Important headlines for April 23rd – #NeverAgain – movement or politics as usual?
Bottom Line: Stories you shouldn't miss and my takes on them
Hot Take: Is this finally an admission that this is really little more than a political PAC? The more I watch and listen to teenagers assert that they're more knowledgeable than their parents, the more I'm certain that I support raising the legal age to buy a gun to 21 along with the voting age.
Islamic State suicide bomber kills 57 in Afghan capital - Sun-Sentinel
Hot Take: Kudos for the Sentinel covering this story. A couple of extremely important points. First, yes, we've made tremendous progress against ISIS relative to where we were with the terrorist organization a year and a half ago. Having eliminated the territory, they'd conquered and occupied has literally undone their caliphate. That being said we know that the impact of ISIS lives on in a more decentralized way. This attack being the latest example. Also, lest we forget, Islamic terror was around far before ISIS became the most prominent terror group in the world. As we're sitting around this country debating adding gun control measures – terrorists have been continuing to blow up people consistently in the name of Allah – you just almost never hear about it in our news. There were two other terror attacks yesterday alone. In fact, over the past 30 days here's the scorecard for Islamic terrorists:
127 attacks (4+ per day)
22 countries
734 dead (24+ per day)
793 injured (26+ per day)
That's an awful lot of devastation and I'm all but certain that this is the first you've heard of it. Evil is unfortunately still alive and too well and it's a reminder that while we've made progress – it's more territorial than systemic safety. In this age of sick copycats there's part of me that thinks that it might be good that those on the fringe looking to hurt people don't know more about this, but Islamic terror has proven time and again that ignorance isn't bliss and it has a way of finding us.