WHEN AIMING WORDS AND BULLETS, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
Words matter. No, President Donald Trump didn’t pull the trigger and kill five journalists in the newsroom of The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, on Thursday. Though he has on numerous occasions called journalists “enemies of the people.”
Nor did far right Trump supporter Milo Yiannopoulos, though he said he’d relish the day vigilantes came after some.
Similarly, Fox News Host Sean Hannity didn’t put the gun in the hands of an unstable, former stalker when he immediately on Thursday evening questioned whether Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters’ call for continuing public harassment of Trump administration officials perhaps inspired the shooting.
Whether they’d like to admit it, none of those careless speakers and tweeters had the power to make 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos shoot through the glass doors of a newsroom and systematically shoot people at a newspaper with which he’d nursed a long-held grudge.
But words matter. And each of those speakers and tweeters knew that words matter. Otherwise, they wouldn’t consistently be using words so pointedly and painfully.
If our president did not understand just how much words matter, would he be saying all the time that immigrants are rapists and gang members? Would he be saying that Kim Jong Un is a “nice” person? Would he tweet, “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” on the very day that his aides announce details of the upcoming Trump/Putin summit?
And he clearly understood the value of his words on Friday when, speaking at an event touting his tax cut plan, he took a moment to talk about the Annapolis shooting:
“This attack shocked the conscience of our nation and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job. To the families of the victims, there are no words to express our sorrow for your loss. Horrible, horrible event, horrible thing happened. …”
Of course words matter.
So do actions. And inaction.
How many more mass shootings do we have to have in this country before Congress and state legislatures stop hiding behind a deliberate stretch of our Constitution and our Second Amendment right?
As interpreted by the Supreme Court, the Constitution gives Americans gun rights. But that doesn’t mean we must all have unregulated gun rights, and right now we need more and sensible gun regulation to keep guns — sometimes even to remove guns — from people who have mental health issues and histories of violent or harassing crimes such as stalking.
Thursday it was a newsroom. Last month it was a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. In April, it was a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee. On Valentines Day, it was another high school in Parkland, Florida. We could go on and on — a country music concert in Las Vegas, a nightclub in Orlando, churches, baseball practice fields — but you get the idea.
And those listings don’t include the mundane daily shootings that don’t make front-page headlines but still fray the fabric of our communities one or two victims at a time. The total is about 33,000 gun fatalities a year — and millions more tears.
The United States has 270 million guns and had 90 mass shootings from 1966 to 2012. The number has increased yearly since. No other country has more than 46 million guns or 18 mass shootings during that 1966 to 2012 time period. Only in America.
We can point plenty of fingers of blame and use a lot of words. Or we can take action.
Words matter.
But actions matter more.