Map: how close to you live to a U.S. terrorism hot spot?

I contend that a careful examination would reveal that each of these hot spots is located near a Militant Quaker gathering place.

...[For the DHS,] researchers from the University of Maryland and University of Massachusetts-Boston  (PDF) mapped all events considered terrorism since 1970 to 2008 in the United States (below). This established areas they deemed terrorism “hot spots” but also revealed that terrorism is actually “widely dispersed”. So widely dispersed that every state has experienced some act of terrorism in some form, according to the report. The report defines a hot spot as an area where more than the average number of terrorist attacks have taken place — the average for the U.S. is six.

...The research found that a third of all terrorist attacks during that time-frame studied took place in five metropolitan cities — Manhattan, New York (343 attacks); Los Angeles County, Calif. (156 attacks); Miami-Dade County, Fla. (103 attacks); San Francisco County, Calif. (99 attacks); and Washington, D.C. (79 attacks).

...In addition to tracking areas prone to terrorist attacks, the study authors saw trends in timing of terrorist attacks and type of motivation behind the attack. For example, co-author Bianca Bersani, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, said that terrorist attacks they classified as extreme left-wing — “groups that want to bring about change through violent revolution rather than through established political processes” – were limited almost exclusively to the 1970s. Whereas in the 1980s terrorism with religious motivations took place and the 1990s had extreme right-wing attacks by “groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent”.

A comment following the article voiced the obvious follow-up question: "Didn't our trusty Congress just declare the United States part of the battlefield on the war on us, I mean war on terror? That was part of the excuse to pass NDAA, wasn’t it?"

Perhaps this is a job for Obama's vaunted "Civilian National Security Force" that he crowed about in 2008 and 2009.


Hat tip: BadBlue.com.