Lynchings teach us about massmurder
Themass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, this past weekend were just the latest in a long series of these grisly events. They shock and sadden us. But our nation has been in a similar situation in the past, and we didn’t stop the bloodshed then. Are we going to fail again and allow more victims to die?
Our national epidemic of mass shootings evokes, tragically, the lynching epidemic that plagued our country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With both mass shootings and lynchings, we have seen a lawless phenomenon continue unchecked for many years, horrific carnage, and the abject failure of politicians and governments to take action to stop the slaughter.
During the peak lynching period, very roughly 1880-1930, almost 4,700 people were lynched in this country, most of them African Americans. Nearly 500 of those lynchings took place here in Texas. What may have begun as vigilantes stringing up victims to tree limbs evolved into largescale atrocities that historians call “spectacle lynchings,” attended by thousands, who sometimes dressed in their best and brought their children and their picnic lunches. The victims were often tortured for hours, mutilated and burned alive.
Local governments almost never indicted the perpetrators, much less convicted them, even when the event had taken place before many witnesses and everyone knew who the leaders were. It was obvious that federal action would be required if lynching was to be stopped.
On Jan. 26, 1922, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an anti-lynching statute. Similar bills passed the House again in 1937 and 1940, but in each case they were filibustered to death by Southern senators motivated by racism and the desire to preserve white supremacy.
According to a highly detailed database compiled by Mother Jones magazine, mass shootings (defined here as incidents in which three or more people are killed) between 1982 and the present have already resulted in 934 fatalities and 1,406 injuries. And, as in the case of lynchings, the epidemic appears to be intensifying, with shootings happening more frequently and higher body counts resulting.
Police all over the country are now highly trained to deal with such an event, but the high-tech assault rifles generally used by the shooters can efficiently kill and wound many people in a matter of seconds, before the best-trained officers can possibly respond. It is obvious that the single most important measure that would help to end mass shootings would be to ban assault rifles, as we did from 1994 to 2004.
But Texas’ own Sen. John Cornyn, rather than advocating for gun control, typically took refuge in a dishonest waffle: “Sadly, there are some issues, like homelessness and these shootings, where we simply don’t have all the answers,” he tweeted Sunday.
Really? For starters, how about stronger background checks, “red flag” laws removing guns from persons deemed a threat to themselves or the public, and banning assault weapons again, as the recent House bill, now stalled in the Senate, provides?
In the wake of the most recent shootings, some Republicans have at least taken halting steps toward gun control. But too many of Texas’ craven elected officials, beholden to the National Rifle Association, prefer to blame mental illness, video games, the absence of prayer in schools, and oh gosh, maybe the phases of the moon. Other countries have mental illness and the rest, but there are no mass shootings in those countries because there, guns are not readily available.
There is another element of similarity between the lynching plague and the mass shooting epidemic: raging bigotry. Hate speech is now encouraged and abetted by the freewheeling, casual hate speech of our president, and the comfortable acceptance — even defense — of this indefensible speech by Republican fellow travelers.
Hate speech at the highest level fuels the angry little man who commits these terrible mass shootings, targeting whichever group he happens to enjoy hating most, whether it be Mexicans, blacks, gays, Jews, Muslims or young women. In the old days, this malignant creature might have acted out his hatreds and miseries by joining a lynch mob. Today he will buy an AK-47 and shoot into a crowd, indiscriminately murdering strangers of all ages who have never done him any harm.
During the lynching years, black men were commonly referred to in newspapers and political speech as “black fiends” or “black brutes.” No wonder men and women brainwashed by racism thought they deserved to be exterminated. How different is that from referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals” who are “invading” our country? In addition to gun control, we need to persistently and passionately denounce all forms of hate speech in our public and private discourse.
Lynchings gradually dwindled, went undercover and into the backwoods, as even the most dimwitted official came to understand that a public lynching was bad for business, bad for the reputation of his town. Are we just going to hope the pestilence of mass shootings passes away on its own whilemore people die? We know what to do, just as we knewwhat to do in 1922. We need the will and the courage to do it.