DANIEL POLSBY (a law professor at George Mason University, in the Virginia suburbs) writes in response to my “panic in DC” post:

I haven’t seen anybody walking zigzag patterns, for what that’s worth.

I’m right in the middle of these incidents and have actually patronized both the Manassas Sunoco station where one murder and the Falls Church Home Depot where the latest murder occurred. What is the level of fear around here? People talk a lot about the sniper, but I haven’t seen much of anything beyond that. There has been a jump, apparently, in carry concealed applications, or so the Fairfax County court clerk told my wife. The cops are working longer shifts, more surveillance and less traffic enforcement (a lot of which has nothing to do with public safety). On net, though the world may feel less safe, it is probably

safer.

I believe the “market research” hypothesis, not the “lone nut” hypothesis. I suspect a crew, not a soloist.

What to do? There is no defense from a long gun fired from ambush; you have to get on offense and stay there. There is a spider web, that is mostly just “out there,” but that plainly couldn’t exist without anchor points in a number of conventional nation-states. If you want to get rid of the spiders you need to tear the anchor points up. This, and not that Saddam is a mean guy, is the real argument for the war against Iraq. The reason it is difficult for the government to lean too heavily on this justification is that other nation-states are anchor points also, and well known to be. Nurturing international acceptance for the use of arms, we don’t necessarily want to make a public commitment to dealing

with Syria — a member of the Security Council for God’s sake! — after dealing with Iraq.

If we do the Iraq thing right, though, a lot of those other anchor points will just sort themselves out.

Indeed.