A guy placed several small homemade bombs around the New York City metropolitan area, but got the willies and could only summon the courage to place most of these in New Jersey. All but one of them failed to go off as planned. No one was killed. In a final shootout with police, the guy couldn’t even manage sufficient competence to kill one of the cops in a suicidal outburst with his gun.
In response, the U.S. House of Representatives passed new legislation today. The bill, called the Community Counterterrorism Preparedness Act establishes funding for training, for readiness for first responders to deal with terrorists. Of course, there’s already such funding in place, and anti-terrorist training programs galore, all established during the creation of the Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security years ago.
The legislation doesn’t do much, really, providing only $8 million per year for the training that’s already provided. But then, there isn’t that much to do.
Terrorist attacks in the United States are extremely rare, and typically are small and poorly executed. So, almost all of the anti-terrorist training that people receive will never ever be used.
Still, the U.S. House decided, it’s important to send an anti-terrorist message in times like these, when everyone is up for re-election and competing to distract the American people from substantial plans for dealing with significant problems that the nation faces.
The threat (of losing the attention of American voters) has never been greater.