@1: Apparently, described as middle easter descent yelling 'Allahu akbar' after he ran away from his truck before being shot by NYPD.

God bless the NYPD!

The suspect has a Uzbek name, but is listed as from Tampa Fla.so no matter what cheeto-jesus and his racist cult will all be wetting there whitey-tighties and crying about "terrorism"

They're whitey-tighties, damn I'm still hung over from that train trip.

@2: Uzbekistan is in central Asia, not the Middle East

No I of course meant "their not their or they're badly hung over and still smarter than a trumpster

if he's Uzbek, he's Muslim. ISIS-inspired is probable.

this is the world now. islamist terror can be everywhere/anywhere. if it's not islamists, it's alienated americans with private arsenals.

@5: Initial reports are not detailed.

The right expects you to accept gun violence as part of the cost to be free and the left expects you to accept the problems of violent jihad as part of being an inclusive society. That's where we live kiddies!

You know, violent jihadists might stop attacking America if we, you know, weren't occupying the middle east with thousands of troops, hundreds of bomb-drones, and dozens of military bases. Because clearly our presence there is a stabilizing force.

But that's not something that's really up for discussion. Because reasons.

@10: I don't accept either, but I don't know how to fix either, either. both seem like long-term projects. we have to create a world where people (angry men) don't want to do the things they can clearly easily do in an open society.

BTW, there are fuck tons of Central Asian immigrants. I don't see us rounding them up. do you?

"violent jihadists might stop attacking America if we..."

Pretty sure "violent jihadist" is where you found the source of the problem.

@11: not so sure anything we could do to de-escalate/withdraw/make amends would change the impression of America or end Jihad at this point.

the pooch is screwn, particularly with the Sunnis.

@13: violent jihad didn't spring from the forehead of Zeus.

it has a history and a context. it has an allure, or it wouldn't attract adherents willing to die for it. its about goddamn time that America stopped thinking in binary oppositions about solving it.

what's your plan to persuade muslim youth to resist its call?

@11. No, it can be up for discussion. It's just pointless. Unless you need a sanctimonious fix.

When are they going to start calling this 'car violence' and other incidents 'bomb violence'? If this is 'car violence' would common-sense licensing and ownership restrictions have prevented it? It bugs me when the left peddles in irrational fears just like the right. I would prefer to think they were above that.

@18: what irrational fear? guns? fuck your stupid equivalencies. go tell them to the dead and wounded in Las Vegas.

bombs are hard to build and take planning and sustained intention. this method was used because it's easy when you're angry. a gun is marginally harder, but still easy if you can pass a background check. see Allen Ivanov.

any opportunity to call "the left" hypocrites.

It is irrational. I consider myself left-wing. I don't care for guns. I don't personally own one. But I live in a very armed area and know a LOT of armed people so I actually looked into it myself after Sandy Hook. The UK banned guns outright in 1997, after restricting them in the '60s following a school shooting. Their murder rates were not affected, and mass murders still take place. Look for a graph of UK murder rates and see if you can see a change corresponding with 1997. You will see that it actually jagged up afterward, continuing to follow a long-standing upward trend, which to my mind means there was no effect. Violent crime, including murder, in the US has been trending dramatically downward for over a decade, even as gun sales went through the roof due to right-wing fear mongering about guns being taken away. Media doesn't talk about that very much. People determined to kill will find a way it seems. Murder, including mass murder, far predates guns. The Vegas shooter had a private plane. Perhaps he would have found something awful to do with that if he had no firearms. So yes, I consider the 'gun violence' hysteria irrational. Someone prone to texting while driving is a much greater threat to their fellow citizens than a gun owner. Car accidents killed 10s of thousands last year. Why are their lives somehow less worth caring about than someone who was killed by a madman in a statistically vanishingly rare event? People are wired to fear the unusual and fear-mongers know it. That's why they harp on 'gun violence' as being an 'epidemic' as if being killed with a gun is somehow different than being killed by a distracted driver, or someone wielding a baseball bat. (Almost no murders are committed with 'assault rifles' BTW. Most are committed without weapons, and almost all gun murders are committed with handguns.)

