If we can’t talk about guns, what about hate?
News of the mass killing at a synagogue in Pittsburgh was only a few hours old when President Donald Trump attempted to cut off any discussion about gun laws by, in essence, blaming the victims.
He said our easy access to weapons had “little to do with it,” meaning the shooting, adding, “If they had some kind of protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation.”
As if the only solution to our epidemic of mass murders is for every single one of us to be armed at all times or to be protected by armed guards. At all times.
OK, let’s not talk about guns then ... for now.
Let’s talk about hate. According to news reports, the man suspected in the Pittsburgh attack, Robert Bowers, walked into the building armed to the teeth and screamed, “All Jews must die.”
He believed the migrant caravan heading toward the southern border was a Jewish conspiracy. (Are you learning anything from this, Fox News?)
Not that long ago, outside of Louisville, Kentucky, a black man was killed inside a Kroger supermarket and a black woman was killed in the parking lot. Police have identified the murderer as Gregory Bush. They say that as he was leaving the area, he approached another man, white, and told him, "Don’t shoot me. I won't shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites."
Investigators believe Bush’s initial target may have been a predominantly African-American church.
That was the target in 2015, when the young white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black men and women in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Guns and hate.
Is there a more lethal combination? One is the dynamite. The other is the fuse.
All that’s required is a spark. Like, for example, hateful speech. According to an independent study by researchers at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, hate crimes rose 12.5 percent in America’s 10 largest cities in 2017.
What causes the kind of hateful prejudice that can lead to violence? The researchers put it this way: “Attitudes have three distinct components: an emotional element, a cognitive set of underlying beliefs that intertwine with these emotions, and an outward manifestation of behavior. Events, personal setbacks, mental instability, fear, intoxicants, anonymity and the legitimization by peers, leaders, or a subculture of defining negative stereotypes; can all play a role in turning even latent prejudices and 32
implicit biases into behaviors.”
When prejudices receive “legitimization” from, among others, “leaders.” Ring a bell?
Like when you have a president who demonizes migrants, calls the political opposition evil and joins in with chants of “lock ’em up” at a rally shortly after pipe bombs were mailed to a series of his political opponents.
Does that ring a bell?
This same president continues to rail against “globalists” when that word has a long history of being used by white supremacists as a veiled reference for Jews.
Early last year, Anne Frank Center director Steven Goldstein told a reporter, "Globalist and corporate media — these are code words of anti-Semitism, and when they're used by a man with an anti-Semitic history such as Steve Bannon, you'd have to be living in the Stone Age not to connect the dots.”
Tens of thousands of Americans are killed by firearms each year. Trump knows all about the potentially explosive combination of guns and hate that exists in our country. Why risk providing a spark?
Make no mistake, gun violence and racism existed long before Donald Trump became president.
But no other president has so persistently and publicly directed so much animosity at his perceived political enemies. Consider the way he refers to the media as an “enemy of the people.” The way he’s encouraged crowd members at his rallies to attack protesters. The way he praised a congressman who pleaded guilty to physically assaulting a journalist. The way he describes opponents as evil.
Tens of thousands of Americans are killed by firearms each year. Trump knows all about the potentially explosive combination of guns and hate that exists in our country.
Why risk providing a spark?
If we can’t talk about guns can we at least talk about hate? Or, better yet, about what we can do to diminish the lethal combination of the two?
Politicians all over the land, including the president, offered expressions of sympathy and support for the victims of the shooting in Pittsburgh.
Whenever I hear these roboticsounding public pronouncements from politicians, I recall something said in 2014 by a grieving father named Richard Martinez, whose 20-year-old son, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, was one of six people killed during a shooting and knifing spree near UCSanta Barbara.
Martinez said of the politicians who spoke of our need to pause and mourn, "I don't care about your sympathy ... Get to work and do something.”
They haven’t.