I’m not sure where I first heard the phrase in the title but it rings true to me in both our international and our political processes. When someone makes a very crude attempt to make a shoe bomb we immediately make it front page news and then spend billions of dollars to guard against it. It seems that by talking about terrorism so much we are actually causing much of it to happen.
When we give all the nuts out there their “15 minutes of fame” we are actually encouraging more to come forward.  When we give so much attention to some of our very seriously unbalanced congressional representative  we are actually increasing the chances that one of them will cause our country to reach critical mass of meltdown or even destruction.
Terrorism is 95% publicity and 5% actual action. We need to lighten up some and not be fixated by it. Â There is no such thing as a typical terrorist other than someone trying to strike fear into us for one of a myriad of reasons. The motive for that fear can come from almost anything. What did Bin Ladin and Timothy McVeigh have in common besides having a warped sense of reality?
Given our 24/7 news channels now it would be hard to not make every one who decides to buy a gun and go out and shoot people the center of national attention. Being able to so easily obtain the weapon and then get so much attention when you use it  just makes acts of terrorism way too easy in today’s world. How do we go about making it harder?
- One way would be to make it harder for someone to get a weapon. That of course is gun control and sadly it seems that not enough innocent lives have been lost yet to spur that action. Even the killing of dozens of five-year-olds are soon forgotten!
- Another way is to quit sensationalizing the killing events. If the news media actually showed the bloody bodies and mayhem that the killer caused instead of focusing on the killer himself maybe others would not seek the fame in that way. Or at least we, as a general public, would be spurred to actually do something about the violence.
- Of course another way would be to make it easier to spot those imbalanced people who create most of these terrorist’s acts. But how do you do that and still maintain personal liberties. That is a very difficult question to answer…
RJ's Corner 
I have been at the 5% end. NYC has as well.
I don’t really have an opinion about gun control, but my husband will never be caught again without a gun in a terrorist situation (not even our military was allowed to wear guns in Saudi Arabia). He has never killed a five year old either.
Your third point, about checking out the mentally ill would stop all of the others. How to profile that person, I have no clue. Even of all the guns were taken they would find a weapon.
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Gun control does not mean taking all guns away from people. It is not an all or nothing thing as the NRA suggests. Nothing is totally black or white.
I guess your point is that there is really NO solution to our continued spiral into violence and that it is just a dark and deadly world now. I simply cannot accept that as an end-point scenario. Especially when much of the rest of the world has already figured it out but we stubbornly refuse to consider their solutions.
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