Early in the morning of September 17th, a pipe bomb detonated during a Marine Corp fun run in Seaside Park on the Jersey Shore. Luckily, no one was injured and, at the time, it seemed like an odd, almost freak, occurrence, one not requiring of widespread alarm. However, over the course of the remainder of the weekend, a series of placed bombs and explosions would sow fear across the New York and New Jersey area. The suspect in the bombings, Ahmad Khan Rahami, would later be tracked down and arrested following a gunfight with police.

Following the New Jersey explosion, another blast went off in the Chelsea district of New York City, injuring 29. Two more bombs were found later, one of which was accidentally detonated by a robot which was trying to disable the bomb.

Police over the course of the weekend began to come to the realization that all the bombs were connected and came up with Ahmad Khan Rahami as a suspect, eventually tracking him down in Linden, New Jersey. Rahani, a 28 year old whose family owns a fried chicken restaurant in New York City, does not appear to have connections to terrorism and it seems, at least so far, that he acted on his own, a so-called “lone wolf attack.”

While most large scale attacks in America take the form of mass shootings due to America’s notoriously lax gun laws, and most recent terrorist attacks have occurred in Europe, the Middle East and parts of South Asia, this string of attacks proves that the threat of bombing is not unsubstantiated in the US and that the American bubble, which has sheltered the US from harm for so long, is not as impervious as people think.