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Boston Marathon bombing, and a few notes on an extraordinary week

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Last week was an extraordinary week. The Boston Marathon bombing and the explosion of the West fertilizer plant naturally dominated the news and pushed aside several stories that otherwise would have led the front page.

Locally, those stories included Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg’s drunken driving arrest (she says she won’t resign but I think she will; she just hasn’t worked through the stages of resignation yet) and former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson’s arrest after a special court of inquiry found he hid evidence that might have exonerated Michael Morton and spared him from serving 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. And nationally, several gun proposals in the Senate failed to get the 60 votes needed to move forward, an Elvis impersonator was accused of sending letters laced with ricin to the White House and Congress, and the Supreme Court sided with the Fourth Amendment by ruling police must obtain a search warrant before drawing blood from a suspected drunken driver.

I wrote a column for today’s paper touching on a couple of thoughts I’ve been processing since last week’s Boston Marathon bombing. There are many other issues to ponder. Just to follow up the column with a few related items:

The Washington Post published a useful story last week headlined “Eight facts about terrorism in the United States.” The Post story relies in part on a report by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, released in December. The short takeaway: There were 226 fatal terror attacks in the U.S. between 1970 and 2011, with 21 fatal attacks occurring between 2001 and 2011. Bombs were the weapon of choice in most attacks.

The terror count includes the Fort Hood shootings but does not include most other mass shootings, since they largely fall outside the report’s definition of terrorism: “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation.” It might not count as terrorism but your odds of being killed by a firearm are about 1 in 25,000. Your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack? About 1 in 20 million.


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