Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Beltway sniper lessons learned: None

It's hard to believe that it's been seven years since John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo cruised the Washington, DC area picking off people at random from their car. Muhammad was put to death by lethal injection last night here in Virginia.

Their three-week murder binge during October of 2002 claimed 10 lives, and struck close to home for me personally when two of them occurred just a short drive from my house. The second of those shootings occurred on Route 1 here in Spotsylvania County as Mrs. Pool Bar and I were on our way from out having breakfast. We were passed by a county Sheriff's car at high speed which pulled into an Exxon station ahead of us where a couple of other Sheriff's cars had just arrived. We got the news when we returned home that 53-year-old Kenneth Bridges had been shot dead while pumping gas at the station.

The shootings took place just a year after the 9/11 terror attacks, and law enforcement authorities moved swiftly to disassociate Muhammad's acts of terrorism from his Muslim religion in exactly the same way authorities today are disassociating Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's shooting spree from his Muslim religion. Law enforcement authorities have become conditioned by our excessively politically correct culture to not consider Islamist fundamentalism as a possible motivator in violent acts.

This kind of political correctness amounts to malpractice on a grand scale and it must be stopped.

1 comment:

Ali said...

I lived through that too - and I still go to the Home Depot where one of the shootings took place... and yes I still think of it every single time I drive into the parking lot. EVERY TIME.

Terrorists don't just cause fear and terror during their reign... it continues for long after.

I am glad he is dead. I am honestly sorry it took so long for us to get a needle in his vein.