President Obama's missed opportunity on terrorism

In May 1998, three anti-government extremists — Robert Mason, Alan Pilon, and Jason McVean — stole a water truck in Ignacio, a town in southwest Colorado. They drove it to nearby Cortez, where it was spotted by a local city policeman named Dale Claxton. He pulled up behind the truck on the side of the road, but before he could even get out of his patrol car, McVean jumped out of the truck, holding a full-auto SKS rifle, and opened fire. Claxton was hit in the head before he could even unholster his gun, and was instantly killed.

The three terrorists ran for it. They stole a flatbed pickup truck from a local at gunpoint, and wounded two more policemen on their way toward Utah. Near Hovenweep National Monument, they abandoned the truck and headed out into the canyon country on foot. Their weaponry had so overmatched the local law enforcement that it was some time before an effective pursuit could be mounted, but within a few hours, federal and state agencies began a massive manhunt.

The search was a total failure, bungled by inter-agency competition and wilderness inexperience. Mason was found dead after a social worker stumbled across him by accident, but the authorities searched fervently for the other two for over a year with no success.

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I was reminded of this story listening to President Obama's speech on terrorism Sunday night. You see, I was in middle school near Cortez back in 1998, and I knew both of Claxton's children — who were about my age — quite well. It turns out that terrorism is pretty bad even when the culprit is not a Muslim.

Today, in the wake of incidents of both jihadist and right-wing terror, President Obama had a very good opportunity to point this out. But instead, the president reinforced the idea that terrorism is something only Muslims do — mentioning the Fort Hood shooting, the Chattanooga shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, 9/11, and San Bernardino; but not the Charleston shooting, the Sikh temple shooting, the Planned Parenthood shooting, or the Oklahoma City bombing.

Laying bare the fact of right-wing terror — according to the New America Foundation, since 9/11 right-wing terrorists are actually slightly ahead of the jihadist variety in the overall body count, even taking San Bernardino into account — would have provided an excellent example for one of Obama's arguments. "It's our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently," he said, arguing against a religious test for any refugees. "Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes — and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country."

The point here is basically that bigotry is wrong. It is wildly unjust and prejudiced to tar 1.6 billion Muslims with the actions of a tiny minority. And because Republicans have been doing this constantly for the last several months (To wit: Behold the fascist at the head of the GOP presidential pack clamoring for a "complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the U.S.), pointing to right-wing white terrorists would offer excellent evidence why Obama's argument is correct. It would be wrong to pin the sins of right-wing terrorists on all white Americans. That too would be bigoted. The same is true of Muslims.

Similarly, just as Muslims are important allies in the effort against jihadist terrorism (dig the Kurdish peshmerga), white Americans are an important part of any effort to stop terrorism from militias, white supremacists, "sovereign citizens," pro-life murderers, and so forth. The assistance of locals is always the most important asset for any law enforcement agency. It would be foolish as well as monstrous to forcibly shut down all evangelical churches, or kidnap Erick Erickson and throw him into a secret prison in Poland, for fear of anti-abortion extremists, just as it would be to shut down the visa waiver program with Norway for fear of Anders Breivik-style attacks. (Not to mention how it would validate a lot of the narratives of anti-government extremists.)

I understand why President Obama refrained from making this point, of course. Conservatives would have come completely unglued at any reference to right-wing terrorism. That's what happened when the Department of Homeland Security released a fairly anodyne (and as it turned out, prescient) report in 2009 on right-wing extremism. Conservatives whipped themselves into a frenzy, convinced that the document was a "hit job" on all conservatives. DHS quickly buried the report and threw the analyst under the bus.

One must conclude that the politics of terrorism are profoundly bigoted. An attack committed by extremist white people gets a police response on the day it happens, but is followed by little more than uncomfortable fidgeting. An attack committed by jihadists gets the same police response, followed by a completely unhinged overreaction directed often not even at the perpetrators, but at convenient Muslim scapegoats (refugees, Iraq, every single Muslim).

And so, the only potential anti-terror gun control measure under consideration (and mentioned by Obama) is banning gun purchases by people on the terror watch list. This sounds reasonable until you realize that the list is a Kafkaesque nightmare out of a police state. Though the procedures for placing people on it are classified, last year The Intercept published one set of guidelines, and they are violently unjust. There is basically no evidence requirement for getting on the list, and it's nearly impossible to get off it. Now there are something like 680,000 people on the list, some 280,000 of whom have "no recognized terrorist group affiliation." Gun control, it seems, can only happen if it further eviscerates due process.

But perhaps we can be comforted by the fate of the Colorado fugitives. A year and a half after the attack, and much romantic speculation about the outlaws who escaped, Pilon was found dead less than three miles from the abandoned truck, probably shot by McVean. And in 2007, McVean's scattered bones were found only a few miles further along — with a wind-up wristwatch suggesting he might have been dead by the day after the attack. The manhunt forces had probably walked right past them dozens of times.

Violent extremism will always have some appeal for bored young men, and terrorist attacks against random civilians will always be easy to carry out in a country so awash in firearms. But such people are just people. Let's not make them out to be anything else.