“Congressional Inaction And Cowardice”: President Obama, Wiping Away Tears, Announces Executive Actions On Guns
On the issue of guns, President Obama has showed anger before. He’s made his sorrow visible, his frustration. But Tuesday, in his address to the nation, he showed us his tears.
In a speech outlining executive actions his administration plans to take in an effort to curb gun violence, many of which he has been trying to implement for years, he stressed the common sense of his directives, and urged Americans to stand up to those who oppose his efforts.
He invoked many of the incidences of gun violence that had compelled him to action, beginning with Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords’s shooting five years ago, on Jan. 8, 2011 in Tucson, the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School – which inspired a bill that would have expanded background checks, but failed because of fierce Republican opposition – and then recited some of the mass shootings that have occurred since he took office in 2009, including Charleston, South Carolina; San Bernardino and Santa Barbara, California; Aurora, Colorado; Fort Hood, Texas; Binghamton, New York; the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.; and Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
At times, he was greeted with sighs of assent, and later, standing ovations, as when he called out the NRA: “The gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage right now. But they cannot hold America hostage.”
The president said he wondered how the issue had become politicized, quoting Republican standard-bearers John McCain, George W. Bush, and the grand pooh-bah of them all, Ronald Reagan, on their sensible stances on guns.
He compared the effort to reduce gun deaths – the majority of which are suicides – to past struggles for civil rights, whether it was women winning the right to vote, the emancipation of black Americans, or LGBT rights; in doing so, he urged Americans not to give in to cynicism and defeat, or to grow dispirited by the routine nature of these tragedies, a routine which extends even to his now predictably outraged post-shooting speeches. “Just because it’s hard is no reason not to try,” he said, allowing that the effort will not succeed within his presidency nor during the current Congress.
Despite the tears, his speech was filled with personal anecdotes and chuckles, reminding Americans that he had taught constitutional law so that he was very familiar with the Second Amendment — to which he reiterated his steadfast commitment. Radical gun owners and the NRA have created a culture that elevates the Second Amendment such that it overtakes other rights Americans have, he said, including the right to assemble peaceably, the right to worship freely, and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
But the crux of his speech rested on the initiatives his administration will take to strengthen and clarify existing laws on gun possession:
All gun sellers must get a license and submit purchasers to background checks. The distribution channel will no longer matter. Background checks would expand to buyers who try to hide behind trusts, or purchase online, and the actual mechanisms of the checks would be streamlined.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents will be empowered to crack down on stolen guns and lost weapons. The 2017 budget will allow for allow for 200 new hires at the ATF Bureau to enforce gun laws.
A proposed investment of $500 million to expand access to mental health across the country. This was perhaps the least detailed of his actions, but he called on politicians to back up their rhetoric on blaming mental health for mass shootings by supporting this policy: “For those in Congress who so often rush to blame mental illness for mass shootings as a way of avoiding action on guns, here’s your chance to support these efforts. Put your money where your mouth is,” he said. Obama also pledged to remove barriers between federal record keeping on mental health issues and background checks, which might have prevented the Charleston, Aurora, Virginia Tech, and Tucson assailants from obtaining guns.
He called on manufacturers to ramp up the deployment of safety technology, which has existed for years but due to political pressure and strange laws has stalled before being allowed to come to market. Using common-sense comparisons with everyday smartphone technology – “If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?” – he said that he would work with the private sector to make sure guns aren’t accidentally discharged by children, thereby reducing accidental deaths.
President Obama noted that we have regulation, safety procedures, and public health research for medicines, cars, and even toys, but that political inaction and cowardice have maligned and sometimes actively prevented public health professionals from studying and implementing reforms that could reduce gun deaths. On the whole, states that have stricter gun measures have fewer deaths, but those that that have weakened regulations, like Missouri, have seen gun deaths rise above national levels.
“Maybe we can’t save everybody, but we could save some,” he pleaded.
