On Being the Gatekeeper of Your Own Nightmares

The FBI are investigating Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik as terrorists because the latter reportedly swore allegiance to Islamic State in a Facebook post before going on the shooting spree in San Bernadino that killed 14 people. As various news outlets have pointed out, this would effectively shift the political debate away from gun control to the traditional scare narrative over terrorism which to date has only ever succeeded in intensifying the problem. If any single characteristic has defined the official response to terrorism in the decade and a half since 2001, it has been that officialdom has made itself cause and cure of the same problem. Rather than responding in way that avoids the single major pitfall of reproducing the parameters of the problem it seeks to resolve, it has at every step fallen headlong into it by invoking exactly the kind of black and white binary logic between us and them that feeds fear of terrorism. More