On Christmas morning an RV exploded in downtown Nashville, destroying more than 40 nearby structures and injuring at least eight people. The man who detonated the vehicle bomb was identified as 63-year-old Anthony Quinn Warner. He died in the blast.
Despite the jarring incident, the story only ran on national media stations for about a day and a half. After it was reported that no lives were lost, and Warner was in fact dead, outlets seemed to accept the story as that.
What’s more interesting is that national outlets did not refer to Warner as a domestic terrorist, and what we’ve witnessed is a pattern that’s all too well known.
The FBI defines domestic terrorism as “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”
Many would agree that someone who builds a bomb in their own neighborhood and detonates it knowing others live nearby is a bit extreme for someone who simply wanted to commit suicide. And the level of complexity going into the detonation rules out an accident.
Warner purposely endangered lives, and yet, CNN said Warner was “a loner with no significant criminal record and as yet no signs of a political ideology.”
One New York Times headline read “A Quiet Life, a Thunderous Death, and a Nightmare That Shook Nashville.”
The Tennessean described neighbor accounts about how Warner would help set up security cameras for them and how he was “quiet and polite”.
Even police have been hesitant to label Warner a domestic terrorist, as they continue to look search for political motives. And President Trump waited days to even mention the incident or take any action.
Yet, following the 2015 Chattanooga, Tennessee shooting that left five people dead, the Muslim man responsible was labeled a terrorist before police had a clear motive. And, the California police chief overseeing the case of Christopher Dorner, a black man, called him a domestic terrorist on live television.
There are also arguments that because Warner blared warning messages telling people to evacuate, that he must have been trying to prevent casualties. Others say the song playing on a loudspeaker from the RV hinted to Warner’s loneliness and why he may have committed the act.
This familiar notion that white men are fragile, lonely creatures who only commit these crimes out of desperation needs to end. Because, the refusal to make villains of these men in the media the way they do black and brown men plays into systemic racism rampant in America.
Media outlets need to be more consistent, and up front, when it comes to labeling terrorism. It doesn’t do service to victims to label their attackers as anything but.