Matthew Yglesias: Nidal Hasan Terrorist Threat 'Not That Big a Deal'

Thirteen people were killed and 29 wounded during Nidal Malik Hasan's jihadi rampage at Fort Hood. President Obama spoke today, and the PowerPoint transcripts of Hasan's Army doctors' lecture have been made available. Of course, I've been covering the story extensively. I've noted the remarks of a number of extremely pernicious leftist commentators, but Matthew Yglesias' post today - coming at the same time as this new information paints a damning indictment of Hasan's propensity to fanatical violence - really takes the cake for willing blindness, even complicity, on the radical leftist:

I think a pretty good case can be made that this kind of situation actually is the main face of the terrorist threat. Not a big well-thought-out plot centrally directed from a “safe haven” in South Asia and undertaken by brilliant covert operatives, but the desperate violent act of a clearly disturbed individual. It’s going to be very hard to prevent this sort of thing. As long as the United States remains a country in which firearms are widely available—for the foreseeable future, in other words—we’re going to be unusually vulnerable to mentally ill spree killers of various kinds, including spree killers who nod in the direction of Islamist thinking.

But the larger point is that while these incidents are serious crimes and major tragedies for the victims, they hardly rise to the level of a major macro-level social crisis. They’re certainly not a first-order national security threat. And even put in the lower-stakes context of violent crime in America, the whole set of mentally disturbed spree killers is a pretty minor slice of the pie. Reducing the volume of these incidents isn’t going to inspire gun rights enthusiasts to support major curbs in firearms availability, and certainly shouldn’t convince Americans to contravene our commitments to diversity and non-discrimination. Simply put, if this is the terrorist threat then the terrorist threat isn’t that big a deal.

Of course, it's not like Yglesias is sympathetic to Islam:

Related: From Mere Rhetoric, "Matthew Yglesias: Anti-Semitic Genocidal Maniacs Are Hip, Terrorists Are Fashionable (UPDATED AND BUMPED: Yglesias Article From Today Predictably Anti-Semitish)."