Was Boston Really Terrorism or Just Another Columbine?

With the news that bombings in Boston were committed by guys that had been living in this country for 10 years, people are worried about a wave of "homegrown terrorism." They're wondering what we can do to combat this.

I have a suggestion: stop beating up innocent people.

After numerous false news reports that variously identified "a dark-skinned man," a Saudi, a guy from Nepal, a Moroccan, etc., as suspects in the bombing, there have been several revenge attacks against people who have nothing at all to do with the atrocity: a Bangladeshi network engineer, a woman doctor from Syria, and so on.

This is nothing new. When people are angry they vent their rage against innocent people who vaguely resemble someone they hate. For centuries these sorts of attacks were common against minorities including blacks, Catholics, Irishmen, Hungarians, gays, and especially after 9/11, Muslims.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev came to the United States as refugees about that time. How did the intolerance and violence towards innocent Muslims did affect their attitudes about America?

The marathon bombings always seemed like an amateur affair, more like the mass shootings at Newtown, Aurora, and Columbine than a masterminded plot like 9/11. Tamerlan seems to have been alienated from American society. He reportedly said, "I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them." If the Tsarnaevs felt bullied and hated the same way that Dylan Klebold and Adam Lanza felt, Boston may be exactly the same as Columbine and Newtown.

We don't yet know exactly why the Tsarnaevs detonated those bombs. There's simply no excuse for killing innocent people at a marathon. Just like there's no excuse for a man to assault a random Muslim woman on the street.

If you want to stop crimes like the Boston bombing, you have to understand what motivated the perpetrators. Random hatred and mistreatment of Muslims in America may or may not have been the trigger for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar. But anyone who feels oppressed by society could have the same reaction, including gay teenagers, home-schooled Christians, gun owners, you name it.

As we've seen time and again, your ethnicity and political and religious leanings have no real bearing on whether you'll commit atrocities like Boston. Abortion- and lesbian-hater Eric Rudolph was responsible for the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City killed far more people than the Tsarnaevs, and he called himself a true American Patriot.

All that's needed for mass murder is a righteous belief that violence is the appropriate response to a perceived affront. The rest is just details.