It’s probably a good thing you can’t get inside the head of someone who would do this, but the reasons for it can be more reasonable than you would think - a lot of folks thought it was the Unabomber at first (including the FBI), but he confirmed he didn’t possess any cyanide.
Regardless, people come up with all sorts of reasons for actions like this - it doesn’t just have to be random or for fun, someone upset about lead poisoning in the water of poor and Black communities might justify poisoning random white Americans as a kind of terrorism to reach political goals, etc. - I dunno, maybe I find it easier to imagine justifications for poisoning random people (maybe I should be concerned, but I’m not).
EDIT: can’t wait for Trump’s FBI to use this to frame me as a violent extremist 😅
it goes without saying, poisoning random people is a poor way to reach your political ends; when the PKK started bombing teachers and schools, they lost a lot of support among the people they were supposed to be liberating, and ceded moral high ground. What once was justified violence against police and military targets as Kurdish liberation became a loathed terrorist group - violence is tricky as a political action, and can often bolster your enemies and push them to more extreme action, having the opposite of the desired effect (it can also lead to civil rights, protections like the 40 hour work week, and so on - so it’s not like violence is univalent).
It’s probably a good thing you can’t get inside the head of someone who would do this, but the reasons for it can be more reasonable than you would think - a lot of folks thought it was the Unabomber at first (including the FBI), but he confirmed he didn’t possess any cyanide.
Regardless, people come up with all sorts of reasons for actions like this - it doesn’t just have to be random or for fun, someone upset about lead poisoning in the water of poor and Black communities might justify poisoning random white Americans as a kind of terrorism to reach political goals, etc. - I dunno, maybe I find it easier to imagine justifications for poisoning random people (maybe I should be concerned, but I’m not).
EDIT: can’t wait for Trump’s FBI to use this to frame me as a violent extremist 😅
it goes without saying, poisoning random people is a poor way to reach your political ends; when the PKK started bombing teachers and schools, they lost a lot of support among the people they were supposed to be liberating, and ceded moral high ground. What once was justified violence against police and military targets as Kurdish liberation became a loathed terrorist group - violence is tricky as a political action, and can often bolster your enemies and push them to more extreme action, having the opposite of the desired effect (it can also lead to civil rights, protections like the 40 hour work week, and so on - so it’s not like violence is univalent).