I received a snail mail from Gabby Gifford’s organization requesting I respond to their 2019 gun safety priorities survey, which I have completed. Gabby Gifford was shot in the head in a Tuscon parking lot at a political rally on Jan 8, 2011. Less than 6 months later, she made an appearance on the floor of the House. Although she eventually resigned from the House, she has continued to be one of main gun control activists in the country. You can visit her website at giffords.org.
Violence in America can happen anywhere as we have seen in the past 10 days in El Paso, Dayton and Gilford. It typically happens when people are most vulnerable and unaware of threats to harm them.
El Paso
In the El Paso Walmart mass murder, the killer drove over 500 miles, even getting lost before checking out the Walmart he had selected to make sure it had a lot of Mexicans, the people he diatribed he wanted to kill. He left, and after dressing in dark clothing, he entered the Walmart parking lot with an AK-47-style assault rifle and started shooting people. He then entered the store and stalked people up and down isles, looking to kill people who looked Hispanic.
This was a typical day for 1,000 residents and employees of El Paso in the Walmart store. It turned out to be a horrific one for so many people.
Racism at the Top
Donald Trump, stoking the violence that took place in El Paso, has repetetly degraded Mexicans as rapists and murderers, and claims that El Paso is one of the most dangerous cities in the US. This is not true. El Paso is one of the safest cities in the US.
The violence we’ve seen in the past 10 days is not the result of Trump’s false claim of an invasion taking place, but because since his first day in office, he has fostered an atmosphere of racism and bigotry toward any non-white group of people.
Osmossis of Amorality
Instead of having any conscious, Trump’s amoral life has dispersed into the fabric of American life, and given rise to more hate groups in the country, helping to radicalize individauls (especially young white men) who are willing to commit horiffic crimes.
Politicians like to make the case that these individuals are nut cases, and suffer from severe mental illnesses. They also like to claim that the video game industry has contributed to the violence in these killers.
Mental Health: I Don’t Think So
It’s more likely that these young American white men have acted, not because of a mental illness, or video game addiction, but on influences that have instilled in them the desire to hate (often immigrants, and people that a non-white) groups of people. For many reasons, they are incouraged by extremism and extremist groups to carry out mass murders. This way, they can kill as many of the people that they have learned to hate.
American Extremism
America has its own form of extremism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has identified over 1,000 active hate groups in the US, and hundreds of white nationalist, Ku Klux Klan, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-LGBT, and general hate groups. According to the SPLC, hate groups have beliefs that attack or malign an entire class of people. Websites, literature, and meetings fuel this hatred, and young men are vulnerable to becoming radicallized by the beliefs of these groups.
Some of them become mass murderers.
Guns
In nearly all of the mass murders in the US, shooters use military-style guns, that are high-powered and inflict horrific damage to people, and enable these murderers to kill many people in a matter of seconds. It only took 30 seconds for the Dayton shooter to kill 9 people and wound over 20.
Combined with Amerian white extremism, the number of guns that populate American society numbers more than 270 million. The population of the US is 327 million people. The US has more guns than any other nation, and 120 guns per 100 people. Except for Yemen (52 guns per 100 people), all other countries have less than 39 guns per 100 people.
The plethora of guns in the US, extremism and racial hatred had led to 251 mass shootings in the last seven months (216 days). This is an exponential rise in mass murders, and there appears to be no end in sight.
Solutions
The horrific events that occurred over the past 10 days in less than 2 minutes have to be dealt with, but not by blaming health practitioners, and game developers. America needs to face the truth that guns in the hands of people is a sure fire way to cause harm. America has a severe gun violence problem. No other country has as many guns as there are in the US. No other country has as many mass killings as the US.
If you listen to the people in El Paso, Dayton, and Gilroy, that is a unison of belief that politicians need to own up to the truth about guns and extremism. Unless they do, then these horrific events, as the Mayor of Dayton said, will continue.
Call Congress and tell them what you think.
Call your Senators at (202) 224-3121.
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