This is cute, but, as you admit, not actually true and probably not very useful either.
There are fairly easy ways to screw things up that people don’t do; the “Beltway Sniper” created a huge disruption and lots of fear with relatively little effort, but there haven’t been any copycats that I know of. For some reason, terrorists insist on using bombs instead, which are flashier but don’t actually produce as much actual fear.
That seems unsurprising to me, given that nobody actually calls themselves a “terrorist”. The tendency to call anyone a terrorist if they blow something up, merely because “terrorist” is the worst insult we have in our vocabulary, is what causes this confusion, I feel.
This is cute, but, as you admit, not actually true and probably not very useful either.
There are fairly easy ways to screw things up that people don’t do; the “Beltway Sniper” created a huge disruption and lots of fear with relatively little effort, but there haven’t been any copycats that I know of. For some reason, terrorists insist on using bombs instead, which are flashier but don’t actually produce as much actual fear.
That seems unsurprising to me, given that nobody actually calls themselves a “terrorist”. The tendency to call anyone a terrorist if they blow something up, merely because “terrorist” is the worst insult we have in our vocabulary, is what causes this confusion, I feel.
Gwern has some interesting points about how “terrorism” is not really about terror: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror