Buffalo shooting: Losing our focus again
Here we are. Again.
Another mass shooting. Another set of vigils. And another round of useless rhetoric focusing on all the wrong things.
As Einstein put it, insanity is doing the same thing over and over, yet expecting different results.
In an attempt to cut through the white noise surrounding the racially motivated Buffalo supermarket shooting, in which ten people lost their lives, here are some commonsense points worth considering:
Once again, many in the media are asking, “why did this happen” and “how can we prevent this in the future?” This one’s easy.
Since there are no laws prohibiting the government from publicly releasing the names of mass killers, the traditional media (and social media) should be proactive by stripping mass shooters of the things they crave most: Massive publicity and a media legacy steeped in their warped sense of romanticism, “achievement,” and infamy.
Such a ban would have to be self-imposed, as freedom of the press should not be restricted. But perhaps the media, in a nod to journalistic responsibility over sensationalism, could honor the “name blackout” — with any outlet violating the new “code” being publicly shamed, and shut out of related media events.
The age of 24/7 news and social media is here to stay, but if we can deny mass killers their wish of self-aggrandizement, while minimizing the spread of their ideologies, we will have taken a concrete first step. The ball is in the media’s court. But will they play?
2) Then there’s the incessant push to blame everything and everyone except the one person who holds 100 percent responsibility for a mass killing: The murderer himself.
That needs repeating. A shooter, and only a shooter, is responsible for the murders he or she commits. Blaming anyone other than the shooters has likely contributed to the rise of mass murderers. Our failure to hold people accountable — including our inability to let children correctly cope with failure — from sports to school, and work to home, is partially responsible for these horrors.
The moment anyone other than the perpetrator is blamed is the instant he gets a pass, since it is society stating that a criminal is not solely responsible for his actions. As a result, the bedrock American principle of self-accountability is disappearing.
It’s ridiculous to politicize mass shootings, yet some always so, usually by blaming legislators for not passing more gun regulations. We can argue about what politicians should have done differently, but they aren’t the killers, and they aren’t responsible for mass shootings. A pol’s words, actions, and inactions do not amount to “pulling the trigger.”
3) Similarly, gun manufacturers should never be held liable for shootings. Under that rationale, automakers should be responsible when a sportscar driver dies due to excessive speed, and beer companies liable when someone is killed because of drunk driving. The irrationality is mindboggling, but it serves as a convenient scapegoat for those not willing to tackle the real issues.
A Binghamton Press article in Yahoo! News detailed how the social media page of the gun store where the alleged Buffalo shooter bought his firearm — legally, according to the story — is being bombarded by social media. Per the article: “…(the store’s) Facebook page is now filled with comments from people accusing (the owner) of being complicit in the Buffalo massacre because he sold the firearm (the suspect) used. ‘You sell assault weapons to teenagers. You sell weapons to violent white supremacists. You enabled this,’ one commenter said. ‘You trade in death. I hope it haunts you for the rest of your life,’ another said.”
So let’s get this straight. From what has been reported, the store owner dutifully followed the laws imposed on him by one of the nation’s strictest gun-control states, and yet he’s the problem?
Newsflash: If you don’t know what the problem is, you’ll never solve it. Those believing that gun store owners, firearm manufacturers and the weapons themselves are “causing” these tragedies might as well memorize their script of complaints, because the same scenarios will undoubtedly continue.
4) Some Black community members are upset with the Buffalo police, feeling that, if the shooter had been Black, he would have been gunned down on sight. But because he was white, so their thinking goes, he was peacefully arrested.
Seriously? That’s so off-themark that it doesn’t merit a response. But we’ll give one anyway. First, in the wake of such a horrific tragedy, is that really the issue that should be front-and-center? Second, no two police situations are ever the same. Period. Any attempt to impose theoretical racial “sensibilities” about what police should or should not have done in the heat of a tense and highly lethal encounter is absurd. Third, are we really to believe
that officers responding to a mass shooting — which surely included Black policemen — made the conscious decision to not fire upon the suspect because of his white skin color (despite their knowledge of how dangerous he was)? And that, in the exact same scenario, they would have pulled the trigger to gun down the shooter had he been Black? It simply beggars belief. Fourth, thinking that a black suspect would have been automatically killed presupposes that the majority of confrontations between police and Black men end in a shooting. Nothing could be further from the truth.
5) From all reports, the Buffalo shooting was racially motivated, with the alleged shooter targeting Black people. The investigation and interrogation need to ascertain where and why the suspect garnered his ideas, and seek to answer whether past activities should have been picked up as red flags. Life isn’t perfect or fair, and sometimes we are left with more questions than answers, such as with the Las Vegas mass murderer. But in this case, there is a plethora of information that needs to be objectively examined to ensure that if anything slipped through the cracks, the process is corrected to help prevent future massacres.
That said, a point dominating the airwaves is the prevalence of white supremacists in America. Obviously, that is of grave concern. But policymakers and the media should not overly focus on this one area since many of the other mass killings were not white supremacy related. Shooting massacres have been, and will be, perpetrated by a multitude of people, for multiple reasons. Figuring out why they are occurring can only be accomplished with a broad-based approach, free of political myopia.
6) Naturally, Democrats are calling for more gun control — especially banning “assault weapons” — which is simply an exercise to make themselves feel better about themselves, since most know that additional gun control would accomplish nothing.
The facts speak for themselves: Handguns — not “assault rifles”— are, by far, the preferred weapon in crimes. And rifles, as a percentage of guns in all homicides, are 3 percent. Some of the nation’s worst crime zones also have the strictest gun laws (Chicago, New York, L.A., etc.), demonstrating that there is no correlation between increased gun restrictions and lower death/violence rates. The Columbine killers committed their atrocity while an assault weapons ban was in place. And the Sandy Hook murderer killed his own mother to steal her gun. America’s two worst mass attacks (9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing) were accomplished without a single bullet. People intent on mass killing will find a way, and no laws, no matter how stringent, will dissuade them. If we are to ever get to the bottom of why mass shootings are now occurring when they scarcely did before — and how we can reach increasing numbers of despondent youth — it’s time to stop shooting from the hip.