Donald Trump's justification for his executive order temporarily banning people from seven majority Muslim countries and refugees from coming to this country was to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. Protecting the U.S. is a good thing but I wanted to look at the terror attacks that had taken place in the U.S. to see if the executive order would have prevented any of them.
To do that, I looked for lists of terror attacks. I started with Wikipedia, but their list seemed incomplete so I went to a website called Religion of Peace. However, their list seemed overly broad. I came up with the following criteria. 1. It needed to be an attack on strangers. The very nature of terrorism is that attacks are carried out on the general populace. This cut out attacks on family members. 2. It needed to be verifiable. I could not find any confirmation on some of the incidents on Religion of Peace. 3. It had to have been carried out by a Muslim who acted on religious grounds. While I know this sounds obvious, Religion of Peace classified the Ft. Lauderdale shooter as a convert to Islam where this appears to be false.
After filtering the attacks, I came up with a list of fourteen incidents starting with 9/11/01. I started there because that was the beginning of the current war on terror. This averages to approximately one per year.
09/11/01 Nineteen al-Qaeda members hijacked four airliners killing 2,996 people.
07/04/02 A lone gunman killed two people and injured four others at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport
07/28/06 A Muslim-American walked into a Jewish Center in Seattle, Washington and shot six women, one of whom died.
06/01/09 An American-born convert to Islam shot two soldiers, one of whom died, at a Little Rock recruiting station
11/05/09 An American-born psychiatrist killed 13 and wounded 33 at Ft. Hood, Texas
04/15/13 The Tsarnaev brothers plant bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding 183
04/27/14 A man who claimed to be a jihadi shot a man in Skyway, WA. He later shot two other men in Seattle and one in New Jersey.
10/23/14 A man armed with a hatchet attacked four officers in Queens, NY.
12/18/14 Teen convert to Islam killed an elderly neighbor in order to get money to buy an assault rifle and commit a mass shooting. He was arrested before he could kill any more people.
05/03/15 Two men travel to Garland, Texas to attack a Draw Mohammed contest. They wound one person before being killed.
07/16/15 A man attacked two military facilities in Chattanooga, TN killing seven and wounding two.
12/02/15 A husband and wife attack a workplace Christmas gathering killing 14 and wounding 22.
06/12/16 An American-born Muslim killed 49 and injured 53 at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
11/28/16 A Somali-born student injured eleven people in a car ramming and stabbing attack at Ohio State University.
Not counting 9/11, sixteen individuals committed thirteen attacks which killed ninety-five people. However, the majority of those were killed in the Fort Hood, San Bernadino and Orlando shootings.
Who are these terrorists? Ten out of sixteen were born in the United States. An additional three came to the US as children with their parents. One came to this country as a teenager and two came as adults. The six foreign born terrorists came from Egypt, Kyrgystan, the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Kuwait and Somalia. Only one came from a country listen in President Trump's executive order and only one came as a refugee (the same person). The others came on tourist visas (2), a fiance visa, as a derivative asylum seeker and one I couldn't figure out (who came with his family when he was five).
Of the ten U.S.-born attackers, three were converts to Islam.
Six claimed allegiance to ISIL (or were claimed by ISIL). One said he was sent by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsuela. The rest did not have ties to any group.
Three out of four perpetrators in the three most deadly shootings were born in the U.S.
What is striking to me is that only three out of sixteen terrorists came to this country as teenagers or adults over a fifteen year period. This suggests to me that focusing our efforts on home-grown radicals will be more effective than trying to keep foreigners out.
No comments:
Post a Comment