WMD charges: Bone-chilling or boring

History certainly has a way of repeating itself, with minor variations—sometimes significant, sometimes less so.
When I was working as an editor at my college’s student newspaper, I was shocked to see that a teenager in Chesterfield, S.C. was being charged with planning to use a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) in an attempt to blow up his high school. At the time, I wrote a column wherein I questioned the prosecutor’s decision in charging 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger with attempted use of a WMD. I argued that applying such a label to a 10 lb. bomb—to be used in an attack on a high school serving a town of less than 1500—might evoke the desired emotional response in the short term, but in the long run would only desensitize the American public to what should be a gut wrenching, cold sweat-inducing term.
Now, a Jordanian man accused of planning to blow up a Dallas, Texas skyscraper has pleaded not guilty to a charge of “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.” In a plan reminiscent of Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building or the attempt by a conspiracy led by Ramzi Yousef to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, 19-year-old Hosam Smadi is alleged to have parked what he thought was a car bomb in the parking garage of the Fountain Place building. The bomb was a dummy, sold to Smadi by undercover FBI agents. (The device, predictably, failed to detonate.)
What constitutes a WMD? Federal law is rather vague on this point, perhaps intentionally. As defined in Title 18, Section 2332 of the United States Code, a WMD can fit the traditional, Cold War-era definition of a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon. Section 921, however, also allows a WMD to be “any destructive device” as federal law defines it—and federal law is, once again, awfully vague. A layman’s reading might yield the meaning of “anything designed, intended, or repurposed to injure or kill a human being.” The U.S. Code does not, however, stipulate a minimum body count or lethal potential for a destructive device to be labeled a weapon of mass destruction, just as the Geneva Conventions are purposefully ambiguous on the definition of “genocide.”
The wide array of possible candidates for WMD status isn’t simply a question of semantics. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, U.S. lawmakers have had to reassess what qualifies as a destructive device or a weapon of mass destruction. A commercial airliner would hardly seem fit, unless it was rammed into a building at over 400 miles an hour.
Legal definitions have been forced to adapt to the changing nature of violence and terrorism. On the one hand, a more loosely defined offense gives prosecutors greater flexibility in charging suspects. On the other, overuse of that relatively-newfound freedom may very well desensitize Americans.
The difference between “destructive device” and “weapon of mass destruction” shouldn’t be merely an academic debate. Words have power, and to inure listeners to the effect of what should be three terrifying words robs those words of their power. What then? We accept, as a society, that some crimes are inherently worse than others. Thus, as a society, we have an obligation to police our use of emotionally-charged language to ensure that a grave charge doesn’t become merely a cliché.