Aug 15, 2017 3 min read

On April 28, 2000, a little more than 16 months before 9/11, the Pittsburgh area was in the grips of a terrorist attack.

That day, which was a Friday, an unemployed immigration attorney from Mt. Lebanon went on a 20-mile rampage, killing random strangers because of who they were. One victim was a Jewish woman. Another was a native of India working in a grocery store. Two employees of a Chinese restaurant were gunned down. The 5-year-old son of one was left to watch as his father’s body was loaded into a coroner’s van and driven away. The final victim was a 22-year-old African-American from Aliquippa taking a karate class.

They were all victims of Richard Baumhammers, who is now 52 and an inmate of SCI-Greene.

In the midst of his killing spree, it should be noted, Baumhammers paused for a moment to spray-paint swastikas on a synagogue.

Close to two decades have passed since Baumhammers went on his murderous tear, and to the world outside this region, his name and his deeds have long been overshadowed by other white, male Americans who have killed others because of the pigmentation of their skin, the place they worshipped, who they loved or the country from which they came. A historic black church in Charleston, S.C., a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., a Jewish retirement community in Overland Park, Kan., and a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tenn., have all been scenes of bloodshed and chaos as a result of white extremist violence.

Of course, we can now add Charlottesville, Va., to this horrible roll call.

In the 16 years since 9/11, more Americans have been killed by white, right-wing extremists in this country in terrorist incidents than by jihadists. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum, 74 percent of law-enforcement officials reported they were more concerned with the possibility of terror emanating from far-right extremists than Muslim extremists. And yet, earlier this year, Reuters reported a U.S. program to combat violent ideologies of all types was going to be revamped by the Trump administration so it focuses exclusively on Islamic extremism.

In an article earlier this year that appeared on the website The Conversation, criminal-justice researchers from such institutions as Michigan State University and Seattle University pointed out memories of 9/11 “will continue to skew both our real and perceived risks of violent extremism in the United States. To focus solely on Islamist extremism is to ignore the murders perpetrated by the extreme far right and their place in a constantly changing threat environment.”

Charlottesville is not the kind of community where you would expect to find racist violence. The murder of a counter-protester at Saturday’s now-notorious rally of white nationalists happened in a cosmopolitan college town that surrounds the University of Virginia, one of the country’s pre-eminent institutions of higher learning.

That the alleged assailant was a 20-year-old Ohio man who drove his car into a crowd on a street is a reminder of a salient reality – if we are going to be endangered by terrorists, which is a vanishingly infinitesimal possibility, the greatest likelihood is the perpetrator will not be an immigrant who comes from a faraway land or a refugee seeking to escape a war zone, but the boy next door.