Episode 201: The Sutherland Springs Shooting – Was it Terrorism?

The church shooting in Texas; was it terrorism, what failed, and where we go from here. That’s the topic this episode. We keep coming to these questions after mass shootings, but this particular one has some stark answers.

Mentioned links:

Sutherland Springs church shooting: What we know

Texas church shooter escaped mental health facility in 2012

Eric Rudolph [Wikipedia]

Timothy McVeigh [Wikipedia]

Terry Nichols [Wikipedia]

Show transcript

While I was taking some time off, a gunman went into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and killed more than half the small congregation, while wounding most of the rest. Let me describe some of the shooter’s background.

While in the Air Force, he was caught trying to smuggle guns onto his base. He was charged in military court in 2012 on suspicion of assaulting his spouse and their child. He got confinement for 12 months, a bad conduct discharge, and was busted down to E-1, or airman basic. Prior to that conviction, he was involuntarily institutionalized at the Peak Behavioral Health Services Center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico for those assaults, but he escaped at one point.

So yes, this is a mental health issue. No, it’s not because he’s white, or that he’s not Muslim. This is a mental health issue because of the shooter’s actual mental health. Some folks have been trying to label this guy as a “terrorist” in an attempt to drive home their point that not all terrorists are Muslims, and that white guys can be terrorists as well.

Here’s the thing; I don’t think most people would disagree with those assertions. But this incident has no bearing on that. One of my friends on Facebook was asserting that he was a terrorist by quoting the dictionary definition of terrorism, “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.” When I asked him what the shooter’s political purpose was, he had to backtrack and say that since he instilled terror in his victims, then he was a terrorist. OK, well perhaps technically true, but the Global War on Terror was not instituted to combat the instilling of fear; the word there, and the definition of it in common use, is in fact the dictionary definition. Otherwise Homeland Security might be raiding spook houses every Halloween. Given his definition, a mugger could be a terrorist. I never got a good response to that. He had made up his mind that this guy was a terrorist.

I have a video in the show notes of a student having a debate with his teacher about this exact same thing; that this guy was a terrorist because the dictionary is wrong, and (one presumes) so is Homeland Security.

I can name white terrorists that fit the common definition of “terrorist”. How about Eric Robert Rudolf? He was the Olympic Park bomber from the 1996 games in Atlanta. He continued his reign of terror in the name of the Christian Identity movement; he was a white, Christian extremist terrorist.

Then there are Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols; radical anti-government terrorists. They blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

They do exist; nobody is denying that. But if you have to dilute the definition of a terrorist in order to make your point, your argument doesn’t fly. If your definition of “terrorism” includes muggers and bank robbers, you must think that the Global War on Terror is about stopping people from getting your wallet and misusing your credit cards. Homeland Security was not created to keep the FDI...