The type of weapon is irrelevant
Actually yes it is relevant. You wouldn't call a kid walking around the street of a poor neighborhood with a combat knife in his hand a terrorist. You can't do a lot of damage with just one knife. However, lets consider he's walking around a neighborhood with an AK-47 and just shoots people. He'd just be branded a murderer. However, if he had multiple types of weapons and possibly a bomb he'd be branded a terrorist. Look at most of the terrorism cases - they usually involve someone having a large amount of weaponry striking masses(usually in public places) with a large amount of witnesses (most of which who wind up dead). That's pretty much every terrorist that has appeared for the last 10 (ish) years.
A "Terrorist" now-a-days is referred to as just a man with a massive amount of weaponry killing people when 10 - 15 years ago they were just called serial killers or psychopaths
Perhaps it's because a serial killer is a much more specific thing. It's calculated, planned, meticulous, patterned, selective, etc., not a random spree.
-
If they enter a village and slaughter a sleeping family they are terrorists.
*murderers. They'd additionally be terrorists if this act was demonstrably part of a larger goal.
You just said that terrorists do have plans and they don't. According to you terrorists have an "objective" or "goal" to send a message via attacks. So lets play devil's advocate here with a hypothetical situation:
Picture a Muslim terrorist. He HATES America. So he comes up with a plan to attack America to show the might of either Islam or his country. He gets together some friends and heads over seas to attack, lets say, the world trade center. His ultimate goal is to give up his life to show the might of his country or religion. He straps a bomb to himself, and through an unrealistic scenario of him being able to evade security and bomb detection he blows up the building.
No one will really consider why he did what he did because certain things don't add up. How would he show his superiority by blowing himself up in the name of one religion/country? How would people translate this into him showing off a sense of power by striking fear into people if he isn't working along side his government (and by me saying that I mean his government sent him there to send a message to America)? How would people know why he did what he did?
It started with the ultimate objective that he hated America and wished harm upon it. To feel something is one thing, to act upon it means that everything action that comes forth in this "
lan" was done out of an emotional reaction.
The logical thing to do if he hated America was to avoid it. I hate a lot of things, none of them I wish harm on. I just avoid those things and proceed to the things I do want. If this thing I hate stands in my way I resort to self defense but it isn't self defense when you go out of your home country just to kill yourself and spread "terror" into the hearts of people and in that moment not even be able to collect on the feeling.
Even if it isn't a suicide bomber, to get out of your way to form a plan to harm innocents and put your future in danger by facing years in federal prison you can't be working on logic. Fear of imprisonment, death, failure, to be stopped, or to have your message ignored should logically outweigh someones one goal.
From extreme hatred to desperation to sheer boredom, there's always a reason.
That has to do with lack of mental stability and health. It has nothing to do with normal emotion or a normal reaction. Normal people don't kill each other because they're bored. Also, you just said that serial killers do what they do either out of a calculated plan or off a in the moment feeling like depression or boredom. They can be both, absolutely, but it leads up to one fact: lack of mental stability.
With Terrorism it's the same thing. But it's an emotional reaction. People do not, in a logical frame of mind, seek to end peoples lives. Unless it's in some other case in which it has to do with miscellaneous things outside of terrorism (for instance, someone has a deadly virus and needs to be killed or go to war with a country).