Invoking Martin Luther King, Jr., twice, he asked Americans to “feel ‘the fierce urgency of now’” and “find the courage” to vote and mobilize on this issue. He ended with the story of Zaevion Dobson, a 15-year-old from Knoxville, Tennessee, who died while shielding three girls who were caught in an accidental crossfire.
Republican presidential candidates predictably denounced Obama and his reforms, with Sen. Ted Cruz calling them “illegal and unconstitutional” and House Speaker Paul Ryan saying that without a doubt Obama’s actions will be challenged in court.
Anticipating a frequent anti-gun-control canard, the president clarified: “Contrary to the claims of what some gun rights proponents have suggested, this hasn’t been the first step in some slippery slope to mass confiscation… This is not a plot to take away everyone’s guns.”
Josh Earnest, the White House spokesperson, said Tuesday afternoon that the president was “well within his legal right” to make these reforms and that the White House worked with the Department of Justice to coordinate these executive actions.
The president has said that Dec. 14, 2012, the day of the Sandy Hook shooting, was the worst day of his presidency, and that the failure to pass gun-control legislation in its wake was one of his most stinging defeats.
“Every time I think about these kids,” he said, referring to the 20 first-graders between the ages of 6 and 7 who were murdered, “it makes me mad.”
By: Stephanie Schwartz, The National Memo, January 5, 2016
“Murderous Minds Are Here To Stay”: Altering Gun Laws Isn’t An Absolute Answer, But It’s Change Within Our Control
What made a young couple walk into a health facility and start shooting people? It wasn’t our gun laws. It wasn’t the easy ability to purchase a weapon in this country.
If such things made people killers, all Americans would be killers. In that narrow way, gun advocates who bristle at any change after the San Bernardino killings are right.
No one makes you pull a trigger.
But if you stop the argument there, you’re being naive — as naive as saying no one makes you abuse drugs, no one forces you to drink and drive, no one tells you to give your money to phony investment advisors. Yet we have laws regarding all those things.
Laws, smartly written, address the dangers facing a society. The item in question should be less important than the threat.
But our biggest gun law was written 224 years ago, and it remains mostly about that — guns, and the ownership of them. It’s not about bad behavior, murderous thoughts or anything else that guns frequently exacerbate. We have been arguing over this law, the Second Amendment, for centuries.
But we don’t touch it. Because it’s part of our Constitution. Because it’s cherished by many. And because, supporters argue, it’s not the law that makes people put on vests, drop their baby at a relative’s house, then go on a mass murder spree and die.
That’s a sick mind.
And you can’t legislate against a sick mind.
Recently, the New York Times ran its first front page editorial in nearly 100 years. It called for the end of the “gun epidemic.” Before that, the New York Daily News, in criticizing lawmakers who offered prayers for victims but no new legislation, ran the headline “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS.”
Naturally, both papers were buried in insults, dismissed as “typical liberals,” and argued against with an avalanche of selected facts and figures that make the case for doing nothing — or for arming more Americans, not fewer. President Obama, calling for tougher gun laws, was shouted down by a well-practiced chorus of critics, who cynically noted, “How’s it working for Paris?”
But being loud and being right are two different things. It’s always easier to scream against change than to create it. Especially since what change would be 100 percent effective? If we banned every gun in the country, some criminals would still get their hands on them, or use bombs instead, etc.
But is that a reason to watch the next whacked out fundamentalist go freely into a U.S. gun shop, legally purchase guns designed for quick, multiple killings, then use them on fellow citizens to go out in a blaze of infamy?
Because you know it will happen again.
I don’t have a fast answer for this. Nor do I have the energy or stomach to argue with hate-spewing people who are so mesmerized by gun possession they won’t budge an inch. It’s pointless.
But I do take issue with those who refuse to accept that mass killings with assault weapons fall under the same category as a hunter wanting to go after ducks. Yes, we have had guns in this country since its inception, but we have not had other things: a media that sensationalizes violence on a global scale, a population that feels alienated, video entertainment that numbs you to murder and a Internet that can connect all these elements with warped minds that see death as a badge of honor.
