US Military Dead during Iraq War 1051

The whole idea of terrorism is "shock and awe." You want the people to freak out over the idea that their political leaders can't protect them. That doesn't mean that middle American locations are off limits, e.g. Oklahoma City, but blowing up a Walmart in Podunk is not going to attract much attention. Heck, we just had two infants shot in gang related drive by shootings in Columbus in less than 24 hours and there's little significant effect on the community.

Besides, in the wake of the London plantings, I wouldn't be surprised if these were not the work of "homegrowns" who are disaffected by Britain's high jobless rate and want to have some meaning for their lives, however lame it may be. It doesn't take a graduate degree to figure out how to wire up a cellphone to a detonator, any more than being able to download a bittorrent makes one a network engineer.

The huge problem with most "security experts" is that they have this absurd notion that most threats are related to extremely large and heavily funded plans by military geniuses.

Terrorism has existed in the US for a long time. The FBI was formed in response to a bunch of person plantings.

The plantings by the SDS Weathermen during my youth should serve as a clue, as should the more recent and elaborate two stage plantings by antiend radicals, where there are secondary plants intended to kill EMS and police first responders as well as rubberneckers to add to the "shock and awe" effect.

The main reason rural communities are relatively unlikely targets for most person attacks is that frankly most people don't really care what happens to the people there. We have large numbers of people end in coal mines in industrial accidents, for instance, yet there is little lasting effect.

If you really want to create "shock and awe," you have to attack a target that resonates in people's minds, that is a symbol of their lives and that scares them to rest. It has to be something that affects every person. It has to make them think, "What if that happened here?" It has to have high profile. Again, most people don't give a damn what happens to rural people. That's why the WTC was chosen for 9-11. It was a symbol.

Rural people off themselves all the time, and nobody cares unless it makes the news like Columbine.