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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Another exception occurred in November 1954 when, 30 minutes into a screening of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas at Radio City Music Hall, in an auditorium with around 6,000 patrons, a seat exploded and injured two women and two boys. Apologetic theater ushers asked 50 or so patrons near the bomb site to watch the remainder of the film from alternate seats, allowing ushers to rope the area off so the police could investigate after the movie.

Contrast this 50s crowd with the mass hysteria over the slightest disturbance today...

Can you imagine people today sitting to watch a movie in a theatre where a seat had just exploded and hurt people -- not to mention the total hysteria from the authorities jumping in like it's the end of the world.

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I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that WWII had ended only a few years earlier.

But, reading other articles about people back then, it does seem they were less inclined to panic than those today. IMHO today's mass hysteria over terrorism is playing directly into what the terrorists want, so perhaps there's a valid point to be made for "keep calm and carry on" as much as possible.

> playing directly into what the terrorists want

It more complicated than that. As much as it suits some terrorist, it suits a larger group composed of the likes of the militarised police forces, the administration hawks, defence forces protecting our freedom, arms firms, security companies, the tsa etc. It's a big industry that needs a scary bad guy.

Exactly. The word "terrorist" is as poor a descriptor as "bad guy" or "alternative music" apart from the people and groups you mentioned that use it to stir up fear (or "terror" if you will!)

It's a triangle. Terrorists, Media, Authorities. All three get something out of blowing this out of proportion (ok, bad pun).

People tend to get desensitized when they're surrounded by death and destruction, leading to phenomena such as gallows humor prevalent among soldiers, battlefield surgeons, and emergency room doctors, and to the famously casual attitude towards the Blitz in London, during which over 40,000 people died.

Whereas these days 7 people getting knifed in London results in a week's worth of non-stop front page news on the BBC and international media coverage, and calls to massively increase surveillance in already the most surveilled city in the world, ramp up the police state, and sacrifice civil liberties.

7 people got knifed? Actually 8 people died. 48 were injured.

Your point is still a point but try to be real.

...out of 8.788 million people, the response isn't proportional to the threat.

It's interesting that the media was so much more willing (than ours) to keep the bombings secret, at least early on. I wonder if that was a side effect of the war as well, in the sense that they might have become accustomed to suppressing sensitive information during wartime.

Breaking news alerts would be sent to phones around the world. "Bombing at New York theater ... Multiple casualties ... DEVELOPING." The Survivalists out in the Dakotas start loading up their weapons with ammo and standing watch on their properties for looters. Twitter is going nuts. Total lockdown at all public buildings in the Northeast US. Etc etc.

I really don't know where this class of triggered ppl get their energy though... to do it day in day out. They seem to be waiting for the next trigger like addicts or something.

It's the addiction of the victim mentality. It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_abuse

Uh like none of this happened when the dumpster bombs went off in Chelsea last year. They closed the streets for the investigation and to look for more bombs but it wasn't even close to a "lockdown of all public buildings", I'm pretty sure they just halted traffic. You could even - yes- walk around the area where the bomb went off the next day. It was a block from my office.

A dumpster is one thing. A theater seat cushion is something else.

I agree that we're a bunch of nervous Nellies these days, quivering in thrall to an overgrown police-military-industrial complex. But I'd probably draw the line at continuing to show the movie after a bomb goes off in the theater, as described in the article.

Can you imagine a bomb in a crowded audience only injuring four people today?

My point rather is, can you image an audience continuing as if nothing much have happened after even an ad-hoc indoor firework was blasted, much less an actual pipe bomb injuring 4-5 people.

Are you trying to imply people shouldn't react to a bomb and stay near the site of an explosion? You evacuate because you don't know if there are more or if there is structural damage.

This question reinforces the parent's point. It seems totally obvious to us that everyone should GTFO of the theatre.

And yet in the 1950s they didn't.

What was different about the mindset of someone from the 50s? Were they inured to explosions coming out of WW2? Were "pranks" with pipe bombs a normal thing? Was it just that nobody had ever been killed by one so they didn't recognize the threat? Was the 50s mind somehow more stoic?

Explosives, gunshots, etc. are outside the normal sensory experience of most people and they are not accurately perceived. Even stimuli such as fire alarms which are intended to produce action frequently leave people standing slack-jawed wondering what to do.

For instance, when under attack from long-range gunfire, it frequently takes multiple shots, possibly even seeing multiple people get hit, before people understand what is going on. In eyewitness accounts people often disagree about which direction the shots came from, how many shots there were, etc. In fact, sometimes people get shot and don't know that they were shot until later.

A person getting injured by a small bomb in a theatre might understand they were injured, and not know how. Maybe they got shot, maybe they got stabbed, ... Everybody was looking at the screen so it is not clear. That person might go out to get help and people will focus on treating the injuries rather than understanding the situation.

It's actually pretty hard to make homemade bombs that reliably kill. It took the Unabomber more than a decade to figure it out, and that is why they have terrorist training camps. It is not very dangerous to make small pyrotechnics, simply because they don't contain much energy. If you were screwing around with those cough lozenge detonators and were making bombs big enough to be really hazardous, you would probably blow yourself up before you blew up anybody else.

Probably 2nd bomb tactic was something unheard of back then

I'm implying that people in the 50s had larger metaphorical balls and less hysteria than people now -- regardless of what is prudent to do.

It was also evident in how free-er kids would walk around -- a 10 year old having adventures around NYC by itself instead of being taken everywhere by their chauffeur parents.

Supposedly the rot started after the disappearance of Etan Patz in 1979, the first missing kid to have his picture on milk cartons. That's when parents started becoming more restrictive of their children's freedom.

Seeing pictures / hearing stories of parts of NYC in the mid 70's, I'd think any parent letting their adolescent/teenager roam completely freely in those days was pretty negligent..

And yet nothing much happened -- just those kids got less snow-flakey and entitled, and with a better grounding in reality.

Well, the murder rate was steadily increasing, so something happened

They also had less historical precedent for bombs going off preceding an armed terrorist attack, or a larger "double tap" follow-up explosion.

Additionally, the low explosive gunpowder used in these bombs is considerably less powerful than what you'd encounter in a modern day terrorist attack using high explosives (e.g. TATP, PETN or RDX). Even compared to other deflagrating low explosives, regular gunpowder is pretty mild compared to e.g. flash powder[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tgFKibzY3s

We're safer and more connected than they were back then. That means more sensitive to smaller risks, and better able to talk & hear about risks of all sorts.

Easily. Terrorists are mostly incompotent. Im always surprised at how low the injuries are when a bombing happens. Most terrorists attacks fail to kill a single person. The internet helps a bit, letting terrorists look up how to make bombs a bit better. But they still suck.

I just started 'Days of Rage', and much of what he discusses is the fact that from the end of the 60's, through the death of the hardline leftists in the 80's, bombings were an extremely commonplace means of violence. These bombings were less often intended to cause casualties as opposed to destroy property and make a public statement.

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