night. welcome to the kind of election year we re apparently going to have this year. why are we having this epidemic? what does it mean? what can be done about it? joining us now is former justice department senior national security official mary mccord. ms. mccord, i m very glad you could be with us on this topic tonight. it s my pleasure. what do you make of the pervasiveness of these threats right now, how disruptive, how dangerous they might be. as you know we re already in a heightened environment of threats, online threats, offline threats coming in all sorts of forms. we ve really been in this state since 2020 and even before that. and this seems to be the latest epidemic. i ll point, though, too r, even march of 2023, less than a year ago, when within one week, dozens off schools across the country were swatted and, you know, causing lockdowns, et cetera. so, it seems to have gone from, sort of, schools to government buildings to synagogues as part
can be with us on this topic tonight. thank you for your time. my pleasure. what do you make of the puzzle pervasiveness of these threats right now, how disruptive and dangerous they might be? as you know, we are already in a heightened environment of threats, online threats, offline threats, coming in all sorts of forms. we have been in this state really since 2020 and even before that. and this seems to be the latest epidemic. a point, though, even in march of 2023 less than a year ago when within one week, dozens of schools across the country were swatted, you know, causing lockdowns, et cetera. it seems to have gone from schools to government buildings to synagogues, as part of, you know, terrorism after the israel-hamas war broke out, terrorism type of efforts to terrorize and intimidate. and now, we are saying, like you say, a whole episode of attacks on government
calls about non-existent hostage situations or active shooter situations. the calls are designed to provoke an armed police response to a target s home. nbc news reporting as of tonight that this includes a swatting on christmas day of special counsel jack smith, who s prosecuting the federal january 6th case against donald trump. the judge who is hearing that case was also swatted at her own washington area home just last night. welcome to the kind of election year we re apparently going to have this year. why are we having this epidemic? what does it mean? what can be done about it? joining us now is former justice department senior national security official mary mccord. ms. mccord, i m very glad you could be with us on this topic tonight. it s my pleasure. what do you make of the pervasiveness of these threats right now, how disruptive, how dangerous they might be.
athletes, teenagers, whether it s high school, whether it s college. i know technically the numbers are low, 100 to 150 deaths a year, but that s a young athlete dying every two to three days. is there something more happening here? are kids more active? do we just know about it more? no, it s not happening more frequently, but the prevalence and pervasiveness of socia media makes it seem that way. as you said, there are about 150 deaths of athletes in the united states every year. it does not look like that has changed. there are about 2,000 people under the age of 25 in this country who will die of a sudden cardiac arrest. so those numbers seem large, but for the population as a whole, they re actually fairly low. but because these people often are incredibly healthy and are so young and vital, every one of
be a backlash. right? there s been a backlash to every major political moment in history. but i think in particular this backlash is because people do not understand sexual violence and they don t understand the pervasiveness of sexual violence. there are these huge myths that exist about what it is and how it exists in this country and really in the world. and so what we re doing now is what we ve always done, is to try to dismantle those myths. i think if people understood that sexual violence is a public health crisis, right? anything that happens every 68 seconds in any geographical space is a public health crisis. i think if people understood that you have to examine the institutions and the culture and not the people then they would understand that this is something that is not about individuals and individual cases and maybe the backlash would be different. so what we do now is we do the work. and that s what we were doing before october 2017 is what we continue to do.