To stop the shootings, first stop the hate

It’s an American problem. In 2019 alone, the United States has recorded 248 mass shooting incidents.

A troubled person armed with a rifle approaches a crowded shopping center intent on creating mayhem. El Paso, Texas, in 2019? No, Springfield Township in Delaware County on Halloween Eve 1985.

What’s most shocking about the latest American carnage is not that this is still happening, but how often.

Add two more cities to the list.

El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

In barely more time than it takes to read these thoughts, 29 lives snuffed out. Dozens more wounded, two of whom also died.

The perpetrators were clearly troubled souls, armed to the teeth, intent on killing.

It is not so much that this continues to happen that shocks the conscience, it is how often.

It was just last weekend when a man went on a shooting spree at that most American of summer celebrations, a town’s annual festival celebrating its claim to fame – garlic.

This time, we did not even have to wait a week before seeing the carnage repeated. Is there anything more American than families going back-toschool shopping at a Walmart?

In El Paso, 31 dead and dozens injured. The shooter – apparently consumed with hate for immigrants who drove more than nine hours from Dallas to wreak death upon the border town, taken into custody by police.

In Dayton, incredibly the gunman taken down by police just 30 seconds after he fired his first shot. But not before he killed nine and injured another 26 when he opened fire on a crowded street in the city’s popular entertainment district.

Let’s be clear, this is increasingly an American problem. Yes, it can happen anywhere, as the recent mass shooting in New Zealand attests. But this does not happen with anywhere near this frequency anywhere else in the world.

In 2019 alone, the United States has recorded 248 mass shooting incidents, generally seen as four or more people being shot in a single incident at a single location. The death toll stands at 248, with nearly another 1,000 wounded.

And as you might expect, this weekend’s dual incidents in El Paso and Dayton spawned no shortage of calls for action.

If the cold-blooded murder of 20 innocent children ages 6 and 7 in the previously secure cocoon of their elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, did not move the nation to action, what makes us think this weekend’s nightmarish scenes will do otherwise?

Just ask Pat Toomey. The Republican U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania went against his own party’s mantra in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, reached out across the aisle to team with Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin on legislation that would beef up background checks, only to see his Republican brethren turn their backs on the plan.

We are left bewildered, and increasingly angry.

It is that anger – some would say hate – that is fostering much of this violence. The gunman in El Paso is believed to have written an anti-immigrant screed vowing violence against Mexicans and Hispanics. He then drove more than nine hours to carry out his plan at the Mexican border.

Hate is all too prevalent in the United States. It fuels our increasingly bitter partisan divide. It pits whites against those of color. It divides us by color. It separates us by the things we once vowed were sacrosanct, religion, race or creed.

Too many in a nation of immigrants, a vast melting pot and the world’s greatest exercise in democracy, now seek to withdraw from those goals. They no longer speak as a united nation, but as splintered factions, pointing fingers.

We no longer speak reverently of “us,” except to differentiate ourselves from “them.”

Gun rights are not likely going to radically change in the United States. There are those who believe – perhaps rightly – that they should not.

At a vigil held in the aftermath of Dayton’s killing spree, the crowd interrupted the speech by the governor with chants of “Do something.”

It is not reserved for public officials, although we certainly encourage them to do likewise.

This is something all of us can do.

Stop the hate.