A Terror and A Tragedy Prevented
There may be a hopeful message in a near tragedy in Massachusetts, according to this Against the Grain commentary by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.
It now appears that police prevented another act of terrorism on American soil the weekend after Thanksgiving. The perpetrators in this case weren’t Islamic terrorists. They were students at New Bedford High School in Massachusetts.
New Bedford police have charged five teenagers, one of them, unusually, a girl, with plotting a Columbine-style assault and suicide bloodbath at their high school.
According to police reports, the group imitated the Columbine “Trench Coat Mafia” and planned to smuggle shotguns and bombs into the school, kill as many people as possible, assemble on the roof, take some farewell drugs and kill themselves. Unthinkable, except it has happened before, several times. Who knows if the teens would have gone through with it, but the evidence suggesting that this was a serious threat is strong.
This story contains, ironically, a hopeful, can-do meaning – not just more gloom. Insane acts of terror and hate can be prevented.
Police in big towns, guidance counselors, and teachers can prevent them. And FBI agents, CIA spies, and baggage inspectors can prevent them.
In the post-September 11th world, the bigness of the old, big stories has shrunk. The Battle of Florida, which seemed to threaten the legitimacy of American democracy, now feels like a fun romp in punditland. The Clinton pardons were but a storyline in a sitcom. The Monica episodes were the highpoints of the series.
Our horror at the 13 lives lost at Columbine has not dimmed, but the murders now seem self-contained, manageable, and not world-changing. It sure didn't feel that way at the time. It felt like there was an incurable sociological anthrax spreading in schools. It felt like there was an evil too dark to dissipate and too insane to comprehend, much less combat. Sort of the way we feel about Islamic terrorism now.
The first round of policy responses to Columbine felt symbolic and futile. Metal detectors at schools. Social outcast profiling. Tip sheets for what parents should do if they found napalm, Uzis, crack and pictures of Hitler in their kids' closets. Sort of like the way we feel now about barring carry-on tweezers on airplanes and John Ashcroft's campaign to question 5,000 Muslims.
But for some reason, school violence has diminished since Columbine. At least four credible but crazy student plots have been foiled in the past year alone – four that we know about at least.
So the danger hasn't disappeared. The New Bedford case reinforces that fact. It fits the “profile.” New Bedford is a large high school, the second biggest in New England, in fact. The teens involved labeled themselves “freaks.” They were bullied and angry at the “preppies, minorities and jocks.0
According to Amylee Bowman, the one girl in the group, they used pot, cocaine, LSD and Ecstasy. The plotting was elaborate and detailed. In the various kids’ rooms, police found crude bomb-making ingredients, bullets, spent shotgun shells, billy clubs, a meat clever, a gas mask and the obligatory pictures of Hitler.
But the plot, or the fantasy of it, came to light because a teacher was close to Amylee Bowman and there was a police officer assigned to the school. Pretty basic stuff.
Similarly, acts of terror by domestic groups have declined since the 1995 atrocity in Oklahoma City. The FBI says 15 attacks were thwarted in 1997, 10 in 1998. It has been reported that 131 terrorist attacks were prevented from 1981 to 2000.
Though it rarely seems so in the midst of a crisis, the country and its imperfect institutions do learn lessons and act on them.
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