[NGTM-1R]

It is indeed tricky. If you count shootings quite liberally, then you will begin to count ordinary criminal activity, too.

Is there some reason terrorism is so separated from "ordinary" criminal activity? Particularly in the case of a lone wolf incident where no training or material support is offered and the shooter is typically prone to having committed some sort of violent act with or without ideology.

Indeed, the risk factors for mass shooters are more or less the same regardless of whether they kill their family or shoot up a nightclub in Orlando. Building a wall like this limits the ability to understand and combat the problem.

[MP-Ryan]

But if you count shootings that are in some way different from ordinary criminal activity (such as terrorism, radicals, crazy people, many dead victims, etc.), then I am sure statistics will show islamic shootings are very overrepresented.

And yet you are very wrong, even in Europe and when looking only at defined "terrorist attacks" according to Europol:  http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/11/updated-europol-data-less-than-1-of-terrorist-attacks-by-muslims/

It is indeed tricky. If you count shootings quite liberally, then you will begin to count ordinary criminal activity, too.

Is there some reason terrorism is so separated from "ordinary" criminal activity? Particularly in the case of a lone wolf incident where no training or material support is offered and the shooter is typically prone to having committed some sort of violent act with or without ideology.

Indeed, the risk factors for mass shooters are more or less the same regardless of whether they kill their family or shoot up a nightclub in Orlando. Building a wall like this limits the ability to understand and combat the problem.

It's worth noting that many/most democratic countries explicitly define terrorism as criminal acts, with a very expansive definition because there is little difference between it and "ordinary" criminal activity.

On the subject of TB, I see nothing wrong with his abandonment of the trash fire that is social media in favour of a more moderated medium, even if it happens to be on reddit.

[666maslo666]

And yet you are very wrong, even in Europe and when looking only at defined "terrorist attacks" according to Europol:  http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/11/updated-europol-data-less-than-1-of-terrorist-attacks-by-muslims/

Maybe I am wrong in Europe. I will have to research this further when I have time. After all the site you posted seems to be quite biased.

But I am not wrong in the US, statistics I posted earlier shows that.

And think that if you include terrorist incidents of a more serious nature, such as where people actually died, muslims will be overrepresented, both in Europe and the US.

[666maslo666]

And yet you are very wrong, even in Europe and when looking only at defined "terrorist attacks" according to Europol:  http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/11/updated-europol-data-less-than-1-of-terrorist-attacks-by-muslims/

Not all terrorist attacks are the same, you have to take into account number of casualties to make a meaningful comparison. We are taking about successful mass shootings here (your list includes even foiled attacks, or attacks with no casualties). A left wing extremist has set a small bomb (essentially a big firecracker) into a rubbish bin to protest animal cruelty here in Slovakia. It exploded and injured no one, no property damage beyond the bin itself. He was convicted of terrorism, so this counts as a one terrorist incident. But this is not even in the same ballpark as someone shooting multiple people. A better metric would be number of casualties, not just number of incidents.

Here is a searchable database that includes such information:
http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/

Search with these criteria:
Years: (between 2000 and 2014), Criteria I: (yes), Criteria II: (yes), Criteria III: (yes), All incidents regardless of doubt., Region: (Western Europe)
Then order by fatalities. Islamist attacks are definitely highly overrepresented in the top of the list, compared to share of muslims in population. So no, I am not wrong when it comes to Europe.

[Grizzly]

The Utoya comparison is... bad. That's not even close to a mass murder in the name of Christianity.

How so? The guy has several times mentioned beign part of a knights templar organization, his manifesto is full of claims that christian culture ought to be defended and Utoya defenitely was a mass murder. I mean, it's really quite telling. He's as much a christian as ISIS members are muslim.

[Phantom Hoover]

Right, but it's not like 61% of Norwegian Christians, when polled, said that membership of the youth wing of the Labour party should be illegal.

[Luis Dias]

They are making themselves heard. I find it slightly discomforting that people do not appear to be listening.

FWIW, I have been hearing not only ordinary muslims, but even conservative muslim preachers trying to get a very sharp and clear message across. I just don't think it's enough. It's too little and almost too late. We need ten, hundreds of times more of this.

[GhylTarvoke]

The Utoya comparison is... bad. That's not even close to a mass murder in the name of Christianity.

