True disturbingly often for police officers. About half the people shot and killed by police in the US (about 500 people per year) have mental illness. Compare that rate with the rest of the western world (less than 100 people since 2000) where people with mental illness tend not to be murdered by police. Even if we remove all the mentally ill people with guns from those numbers (to make the weapon use comparable across countries) we see very many more people killed in the US than any other western nation.
And if you want numbers for innocent people shot by officers with poor aim, well, they don't keep numbers so you can't get accurate stats. Here are a few: https://popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-love-yo...
> So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11)
I'm not excluding 9/11. Christian and right wing extremists have killed more than 3,000 people in the US in the 19th and 20th century. At least 3,500 black people were lynched, for example. We've seen in this thread people claiming that Islam has centuries of violence, so let's go back 200 years and see who's being killed and who's doing the killing. Black folks are being killed, and Good White Christians were doing the killing.
> They're not looking to take down all of Western society.
Sure they are. "NEW WORLD ORDER" and "THE JEWS DID IT" and "FREEMEN ON THE LAND" are all about how corrupt the current system is. Read the Unabomber manifesto. That's all about overthrowing the system.
> They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer.
There's no point having this discussion if you're just going to shift the goal posts to keep redefining what terrorism is or what extremism is or what atrocities do or don't count.
No, they aren't. Christian extremists include organized extremist groups, including those that have been behind or sheltered abortion clinic attacks (e.g., Army of God), and also much of the militia movement (large segments of which are Christian extremist groups with apocalyptic views.) Sure, there are apparently lone wolf attackers (just as there are among Islamic terrorists), but they generally turn out to have both pre-attack affiliation and post-attack shelter from organized extremist groups (just as is true among Islamic "lone wolf" terrorists, though fewer of them have the opportunity for post-attack shelter.)
And there have been a number of investigations and arrests connected with these groups and specifically addressing them as organized, active, violent extremist groups. However, unlike international Islamic groups, they don't get reported in the media, in part due to media bias, but in part due to the fact that the FBI (and DoJ more generally) don't put out press releases for the arrests the way they do with Islamic terror investigations and arrests, and on the occasions when they do, they don't highlight the organizational links in the cases.)
This may, for the government at least, be part of a deliberate strategy to avoid aiding the growth of homegrown domestic terror groups by avoiding giving the specific groups visibility, but it has the added effect of misleading the general public about the nature of the sources of organized violent extremism threatening the United States.
What information sources do you follow that indicate that Christian extremism is even remotely as great a threat as Islamic extremism? When I look at the FBI most wanted terrorists lists and other sources, I see a complete dominance by Islamic terrorist groups.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/23/fbi-c...
Contrary to your claim that the DoJ is downplaying domestic terrorism, I've noted several efforts by the administration to "talk up" domestic terrorism and downplay Islamic terrorism - then when pressed on who these domestic terrorists are, administration officials have been at a loss to name any specifics.
Actual statistics on who kills Americans in America.
> When I look at the FBI most wanted terrorists lists
That tells you which individuals the FBI sees the most value to the policy objectives set by their political leadership to draw public attention to.
It doesn't tell you anything about relative risk of classes of terrorists. At most, given complete trust of the judgement of the FBI and assumption of their policy objectives being aligned with risk to Americans and assumption that there are no factors other than risk weighing into what they draw public attention to, it gives you information on the relative risk attached to individual terrorists. But, even then, if there are relatively fewer Islamic groups posing danger to Americans, and each of those groups is more dependent on a narrow set of senior leaders for effectiveness, then members of Islamic groups could be dominate the 10 most wanted list by being the individuals responsible for the most risk, even while Christian groups are collectively responsible for greater risk.
> Contrary to your claim that the DoJ is downplaying domestic terrorism
I didn't claim that DoJ is downplaying domestic terrorism.
What I stated is that they don't issue press releases as frequently, and don't highlight organizational ties in the press releases they do issue, for the actual specific arrests or specific investigations of homegrown Christian terrorists in the way they do for arrests or specific investigations of Islamic terrorists tied to international groups.
This is actually in tension with the DoJ's portrayals of the overall risk from domestic, non-Islamic groups (I suggest a possible motive for this inconsistency in my early post, though that is pure speculation.)
Edit: Not sarcastic. Something like the FBI's list that someone else shared, of the group responsible for US terror attacks from 2002-2005.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/the-terrorist-threat-conf...
> At the same time, the United States also faces significant challenges from domestic terrorists. In fact, between 1980 and 2000, the FBI recorded 335 incidents or suspected incidents of terrorism in this country. Of these, 247 were attributed to domestic terrorists, while 88 were determined to be international in nature.
> Right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat. Two of the seven planned acts of terrorism prevented in 1999 were potentially large-scale, high-casualty attacks being planned by organized right-wing extremist groups.
How is that a fair or even interesting comparison, though? Islamist terrorists aren't killing people ostensibly engaged in criminal acts. Islamist terrorists aren't otherwise expected to be agents of the government charged with using physical force to protect the laws. Islamist terrorists target innocents in a deliberate effort to maximize damage and loss of life. Body counts tell almost nothing of the story in an honest comparison of the threat from police officers vs Islamic terrorists.
US citizens are at greater risk of far right or Christian extremists than they are of Islamist extremists
This is a slightly more interesting comparison, but even then you have to look at who the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are watching to understand that Christian extremists are individual actors who target specifics like abortion providers. They're not looking to take down all of Western society. They aren't amassing armies in other countries to assert 6th century law on all the territories that they conquer.
So sure, Christian terrorists' kill numbers might be comparable or even greater than Islamic terrorists domestically (if you unfairly exclude 9/11) - but that doesn't mean that they're the same level of threat in a strategic geopolitical sense.