I'm sad for the people who were killed needlessly by alienated young men, but Tylenol kills more people in a single year than all of those cases combined. The fear mongering around this subject is off the charts.
I think some form of compassionate outreach is probably a better approach to that problem than branding them terrorists.
Lots of things kill more people than lots of other things; that isn’t the sole metric that dictates our domestic policies.
I happen to agree re: positive outreach. But outreach is a prophylactic measure, and the incel “movement” (as it were) contains people who run the spectrum from reachable with traditional support to people who merely lack the means to kill at the current moment. Both need to be addressed.
I agree with your last sentence, but the reason why malicious actors who kill fewer than drug overdoses deserve considerable concern is bc at most one person will die if you take too much tylenol. The number of casualties is linear in the number of actors.
Processes of violence have much higher variance in terms of the number of casualties, and the consequences of networks of actors even moreso, because, tragically, the events are not wholly independent and there can be multiplicative effects if one copies another, if a community that leads people toward committing acts of violence forms, etc.
I agree we should remain vigilant about encroachment upon our civil rights, who is being accused of 'future crimes' ex ante, etc., but to treat each as the same kind of statistical outcome-generating process is not the most useful mental model imo.
When they commit mass murder in the name of their ideology, they become terrorists. That isn't off the charts fear mongering. Any group which did the same, and celebrated the people who did, would be called the same.
I think some form of compassionate outreach is probably a better approach to that problem than branding them terrorists.