As two cases in the UK and Ireland showed this summer, attempts to understand "family annihilators" can obscure underlying issues.
Lindsey Parnaby / AFP / Getty Images
It was rare for Spalding, a small town in Lincolnshire, east England, to be the centre of national conversation. But on a Tuesday morning in mid-July, Spalding went into lockdown as reports that three people had been shot dead emerged. As the town trended on Twitter, camera crews and armed response police vehicles descended on the scene.
"There's a shooting in Spalding," people asked online. "Is this a terrorist attack? What's happening to this country and this world?"
It wasn't out of the ordinary to assume the shooting could be terror-related: the night before, a teenager armed with an axe and a knife attacked 20 passengers on a train in Germany, and in the previous few weeks, Berlin and Nice had been hit by atrocities. Though Britain hadn't been targeted in the recent spate of attacks, the current threat level for international terrorism in the UK is "severe." However, it was later revealed the Spalding shooting was a world away from an international terror plot and far from "warring migrant gangs engaged in bloody turf war", as it was described by some corners of the press.
It turned out the perpetrator wasn't an ISIS-inspired attacker – it was a British man who, in broad daylight, shot his wife and daughter dead.
via BuzzFeed - World http://ift.tt/2c5Wulo
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