On Friday's CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello, during a discussion of "lone wolf" terrorists and how to combat them, CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem declared that it would be "absurd" to arm people in "soft targets" like schools and movie theaters. At ont point, she also oddly included the word "church" in the list of places where one might be "radicalized."
At about 9:30 a.m., after noting a study by the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center which enumerated attacks since 2009 which the group categorized as "domestic terrorism," host Carol Costello brought up several Americans who in recent years began their lives non-Muslim and converted to Islam before plotting terrorist attacks. She posed:
And, Juliette, as the Southern -- well, as we pointed out, these lone wolves come from every community. I mean, Ciccolo sounds like an Italian name to me, so he certainly wasn't a practicing Muslim all of his life.
Without specifying any Christians who might have committed terrorist attacks, Kayyem included the word "church" in the list of places where law enforcement should be "engaging" to "identify potential people who may be radicalized, whatever their faith," as she began her response:
The majority of the domestic terrorism incidences are actually not Islam or Muslim-related. They're actually white supremacy, at least according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Look, you're not going to be able to target a group of people who have no common identity, right? So you can't just say, well, this group of people. They are coming from all over the place.
So there's a couple of solutions. One is clearly engaging communities -- whether it's family, friends, community members, church, mosque leaders -- to identify potential people who may be radicalized, whatever their faith. And then the other is, of course, being smart about soft targets.
Then came her anti-gun sentiment as she added:
But I want to make it clear here. Guns are not the solution here. The idea of arming everyone who might be in a soft target is -- is absurd. I mean, then you're talking about schools, movie theaters -- you'd have a very different society.
Guns are actually very easily attained by violent people, as we see, and so we can harden soft targets, but it's a delusion to think that we are going to be a country with a harder -- without soft targets.
