Pedro Espinoza is a terrorist. There's no doubt in my mind that this gang member from Los Angeles is as cruel, heartless, callous, and evil as any terrorist we're fighting overseas. He is currently under arrest for walking up to a black teen in Los Angeles, asking him if he was in a gang, and shooting him dead before he could answer.
Whether or not the black teen, Jamiel Shaw, was a gang member is immaterial. We should temper our feelings about Pedro Espinoza based on his callous act, not on the perceived value of the life he took. The fact that Jamiel Shaw was a good kid with a real future ahead of him makes his loss all the harder to bear, but it is a separate matter. If he'd been a kid with a history of trouble, that wouldn't have made Espinoza's act any less evil.
Gang members have been on a campaign of terror in Los Angeles in recent weeks, with residents more afraid to leave their homes than they have been in years. According to this CNN article, in the past few weeks: "A man was gunned down as he held a 2-year-old baby in his arms. A 13-year-old boy was shot to death last week as he went to pick lemons from a tree. In another incident, a 6-year-old boy was critically wounded when he was shot in the head while riding in the car with his family."
How does that differ from Al Qaeda going through a neighborhood and shooting people? The purpose of these shootings is to instill fear in people. They want to cause terror and they kill or wound innocents as often as "legitimate combatants." And that makes them no different than Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda or any other league of scum.
Jamiel Shaw's mother was over in Iraq, serving in the military, when her son was killed by terrorists less than a block from his father's house right here in the United States. While she was engaged in the "war on terror" overseas, ostensibly to prevent Islamic terrorists from attacking Americans at home, our own homegrown terrorists killed her son. Fueled by poverty, despair, poor education, drugs, and rage, our inner city youth have become a violent, senseless, killing force. Give them a charismatic leader with a plan for revolution and this could easily escalate from random shootings to a full-blown war.
George W. Bush and John McCain would have you believe "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here." We are fighting them over there so the Republicans can distract us and avoid fighting them over here. But thanks to street gangs, we have armed, callous, cruel, evil people using terror to hold good people hostage in their homes in almost every major city in our country. And right now, they're only doing a fraction of the evil they could be doing.
But yeah, let's spend a trillion on fighting terrorism in Iraq. Our inner cities haven't blown up... yet.
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