#20
You REALLY think that the UK equals the USA in gun deaths?
Then you mention car deaths?

You can google gun deaths I’m not doing that again--but there WERE 59 people who died in Las Vegas along with >500 hideously injured by a guy who AMAZINGLY wasn’t called a terrorist!? Gee white, Christian-nope not a terrorist.

Now the cars. Cars are made for transport. 94% of all fatalities are caused by “distracted driving.” Texting, eating, drinking, idiocy. But cars are MUCH safer and the number of injuries and deaths have gone down with seat belts, MADD (Mothers against drunk driving--the term “designated driver” is fairly new in our lexicon.) We’re nearly to the point of driverless cars.

But guns!! Guns are built for ONE thing. Killing. Oh you and your buddies can put on cammies and play AR-15 out in fields with targets---but those targets don’t shoot back.

As a surgeon who has watched too many kids--a few babies bleed out from .223 round---and there is NO way to stop the bleeding...I’m ready to melt down all guns.

There is NO reason to manufacture guns anymore. They are antiques that have NO place in the 21st century. Period. Don’t agree? Come work in our emergency room on a Saturday night. I’ll let you hold the next three year old that bleeds to death. Bullets shred blood vessels, liquefy solid organs like the heart and liver, and fracture bones by the shock waves. 93 people die each day in the USA from guns. Seven of those are children and teens. Every day!

Enough already. I’m so sorry you have a small cock! Or if you REALLY NEED that weapon, the US Army accepts recruits up to age 42. Or sign up as a mercenary--or hell just take all your weapons and fly to Syria. Lotsa fighting and fun times over there!

@11 That's called victim shaming and its not ok.

@24. They're deflecting. Check out this pew study.

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-w…

The extremism isnt "just a few", it's a significant portion. Granted, the willingness to act on these beliefs is probably small, but the pool of the backwards religious to draw followers down that path from is huge. You have to read through the bias a little to get to the gravity of what they're saying. Like when you get to "majority say suicide bombing is rarely/never justified". Majority true. But look at the fucking percentages that say it is "often justified". You'd think that number should be zero, but it's not even close.

This type of violence is here now. It was only a matter of time before this started happening in the states. It will only get more prevalent from here on out.

Is there a way to get the treating-women-like-dogs-while-the-rest-of-us-pretend-that-they-love-it-and-that-it's-liberating-although-it's-the-exact-opposite-of-the-definition-of-liberating part of Islam, without the Jihad part?

Anything anti-West is amazing. Islam is as anti-West as it comes. Islam is amazing.

You will love Islam. At any cost.

@21 Time to require accidental (and intentional, for that sake) death insurance for guns.

@25 - The USA is the 'victim' of aggressively occupying another country? Hm. I don't quite see how you got there.

The dead and injured Manhattanites are victims, and this 29-yo asshole Saipov is the perpetrator and deserves nothing less than the full punishment coming his way, hopefully after interrogation to determine his links & contacts so we can continue to isolate and capture other potentially violent individuals.

However, in the greater context of things, the USA has been overtly occupying Iraq since 2003 and has killed around 200,000 civilians there. Or is it, in your view, Iraq's fault that they got occupied and bombed to pieces by the USA?

@13 - Just out of curiosity as to your historical knowledge, who attacked who first?
Do you remember G.H.W.Bush's original Gulf War in the early 90s? And the reasoning for it? How about the following decade of "no fly zones" and daily bombing sorties?

We've actually been occupying Iraq for nearly 37 years. And just look at the stability!

Middle East instability has nothing to do with thousands of years of a culture of tribal/regional warring, and then of course the two sects of Islam who have nothing against one another.

