Five years ago last January, a white supremacist named Kevin Harpham tried to kill a whole lot of people in Spokane, Washington, by bombing a parade celebrating the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. For the purpose of killing as many people as possible, Harpham loaded his bomb with fishing weights that, if all went as planned, would be converted into shraphnel by the bomb's detonation.

The fact that Harpham was buying so many fishing weights without buying any more fishing gear, or even possessing a fishing license, led to the tip that led police to Harpham in the first place. The fishing weights were coated with rat poison so that Harpham's victims would bleed more profusely. Kevin Harpham really thought this whole mass murder thing through, and it was two sharp-eyed park employees and some very good police work that thwarted him.

I mention this because it appears that some very good police work—and the fact that New Yorkers are decidedly less timorous than are a lot of people in the rest of the country—has gotten on top of the situation that occurred on Sunday night in NYC and in New Jersey. On Monday morning, after a gunfight that the alleged perpetrator managed to survive, they hauled him in. From the Times:

The dramatic episode on a rain-soaked street in Linden, N.J., came after the police issued a cellphone alert to millions of residents in the area telling them to be on the lookout for the suspect, who was described as "armed and dangerous." Photos from the scene showed a man believed to be Mr. Rahami lying on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind his back and his shirt pulled up exposing his stomach and chest, with a police officer standing over him. Witnesses said they saw police shoot at a man who was running away. One person who was too rattled to give his name said the victim appeared to have been shot more than once and was "still twitching." He also said it appeared a police officer was shot. "Lotta' lotta' gunfire," said Derek Pelligra, manager of Linden Auto Body. Mr. Rahami, 28, was identified on surveillance video planting the bombs in Chelsea, both the device that exploded and another that did not detonate a few blocks away. He was described as a naturalized citizen of Afghan descent who had been living with his family in Elizabeth, N.J.

This was a relatively sophisticated plot apparently involving more than a few people. It is just pure dumb luck that a lot of people were not killed, just as it was just pure dumb luck that nobody died in Spokane five years ago. Pure dumb luck and good police work.

Yes, the whole thing has been tossed into this rickety, short-circuiting, spark-and-smoke-belching blender of a presidential campaign, and El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago reacted with his usual nuanced blend of self-aggrandizement and counterfeit piety to his favorite sofa full of meatsacks. The L.A. Times filters the muck on our behalf.

Speaking on "Fox and Friends" on Monday, the Republican presidential nominee reverted to familiar lines of attack on national security in response to questions about crude bombs that exploded in lower Manhattan and near the start of a 5-kilometer race in Seaside Park, N.J. On Monday morning, another suspicious device detonated near an Elizabeth, N.J., commuter rail station. Trump took a measure of credit for saying quickly Saturday night that a bomb had gone off in New York even as officials were still investigating the explosion. "I should be a newscaster because I called it before the news," he said. "This is something that will happen, perhaps, more and more all over the country," Trump said. "Because we've been weak. Our country's been weak. We're letting people in by the thousands and tens of thousands."

This was not aimed at the people most immediately affected by the events of Sunday night who, by most accounts, handled the situation with considerable aplomb. This was aimed at nervous television viewers in part of America where folks secretly—and, sometimes, not so secretly—believe that places like New York and Boston have it coming. But if someone is willing to buy 124 fishing weights and coat them with rat poison so the people he injures will bleed to death more easily, if someone is willing to put that kind of thought into mass murder, dumb luck and good police work is pretty much all we really have.

If we all were New Yorkers, this would help, too.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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