Remember 9-11

[WyrreJ]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_...hostage_crisis

here is your fear mongering.. Glenn Beck was talking about preventive measures and plans schools have in case of one of these actions happens here. I never thought education and knowledge as something we should fear?

To think that it couldn't happen here is naive. Look at all the mass shooting we have had in our schools just in the last few years and they were not even terrorists. I know I would feel better if my school system was really looking out for my kids. What can we really do????

A perfect example of doing the terrorist's job for them.
One case, 3 years ago right on the border of Chechnya -- you know the area in the middle of a freaking civil war.

Do you know how much bad fecal matter goes down around the world every day? We can't possibly plan for everything that could happen. It just isn't possible. There isn't enough money on the planet to pay to protect us from every movie plot that someone thinks up.

What's naive is to take the fear-mongers seriously. Was it this Beck guy's idea to associate school shootings with terrorist attacks? Typical fear-mongering - invent a problem and then associate it with some totally unrelated, high-profile, vivid event and capitalize on the fear by association.

Except in this case, any rational evaluation of school shootings would show that those are so rare that they are hardly worth the worry - what 2 per year out of the tens of thousands of schools in this country? A couple of hundred times more kids die in car accidents than die in school shootings. The reason they make all the headlines is because they are so rare to begin with.

Sure, every school should have an emergency plan -- a plan flexible enough to deal with most reasonable concerns - bad weather, power failures, etc. But terrorism is about the last thing on the list that schools need to be worried about.

There is one and only one way to win the "War on Terror" and that is to REFUSE TO BE TERRORIZED.

[WiSDoM]

Beck didn't say anything about the school shootings. The information he was talking about was coming from a person who was working for homeland security in 2004. I mentioned shootings just to show how some seemly unorganized wackjob can create such a problem. Vtec for example.

I don't live in fear, but if someone tells me not to travel in a certain part of town at a certain time of day because there is high chance of me being hurt then I make sure i don’t need to go there. It is like 9-11 there was all kinds of intel but no one connected the dots. if they had maybe it wouldn't have happened. I don't see anything wrong with them paying attention to intel and trying to prevent things from happening again. Information is information, do with it what you will. If you make yourself aware of a potential situation you maybe able to avoid it.

When I travel outside or inside this country I like to have as much info about the area as possible. I wouldn't consider that foolish. I've traveled enough to know that your better off listening what people say about your surroundings.

What does it hurt aware of what is going on around you.

[WyrreJ]

What does it hurt aware of what is going on around you.

The problem is discriminating between the BS and reality. So far we have been absolutely inundated with BS, while the reality has been negligible.

Just look at the ridiculous "terror alert level" -- we have been at "significant risk" or higher since its inception in January 2003 - and NYC has never been below "high." How many actual terrorist attacks have happened here or even been attempted since then? Zero. How many cockamamie terrorist threats have been reported by the media? Hundreds if not thousands.
How does that kind of intel help?

Part of the reason no one "connected the dots" for 9/11 is because there were way too many dots and not enough people trying to connect them. So what have we done about it? Add more dots. Warrantless wiretapping, warrantless data-mining, no-fly lists, etc. Lots more dots, hardly any more people to connect them.

What matters is quality of information and just like the government has been adding low-grade information in the form of more and more "dots" -- fear-mongering is all about exaggerating the low-grade, but sensationalist information and ignoring the sensible.

The media loves to hype terrorism because danger sells ears and eyeballs, and the government loves to hype it because for them, its all CYA and empire building. The more people are afraid, the wider they open their wallets for the bureaucrats to reach into and build bigger bureaucracies.

You say you don't live in fear, but really, how can you justify giving any credence to "intel" about terrorist attacks on american schools -- an event with exactly 0 precedence in country and barely 1 case in recent history in the entire world -- when there are so many other risks like shootings, knifings, sexual assault, drugs, etc that happen every day? Is protecting against a Beslan-style attack really a wise use of our limited resources?

[johnnyapollo]

Word.

-- John

[WiSDoM]

all I am saying is that they should be protecting against all the situations you mentioned not just the a Beslan-style attack and to have plans in place to deal will these situations.

[WyrreJ]

all I am saying is that they should be protecting against all the situations you mentioned not just the a Beslan-style attack and to have plans in place to deal will these situations.

Why are you drawing the line at something like Beslan? Don't you remember all the talk about terrorists getting hired as school bus drivers? -- http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,259168,00.html We gotta have plans for that one too. But what if they infiltrate the school administration? -- http://www.wtop.com/?nid=596&sid=1224471 Better have plans for that too. We also don't want terrorists kidnapping our children and using the money to fund their terrorist operations, right? -- http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/n...icleid=2373599 Better have a plan for that too. There must be a hundred other one-off threats we gotta be planning for, after all we need to be safe and secure right?

Every dollar spent on planning for the highly improbable is a dollar that could have gone to education. Worrying about Beslan, or any of the other things in that list is counter-productive because you just can not afford to protect against every conceivable threat. Even if you could afford it, chances are that when someone really wanted to do harm they would conceive of a brand new way to do it that no one has planned for yet, and then what good has all that wasted money done?