I’m pretty sure if America in 1791 had IEDs, jihads and YouTube, our Second Amendment wouldn’t read the way it does. But we cling to words written 224 years ago in a world that changes by the blink. This fact remains: people without a previous criminal history can make their first bad deed a doozy with legally purchased American guns, and killing them once they do only speeds up what many of them hope for: a sensationalized death. This is not limited to Islamic fundamentalists. Mass shootings in Colorado Springs (three dead), Oregon (nine dead) and Charleston, S.C. (nine dead) — all in the last six months — had nothing to do with Islam.
We can leave gun laws untouched, but something else will eventually give: maybe surveillance on every home and business; metal detectors on every door frame; random interrogations, sweeping immigration reform, airborne snipers, rounding up of particular religions. All things that will make America look a lot less like America than if its people were a little less armed.
Our choice. But sick, murderous minds are here to stay. How easy we make it for them is the only thing we can control.
By: Mitch Albom, The National Memo, December 30, 2015
“Hawked By Dealers With A Ready Grin”: Where Mass Murderers’ Weapons Of Choice Are Sold With A Smile
As the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings approached, a weapon identical to the Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle used to murder 20 youngsters and six staff was on display at an Indiana gun show.
Next to it at the Crown Point show on Dec. 12 was a weapon identical to the DPMS AR-15 used by one of the terrorists who killed 14 at a San Bernardino holiday party.
Next to that was an AK-47 knockoff such as was used to kill a police officer and two other innocents at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado.
Nearby was a Smith & Wesson AR-15 identical to the ones used by the other terrorist in the San Bernardino killing and by the madman who killed 12 in a movie theater in Colorado.
And just past the assault rifles were handguns such as are used in the day-to-day carnage that receives only sporadic attention in between mass shootings.
Among the handguns was a .40 Glock, of the same caliber as the pistol used to target and kill 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee last month in Chicago, a little over an hour’s drive from Crown Point. The pistol was one of several now being examined by a girl of around the same age.
“Hello, young lady, did you come to buy your daddy a gun?” the dealer on the other side of the display table cheerfully joked. “I bet he’s the best dad ever. I bet he’s just going to love you for buying him a gun!”
Nobody seemed to see any great irony in the signs reading “NO Loaded Firearms in Building” and “Absolutely No Loaded Guns or Clips in Building” covering the glass doors at the entrance to this one-story red brick structure on the Lake County Fairgrounds. A uniformed cop inspected the guns of all new arrivals to ensure the weapons were unloaded.
“If you don’t have a gun, you can go through,” the cop announced.
Among the folks who had bought guns at earlier Crown Point shows in this same one-story red brick building on the Lake County Fairgrounds was a former suburban Chicago high school football star named David Lewisbey. He is said to have made a “to do” list upon arriving at college that included, “Get guns back up.”
To that end, he made repeated trips down to Crown Point and elsewhere in Indiana, which provides 19 percent of the illegal guns recovered back up in Chicago.
“He would go travel to Indiana, to these gun shows where he would load up literally a duffel bag, go from table to table paying in cash, large amounts of cash, and collect all of these firearms before returning from these gun shows right into the worst neighborhoods of Chicago, where he would sell them literally in the back alley and on the side streets,” a prosecutor later said.
In a two-day period, Lewisbey sold 43 firearms. He is believed to have sold many more before his arrest in 2012. He insisted he had only bought guns for his “personal collection” and dealt drugs, not firearms.
Lewisbey was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in federal prison. The trial record shows that he sometimes made the purchases through licensed dealers, which required him to undergo a background check. He would simply report that the weapon had been stolen if it was recovered in connection with a crime.
More often, Lewisbey took advantage of what is known as the “gun show loophole,” which allows private dealers to sell firearms without conducting background checks or filing any paperwork regarding the buyer.
