I think the author fails to understand the close relationship that France has with most of the western world.
It's not that the west doesn't care about a terrorist attack that happened in Lebanon (I certainly heard about it the night of on my national news channel), it's just that we tend to care more about attacks in locales that we and other people we know have frequented more often.
I don't know anybody from Lebanon or anybody who has ever been to Lebanon. Personally, I have been to Paris. My entire family and my wife's family have been to Paris. My wife's bosses were just in Paris last week.
The attack on Paris just hits closer to home, that's all.
Here is why - islamic terrorists killing a few hundred people in Beirut (or anywhere in the Middle East, really) is normal. Not in a sense of 'what the world should be like' but in a sense of 'this is not an unexpected occurrence'.
Same way that Christian terrorists (even though they weren't called that) killing 20 thousands people in Paris 443 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massac...) was normal back then. That's what the Christian world was going through.
However in the last few hundred years Paris didn't really have religious terrorism - that's why it coming back is a big deal.
In 2013 CDC say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
> in 2013, firearms (excluding BB and pellet guns) were used in
> 84,258 nonfatal injuries (26.65 per 100,000 U.S. citizens) [2] and
> 11,208 deaths by homicide (3.5 per 100,000),[3]
> 21,175 by suicide with a firearm,[4]
> 505 deaths due to accidental discharge of a firearm,[4] and
> 281 deaths due to firearms-use with "undetermined intent"[5] for a total of 33,169 deaths related to firearms (excluding firearm deaths due to legal intervention).
That would be about 90 per day. US police shoot and kill about 1,000 people per year, but weirdly they don't count so we don't have robust numbers.
Edit: I was referring to a report by the Brady Campaign that in 2012 there were over 90K gun deaths in that particular year. I saw this recently on the news, and the stats stuck in my head for obvious reasons.
>anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity
So while this article isn't literally "hacker" related, it is not considered off-topic necessarily, and a high percentage of articles on HN are not directly related to technology, software, etc.
