be taken seriously

If it ends at three, there won’t be a need for deep analysis or an action plan.

“It” is the recent series of attacks against government institutions by people with obvious and severe mental problems.

Last Friday, John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., opened fire on Pentagon police guards and was shot dead. The guards escaped serious injury.

In that regard, the guards were more fortunate than the targets of Joseph Stack, who flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, in February. Stack not only killed himself, he killed an IRS employee.

And in January, Johnny Lee Wicks, fired shots at a Las Vegas courthouse, killing a security guard and being shot to death soon after. Wicks was angry about losing a lawsuit challenging a cut in his Social Security benefits.

Three months, three attacks, five dead, including the three attackers.

They felt victimized

Among the things each of the three men had in common was a strongly held belief that they were out to get them. They became any government agents, and so Bedell, Stack and Wicks launched their attacks on government symbols and managed to kill or injure ordinary people who were just doing their jobs. And that, of course, is a clue — along with the suicidal nature of their attacks — that these were more the irrational acts of troubled minds than conscious attempts to bring down a government.

These were not the actions of sane men, which is not to say they should be excused. At some level they certainly knew that what they were doing was wrong. Nor does the irrationality of these individual attacks indicate that government agencies should dismiss them as aberrations.

Individual acts of violence such as these are different from acts of terrorism, which have their roots in organized domestic groups or international political movements. But in tough times, the government becomes an easy target for the disaffected and mentally unstable.

During the Depression, banks became a target, not of the insane, but of the greedy and sociopathic. Yet even the most vicious bank robbers and outlaws took on a cult-hero status among ordinary people who would never have committed a robbery themselves.

That wasn’t a pretty side of America 75 to 80 years ago, and it would be no less ugly today if Americans started “understanding” why someone would be frustrated enough to attack the government.

In some cases, insanity might be an explanation for these attacks, but there is no excuse.