As someone personally affected by the lockdown, I find this highly offensive.<p>We were not cowering, though it would not be illogical to do so... we're talking about people proven willing to not only kill and injure hundreds of innocent people, they were also willing to get into action-movie style shoot outs with heavily armed police, tossing homemade grenades and pipe bombs, and murdering a police officer in cold blood.<p>So, maybe keeping people inside for 12 hours isn't that much of a price to pay to make sure they stay safe. But it was really more than that.<p>It was about finding this S.O.B. before he could get away.<p>We knew he was in the area, but couldn't be sure exactly where. By shutting down public transportation and keeping people and vehicles off the road, we made it nearly impossible for him to escape. ANYONE walking around, driving a car, is then automatically suspect and can be stopped. There is no crowd you can mingle in, no trains or buses you can slip onto, no taxis you can hail. There are no cars you can carjack. You're trapped.<p>Suddenly, instead of being able to hide among all the people in the city, you're in an urban ghost town where anything that moves can be pounced on. It's a hell of a lot more effective than just hoping someone recognizes him among the other 2 million people running around.<p>If you mess with Boston we will shut the whole city down to find you. Yes, we will. And you know what, most people will be glad to do it, to get the guy who killed 4 people and injured almost 200 others. It's just one day. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I think most other people here would too.<p>We weren't scared. We were pissed.
These actions went far far beyond martial law powers, and yet martial law was not declared. I don't know what legal authority there was to do this, I assume it exists and comes from some recent Patriot Act like bill. Whatever it is, we see that its power is greater than that of martial law and it is something that doesn't have to be activated in an emergency, the power exists at all times.<p>That in itself is terrifying and that undeclared power is not what I want for a country that I live in.<p>The detail that the police ordered everyone to shut down even train service, but with the sole exception being that they requested Dunkin Donuts shops stay open and continue providing free donuts for police is straight out of feudalism.
Something to consider: it worked. It would still be presumptuous, but at least a little less misdirected, to Monday-morning-quarterback a team that lost the game.
Personally, I wonder if this wasn't <i>exactly</i> the right sort of response. They say that severity of punishment is not nearly as effective a deterrent as certainty. If the image of the entirety of Boston so quickly working against these two men isn't the very picture of swiftness and certainty/inevitability, I don't know what is.
I imagine very few people will question the political decisions here because it requires imagination to account for the unseen. Hazlitt famously wrote about this in Economics in One Lesson. What ground breaking research at MIT didn't get done Friday? What important meetings were delayed? And then what does that add up to when you multiply it by millions?
"I don’t think that’s quite right. I’d bet the American people, if given the opportunity, are as capable as the Israelis and the Brits of withstanding the occasional deadly attack by extremist groups or individuals [...]<p>It’s the authorities and the media that tend to go a little crazy, and their actions reinforce each other."<p>So the Israelis and Brits don't have authorities or media? Or are their authorities and media not Israelis and Brits? Or does he mean that the authorities and the media in America are not made up of American people?<p>Seems quite a stretch to make this distinction without a difference to try and sidestep any actual discussion of why these differences among cultures exist. Cheap rhetorical trick. Not that I can blame him I guess, it's "un-american" to propose rational reactions that might decrease terrorism rather than scorched-earth vengeance seeking.
1. I'm getting really good at predicting what the intellectual hipster perspective on a particular issue will be. I knew yesterday we would see op eds like this.<p>2. Not Hacker News. Flagged.