Photo by Mike Lewinski | Public Domain
Five days after the Halloween lone-wolf terrorist, Sayfullo Saipov, attacked pedestrians and bicyclists in New York, killing 8 people and injuring 12 others, another lone-wolf undertook a terrorist attack this time in a small, unincorporated community 30 miles southeast of San Antonio, TX. The terrorist, Devin Kelley, killed 26 people and injured 20 others attending the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs; in 2000, its population was but 362 people.
One month earlier, on October 3rd, in Las Vegas, NV, Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retired real-estate speculator and gambler, shot assault rifles from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay at attendees of the Route 91 Harvest music festival, killing 59 people and leading to over 500 people being injured. In August, at the bloody political showdown in Charlottesville, VA, a 20-year-old white nationalist, James Alex Fields, Jr., of Maumee, OH, drove his car into a crowd of marchers, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year old local resident, and injuring 19 others.
The attackers were lone-wolf terrorists operating in different parts of the country, executing different actions and for apparently different reasons, but taking one of two forms – political (i.e., Saipov and Fields) or psychopathological (i.e., Kelley, Paddock). Pres. Donald Trump expressed very different assessments of both forms.
With regard to political terrorist, Trump initially…