Hee! @23 I guess you could say I have a small cock since I am a cis female. As a mother I understand what you feel though you likely will not believe me. I understand why people want violence to end. I would love that too. I understand emotionally why people are believing that gun bans will accomplish this. They want it to be true and it seems so simple. Rationally, I think the second notion is magical thinking. The experiment has been tried and it failed. I suppose it was a political success because UK folks I've read are convinced they are safer now, and I expect their politicians benefited from that. The actual statistics are that the same number of UK citizens died by violence after their gun ban as before the gun ban. Perhaps they were less likely to be killed with a gun, but they were still killed. Some of them are children who died in the arms of doctors and emergency personnel I am sure, though I wish I were not. The point that is always neglected when the media talks about how many fewer UK citizens are killed with a gun than Americans is that it was also fewer BEFORE their gun ban as well and continued to be fewer after the gun ban. There was no effect. Americans kill one another more, mostly with hands, blunt weapons and handguns, in that order. I blame the existence of ghettoed minorities without access to an effective criminal justice system, and drug prohibition for most of the difference, but that's just my guess. It beggers belief that restricting access to one tool that is not even the most common tool for murder is somehow the magical key to reducing violent behavior and murder. It makes more sense that politicians are fear-mongering in time-old tradition. I don't fear my children will be shot in a school shooting. I don't fear random bullets. Personally, I fear the 2000+ tons of metal directed by distracted or drunk people that kill 1000s of kids every year. But I guess that's not an 'epidemic'?
The right has bought into the notion that immigrants are a clear and present danger and denies climate change. The left buys into the idea that they are at huge risk for being shot at any moment (you're not) and politicians can rescue them from an epidemic of 'gun violence' and denies vaccines. I'm a leftie, but I hate fear-mongering and the way politicians roil up irrational fears to avoid dealing with racism and inequality and all the rest of the nasty status quo. "It's the guns!" Right.

@31 - I'm going to bet you don't even know what Sharia law is. Do you?
Most American's don't, so it is effectively a "scary buzzword" to our ears.
I invite you to prove me wrong.

Oddly enough, under Saddam's secular state women had more rights and access to public education through university. The US invasion stopped all that and things have shifted to more religious control & sectarian fighting in the power vacuum. So really, post-invasion was a major step backwards for the region in many ways, and has reinforced some of the worst aspects of Islam.

Don't get me wrong, Saddam was no angel and did horrible things to Kurds & other minority groups (eg. mustard gas). But a military invasion by the USA wasn't the solution to those problems, and now most things are worse there... to say nothing of the fact that a military occupation basically encouraged and facilitated the development of AQ, AIQ, ISIS, and the explosion of jihadi groups generally.

(Let's also not forget that the USA itself fomented, trained & supplied the original jihadi networks --including bin Laden's-- in the 80s to counter the USSRs invasion of Afghanistan. Great strategy, no?, considering that it's all blowing back on us now.)

I respect Hitchens, thanks for the links. Interesting points. Also Saddam was supporting the Palastinian resistance (literally paying families of suicide bombers), and building a giant-ass gun to shoot at Israel (project babylon). Also, Saddam switched oil sales to the Euro... These may also be factors that Hitchens does not mention.

Regardless, the USA occupying Mesopotamia has unleashed a Pandora's Box of jihadism & asymmetric warfare. No?

@34 - Don't forget, Hitchens also thought waterboarding was just fine n' dandy too. So his word is not exactly gospel. He supported waterboarding until someone challenged him to try it himself. And to his credit, he did. He then reversed his position and declared that it is, in fact, torture.

I'm not fully convince that 200,000 dead civilians is an wonderful bit of "statecraft" as Hitchens describes. And Hitchens seems to elide this rather large, glaring point: The US actively supported Saddam & his Iraq for many years: ""Reagan/Bush administrations permitted—and frequently encouraged—the flow of money, agricultural credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, and weapons to Iraq."[4]"

@38 But your still reading! :D yes, another day.