Mental illness excuse only offered for white killers

The diagnosis of mental illness took a great leap forward this last week. From the far side of the Pacific Ocean, Donald Trump was able to determine that Devin Patrick Kelley was mentally ill. Of course, Kelley was white. No one excuses mass killings as mental illness if the killers happen to have Arabic-sounding names, or have immigrated from an Islamic country. Such people are automatically classed as cold-blooded terrorists, who knew exactly what they were doing.

The excuse of mental illness seems to be offered only to white male Americans. Devin Kelley, who murdered 26 people inside a Baptist church last Sunday morning in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas. Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary.

They obviously can’t be in their right mind if they shoot fellow Americans, can they?

Thus we turn crime into a medical problem.

Asked about possible gun control legislation, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz told reporters, “We don’t need politics right now.”

He’s wrong. Politics is precisely what we need right now.

I contend that U.S. legislators, at all levels, and the gun industry should be charged as accessories to murder.

The legal principle is clear — those who enable someone else to commit a crime share responsibility for that crime.

Courts have ruled that the tobacco industry may not evade responsibility for what users did with their product. Big Tobacco has paid billions of dollars to states and provinces as compensation for the health costs that resulted from smoking cigarettes.

The gun industry similarly provides a product which causes untimely and unnecessary deaths — roughly 35,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. But in 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Protecting Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) which granted the gun industry immunity from civil liability for the unlawful use of guns.

Like Big Tobacco, the gun industry has long known the harm its products can cause. Nevertheless, it has continued promoting and marketing a dangerous product. As a Truthout opinion piece said, “Guns, like cigarettes, are a public health crisis in the United States.”

Congress passed that legislation. Congress has repeatedly refused to consider legislation to control gun sales and gun use.

Congress, instead, has put its faith in prayer.

The U.S. Pretender assured Sutherland Springs, from a golf course in Japan, “All of America is praying to God to help the wounded and the families of the victims.”

In the hours after Kelley’s rampage, TV video clips showed small circles of survivors joining in prayer on the green lawn outside First Baptist Church.

There could be no doubt about fervency of those prayers. They knelt. They wept. They held each other. Some even bowed their foreheads to the earth.

But praying for what? The video didn’t record their words. Asking God to make sense of the killing? Asking God to undo the deaths? Asking God for vengeance against the killer?

All I can say with any confidence is that God not prevent the shooting from happening.

Asked how he makes sense of the tragedy in which his own daughter died, First Baptist’s pastor Frank Pomeroy said, “I don’t understand, but I know my God does.”

The CBC’s Paul Hunter interviewed survivors. He noted that not one person — not one! — even mentioned gun control: “Not even a whisper that maybe guns are part of the problem, that toughening gun laws might be a part of the solution.”

Public opinion surveys routinely report that 80 per cent of Americans believe in God — however vague their notion of who or what God is.

Paul Hunter’s interviews suggest that at least as many Americans believe in guns.

Or maybe the two are the same thing. Guns and God are both about power. The power I don’t feel I have as a person, I can get through a gun.

I wish I didn’t feel impelled to write about American politics and American killing. I can’t help it. We in Canada experience too much spillover from what happens in the U.S.

The day after the massacre in Sutherland Springs, a police officer in Abbotsford, in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, was shot and killed. By a man from Alberta, a province that sees itself as Texas North. Using a gun to defend a car he stole the day before.

I’m not suggesting that one crime is directly connected to the other. But the resort to guns as a solution to personal problems is like a toxin, seeping across the border, infecting us all. I cannot discuss that toxin in isolation from its source.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at: rewrite@shaw.ca. This column appears in Okanagan Weekend.