TerrorismBoston bombing may signal end to ten relatively terror-free years in U.S.
The bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday may signal an end to more than ten years in which the United States was surprisingly free from terrorists attacks, largely as a result of aggressive law enforcement tactics which followed the 9/11 attacks.
Video capture showing fireball from first explosion // Source: baomoi.com
The bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday may signal an end to more than ten years in which the United States was surprisingly free from terrorists attacks, largely as a result of aggressive law enforcement tactics which followed the 9/11 attacks.
The New York Times reports that the Global Terrorism Database, compiled by a terrorism research center at the University of Maryland, noted that the 9/11 attacks were an anomalous event during a period, which began in the mid-1970s, of gradual decline in the number of terrorist attacks in the United States. The only post-9/11 terrorist incident in which the number of deaths exceeded nine people was a shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009. The number of casualties in the bombing in Boston – three deaths and 176 injured – far exceeds the highest casualty count in terrorist activities in recent American history.
Only four such acts — the 9/11 attacks, the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the poisoning of restaurant salad bars with salmonella bacteria by religious cultists in Oregon in 1984 — exceed those numbers.
“I think people are actually surprised when they learn that there’s been a steady decline in terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 1970,” Gary LaFree, a University of Maryland criminologist and director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, told the Times.
During the 1970s 1,350 attacks were carried out by various radical groups, including extremists from the left and right, white supremacists, Puerto Ricans nationalists, black militants, and other groups.
The numbers declined during the 1980s as these groups were weakened by arrests and defections. This decline accelerated in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, which covertly supported some violent leftist groups, according to LaFree.
“As a result of 9/11, there’s been a revolution in the way law enforcement treats this problem,” LaFree said. “Police agencies led by the F.B.I. are far more proactive. They’re interrupting the plots before the attacker gets out the door.”
LaFree noted that not only law enforcement agencies have become more sophisticated, so have the terrorists: about half of the terrorist attacks worldwide since 9/11, and nearly a third of those in the United States, have never been solved.
