On a single day this summer, 15 people were wounded after a man blew himself up outside a music festival in Ansbach, Germany; two teens were killed and 18 others were wounded outside of a Fort Myers, Florida, nightclub; and a Japanese man fatally stabbed 19 of his former coworkers.
“Where does such deranged violence begin? When will it end?” asks Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her latest column. Since June, she notes, dozens of senseless mass killings have occurred across the globe and in the U.S.
“Here in our own community, meanwhile, we are still reeling from the ambush attack on six law enforcement officers that left three dead and a fourth critically injured,” Riegel writes, noting their murders came just days after a similar attack in Dallas that killed five police officers.
“How are we supposed to make sense of it all?” Riegel wonders. “There is seemingly no common thread, no connective tissue, among these horrific killings except, perhaps, that in every case the perpetrator was young, angry, disaffected from whatever his country or society of origin and, yes, male.”
Perhaps most horrifying about this summer’s incidents, Riegel says, is the venues at which they’ve taken place: shopping malls, concert halls, nightclubs and city streets.
“In most of the cases, crowds were present to witness the carnage they handily inflicted, despite security measures that were in place,” she notes.
In other words, Riegel says, the MO of the terrorists behind the attacks flies in the face of everything we instinctively know and have been taught about how to keep ourselves and our children safe.
“Crowded and well-lit public places can be just as dangerous as dark alleys. Anyone is a sitting duck anywhere—in a quaint European village, a movie theater, a school cafeteria or a sidewalk on sleepy Airline Highway in Baton Rouge on a sunny Sunday morning,” she writes. “I can’t get my head around it. As a parent of older teenagers, it makes me crazy. How do you send your children out into this world with any reasonable assurance of their safety? What are we leaving them to inherit?”
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