How so? The guy has several times mentioned beign part of a knights templar organization, his manifesto is full of claims that christian culture ought to be defended and Utoya defenitely was a mass murder. I mean, it's really quite telling. He's as much a christian as ISIS members are muslim.

From your link:

According to the International Business Times, in his manifesto, he "did not see himself as religious", but he did identify as a cultural Christian and wrote about the differences between cultural and religious Christians, but stressed that both were Christians, and shared the same identity and goals. After his imprisonment, Breivik stated he had never personally identified as a Christian, and called his religion Odinism, stating that he "pray and sacrifice" to Odin.

In any case, being Christian/Muslim and committing mass murder in the name of Christianity/Islam are two very different things.

[MP-Ryan]

Not all terrorist attacks are the same, you have to take into account number of casualties to make a meaningful comparison. We are taking about successful mass shootings here (your list includes even foiled attacks, or attacks with no casualties).

I, too, can manipulate statistics to show whatever I want by narrowing down criteria sufficiently.

If all you want to count is sufficiently narrow criteria to capture only the attacks that have been committed in the name of Islamic extremism, then of course you are going to find heavy over-representation of Islamic extremism.  The fact remains that by far the majority of actual mass shootings in the US are not committed by Muslims nor are they necessarily considered large-scale terror attacks, yet they are mass shootings.  In Europe, on a per-attack basis, Muslims are not even remotely over-represented.  If we narrow down the criteria sufficiently, then of course they become over-represented.

I don't dispute that Islamic extremists have been responsible for some of the largest body counts in recent terrorist actions of the last decade, but that is entirely a different argument than Islamic extremists being heavily overrrepresented in attack statistics.  You are confusing quantitative data with qualitative.

[Scotty]

maslo's only contribution to this discussion so far has been to try and narrow the criteria for what constitutes either a mass shooting or a terrorist attack enough to find a single statistical cross-section where Muslims are over-represented so he can blame them (or immigrants) for everything.

Then again, that's maslo in just about every thread.

[666maslo666]

It is the fact that I do not need to narrow the criteria much at all that shows how important my contribution to the thread is. "Terrorist act with actual deaths" is enough. Thats not narrow at all.

[Dragon]

Note that every terrorist act is meant to cause actual deaths. If you want to see how "terrorism-prone" a group is, thwarted and failed attacks need to be included.

What the narrowed tell us is that Muslim terrorists are, on average, more competent and, consequently, more of a threat than other groups. This is actually the case, they're more organized than any other terrorist group since PIRA. They're also notably unconcerned with their own survival, which probably has an effect on their success rate.

BTW, in that data MP_Ryan posted, I was, quite surprised to see just how many attacks (most of them, in fact) are committed by separatists. Nearly all of them in Spain or France, which suggests that Basque nationalists are to blame. Why aren't those getting more publicity? It seems that two big, European countries have a major domestic terrorism problem. I didn't even know what ETA stood for (on indeed, remember that there is such a thing) until I checked the wiki.

[Luis Dias]

European nativism goes to very short scales. Many spanish provinces desire indepedence from Madrid. They want this for centuries. Portugal had the fortune of getting its indepedence at the same time Castella (Madrid) was struggling to maintain Barcelona within its borders, thus allowing Lisbon to secede. Barcelona still wants the independence today (they have lost the referendum though). The basques, however, are truly violent in their expression.

Great Britain will most assuredly start to fragment after #Brexit. With the borders of GB lift again against europe, that will mean borders will lift between Northern Ireland and Ireland. And that may well mean the restart of bloody violence at those territories.

[AtomicClucker]

maslo's only contribution to this discussion so far has been to try and narrow the criteria for what constitutes either a mass shooting or a terrorist attack enough to find a single statistical cross-section where Muslims are over-represented so he can blame them (or immigrants) for everything.

Then again, that's maslo in just about every thread.

Eh, it's not surprising - a one trick pony to be accurate.

[NGTM-1R]

BTW, in that data MP_Ryan posted, I was, quite surprised to see just how many attacks (most of them, in fact) are committed by separatists. Nearly all of them in Spain or France, which suggests that Basque nationalists are to blame. Why aren't those getting more publicity? It seems that two big, European countries have a major domestic terrorism problem. I didn't even know what ETA stood for (on indeed, remember that there is such a thing) until I checked the wiki.

