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I gotta chime in with something that just occurred to me. Here we have 13 people who have been shot, 10 of them have died, in and around the D.C. area. Yes, it is horrific, no community should be terrorized by anyone. And this leads to my point

I wonder how many shooting deaths there were in South Philly over the same time period? Lets broaden that a little and include Detroit and maybe throw in one more area so that it roughly equals about 4-5 million people. How many murders have occurred in the same general population throughout other communities across the nation since the sniper began his rampage?

I'm not a statistition, but I have a hunch that the numbers would be close to the same as the now infamous sniper. What makes this one so special? Hundreds, if not thousands of people are being killed, mamed and wounded all across the country every week and it barely gets noticed. Many of them will be lucky to get a note buried somewhere in the back pages of the news paper. WHY?

Is it because these people are not considered innocent? Are the victims of the sniper more or less deserving of the kind of attention this case is getting? Even more, is the sniper more deserving of the attention he is getting than all the other murderers who are "quietly" killing people throughout this nation each and every day? I cannot help but wonder why this is?

I may be wrong about this but I heard that the United States is the murder capital of the world. What makes this one so special?

I feel like I am being manipulated by something that is beyond my control. I'm getting off of this roller coaster. I have a life to live.

When you're a news junkie, this IS your life. ;-) (sad, ain't it?)

And yeah, you're right. The stats show it. You have something like a 1/300 chance of being killed by someone OTHER THAN THE SNIPER in the DC area; you have a 1/517,000 (and that's being very...liberal...in the nice sense of the word :p) of being hit by the sniper. Why is this guy capturing our attention? Because he's good at psyching us out. Your average murder, the American understands. The cruel, strange, weird serial murders...we can't grasp them, and so we keep trying to. It makes no sense to us, and the mind recoils. We can at least understand the motives behind a guy who "goes postal" at work, or robs a bank, or knocks over a drugstore for Oxycontin...but this is pure, quantified *EVIL* of a nature we rarely encounter.

And that's why we're fascinated with it -- and it doesn't bother me much, because Americans should be constantly reminded that Evil *does exist", and not just as an abstract concept.

--KL

You don't have to go to Philly to make a comparison. Brit Hume had a guy on two days ago who researched Mongomery County and found that, on average, 30 people a month were murdered. So even if you attributed all the sniper's victim to that one county, your oddd of being murdered by the sniper were only one thirds of your odds of being murdered by someone else.

My idea as to why this scared so many people is simple. Media coverage.