Friday evening I was in the middle of writing a blog post about photography when my social media feeds began to fill with posts about an active shooting incident in Paris. As the situation escalated, I lost all interest in writing. Instead I spent the next several hours glued to the television, flipping between CNN and MSNBC to follow breaking news updates as the carnage unfolded.<\/p>\n

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To me, the difference between warfare and terrorism is the difference between a scheduled boxing match and randomly walking up to an old lady at the mall and punching her in the face when she’s not looking. Warfare is a scheduled event, for lack of a better term. Two entities, be it religious factions, countries, or large coalitions — agree to do battle. There are rules. “We agree to only shoot these people, in these places.” But as we have all unfortunately come to understand, with terrorists, there are no rules. There are no gentlemen’s agreements to be made with terrorists. <\/p>\n

I only know a little bit about ISIS or ISIL (or Daesh, as they are sometimes referred to). I read about their caliphate declaration on Wikipedia<\/a> and how their goal is to “continue to seize land and take over the entire Earth.” My dad has a theory that if spiders were the size of dogs, they could not co-exist with human beings. Either the spiders would have to go, or we would. I think the same rule applies to ISIS. When an organized group of terrorists has announced their plan is to take over the earth, it seems like the unstoppable force will eventually meet the immovable object. Both cannot succeed.<\/p>\n

The attacks in Paris were attacks on freedom. Specifically, “soft targets” (groups of unarmed civilians) enjoying food, sports, and music were slaughtered. I find the targeting of non-combatants cowardly, but the targeting of people enjoying art downright despicable. If we are not allowed to enjoy the fruits of this world without being persecuted and attacked by others that do not agree with us… what is left? I have always stood behind “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (which may or may not have actually been said by Voltaire). Along those same lines, I believe people should be able to enjoy anything that does not harm another person. I am all for other people enjoying types of music, art, books and films that I do not care for. Variety is the spice of life, after all. It is this freedom of choice that makes the free world free, and when a group comes along that declares violently that other people shall not have this right… we both cannot exist.<\/p>\n

I cannot help but think that eventually these fighters will arrive on our shores. Several of the targets in Paris, including a professional sporting event and a concert, are places where Americans are not allowed to carry weapons. I am afraid that attacking those types of locations here would have similar results. ISIS will never attack a gun show here in the Midwest. If and when they do attack on American soil it will be against unarmed and unsuspecting civilians. And it will be terrible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday evening I was in the middle of writing a blog post about photography when my social media feeds began to fill with posts about an active shooting incident in Paris. As the situation escalated, I lost all interest in writing. Instead I spent the next several hours glued to the television, flipping between CNN and MSNBC to follow breaking news updates as the carnage unfolded. To me, the difference between warfare and terrorism is the difference between a scheduled boxing match and randomly walking up to an old lady at the mall and punching her in the face when… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}