The Basques are doing their thing in a relatively undeveloped and underpopulated area, have been for a long time, very few people are getting hurt, and it's a very regional issue. In terms of raw numbers they're about the size of, but considerably less effective than, an LA street gang in the early '90s, so it's hard to get really worked up about comparatively.

With the borders of GB lift again against europe, that will mean borders will lift between Northern Ireland and Ireland. And that may well mean the restart of bloody violence at those territories.

It's never entirely stopped there either. The days of the highly organized, best-in-the-world IRA are over, and the Protestant terror groups are legitimately all-the-way gone, but there are still a couple groups that claim to be the IRA, attempt things on a regular basis, and occasionally manage kill someone.

The Bad Old Days are probably never coming back, though. The Ulster police aren't the farce that made the provocations for the Troubles possible, and the Irish national police are distinctly unsympathetic to the current incarnations of the IRA since they've been caught doing things like human trafficking and drug dealing to try and stay funded. (The old PIRA was notoriously anti-drugs, to the point they were known to kill drug dealers simply as a perceived public service.)

[Det. Bullock]

European nativism goes to very short scales. Many spanish provinces desire indepedence from Madrid. They want this for centuries. Portugal had the fortune of getting its indepedence at the same time Castella (Madrid) was struggling to maintain Barcelona within its borders, thus allowing Lisbon to secede. Barcelona still wants the independence today (they have lost the referendum though). The basques, however, are truly violent in their expression.

You forget the various terrorist political groups in the 70s and 80s in Italy and other places.

Here in Italy both communists and fascists loved to place bombs, kidnapping politicians, gunning down people on their blacklists and disrupting concerts.

[Dragon]

The Basques are doing their thing in a relatively undeveloped and underpopulated area, have been for a long time, very few people are getting hurt, and it's a very regional issue. In terms of raw numbers they're about the size of, but considerably less effective than, an LA street gang in the early '90s, so it's hard to get really worked up about comparatively.

They sure do seem to skew the terrorism statistics, though. According to that article posted a while ago, "separatist" attacks make up the overwhelming majority of European terrorism. In that case, maslo might be justified in narrowing down the criteria, though I would've done it differently. Islamic terrorism is pretty much unique in that unlike other cases, it's an international matter. Every other case terrorism I've seen was a strictly domestic case, as separatists tend to attack the country they want to separate from (saner ones also tend to avoid killing random people, mostly focusing on government officials and police), while political (left and right wing) terrorists tend to restrict their attacks to their detractors (or people they see as such) in their home country.

In general, reading about the Basque conflict made me realize that "terrorism" might be too broad of a term. It seems that a lot of "acts of terror" committed by groups like ETA and PIRA were things like planting bombs and then (anonymously, of course) letting people know about it, leading to evacuations and general disruption while not actually killing anyone (can even be done without a bomb when the mood is tense enough), which was a cheap way of keeping the government on their toes without pissing ordinary people off too much. Islamists never bothered with that, to my knowledge. They always go for the kill.

[NGTM-1R]

In general, reading about the Basque conflict made me realize that "terrorism" might be too broad of a term. It seems that a lot of "acts of terror" committed by groups like ETA and PIRA were things like planting bombs and then (anonymously, of course) letting people know about it, leading to evacuations and general disruption while not actually killing anyone (can even be done without a bomb when the mood is tense enough), which was a cheap way of keeping the government on their toes without pissing ordinary people off too much. Islamists never bothered with that, to my knowledge. They always go for the kill.

The Basques and the PIRA had to live where they worked. People knew who they were. They had to strike a balance; if they scored too many own-goals than they risked losing public support, or at least tolerance, and that would make their lives significantly shorter and more violent. They avoided it for a reason.

Islamic terrorists have traditionally targeted areas far from where they're from, either over the border in Israel or around the world in Europe and America. It was never something they had to worry about before the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda learned the lesson in Iraq during the 2008-2009 period the hard way, and it hurt them a fair bit. One of the major causes of the split between them and the Islamic State was a result of trying to incorporate the lesson that they couldn't kill local Muslims indiscriminately and expect to continue operating among them.

[Grizzly]

Islamic terrorists have traditionally targeted areas far from where they're from, either over the border in Israel or around the world in Europe and America.

Really? I thought we got off very, very lightly compared to what is constantly going on in Baghdad (for instance).

[NGTM-1R]

Really? I thought we got off very, very lightly compared to what is constantly going on in Baghdad (for instance).

Before or after Saddam? Read the post carefully.