Nationwide, some 5,000 gun shows are held each year. Indiana is among the 33 states that allow such loophole sales. The regular gun shows at the Lake County Fairgrounds in Crown Point were said to be “one of the prime topics” at a kind of summit of 20 federal, state, and local law enforcement officials two years ago.
In an indication of slight progress, no private dealers were in evidence at the most recent Crown Point show. The dealers were all licensed, which meant purchasers had to undergo a nearly instant background check via one of the laptops each dealer had.
“They tell me to proceed and then it’s yours,” a dealer told one prospective customer. “You just have to have an Indiana driver’s license or picture ID.”
But there was nothing in the law to prevent a private citizen from then giving the gun to another private citizen.
And among those who would be happy to keep it that way and maybe roll back restrictions altogether was a gentleman collecting petition signatures for both Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.
“Get gun rights candidates on the ballot!” he exhorted.
He noted that both senators had a top NRA rating.
“A-plus,” he said.
He could offer no rating for Donald Trump, on whose behalf a woman in a pink T-shirt reading “Get on the Trump Train” was collecting signatures at the next table.
“He’s unique because he’s never held elective office,” the man said of Trump. “He’s unproven.”
Strict gun laws have proven to reduce gun violence and would almost certainly cut deaths dramatically if all states adopted them uniformly. But as long as we keep manufacturing high-capacity weapons, there is no way to guarantee they will not fall into the hands of people who should not be allowed anywhere near a firearm. California has some of the toughest restrictions in the country, but the San Bernardino killers had little trouble arming themselves with assault rifles such as were for sale at Crown Point.
“Every customer is a friend,” words on the DPMS AR-15 box read. “We wish you many years of enjoyable use of your product. Welcome to our family.”
Across the top of the box was the exhortation “Get Ready to Flip the Switch.”
A paper tag said the DPMS could be yours for $599. The tag on the Bushmaster beside it read $649. The dealer was asked the difference between the two assault rifles.
“Mainly brand,” the dealer said. “Little bit of accessory difference, but that’s about it.”
He added, “They’re both midlevel ARs.”
He was asked what might be a top level assault rifle.
“Far as your budget would allow you to spend,” he said. “LWRC, Daniel Defense, you could spend two, three grand on an AR.”
The LWRC and Daniel Defense assault rifles are indeed in that price range. Mass shooters favor the mid-level ARs, which also includes Smith & Wesson, going at the show for $639.99.
“Very important: Instruction book inside to ensure safe use,” read a small notice on this box.
Beyond that table was one that displayed hunting rifles and shotguns, all of which would satisfy the right to bear arms as contemplated by the Founding Fathers and were more than adequate for self-defense.
Maybe call these long guns DRs, for defense rifle.
But they lack the military hoo-hah that apparently makes ARs—the A seeming to stand for arousal as well as assault—popular with boys who never quite grow up. DRs also lack the capacity for mass carnage that make ARs the favorite of terrorists and murderous madmen.
The deadliness of ARs definitely appeals to gangbangers and other street criminals. The problem for them is that the weapons are difficult to conceal. Thugs generally prefer handguns such as the Glock .40.
The dealer at Crown Point gave Glocks high marks for durability. He cited a YouTube video of “the Glock torture test,” in which the guns are dragged behind a four-wheel vehicle and buried in dirt.
“They spray them off with a hose, load them up, and fire a thousand rounds,” the dealer said. “Glocks are pretty much indestructible.”
Also for sale at the show were extended magazines that allow a gangbanger to let loose as if with a shrunk down AR-15.
“The more shells the merrier,” a Chicago gang member told The Daily Beast the other day.
Among the legitimate citizens who have felt compelled to arm themselves is Felix Gonzalez, a 42-year-old real estate lawyer from Chicago who came to the Crown Point show with his two sons, 10-year-old Diego and 9-year-old Nico.
As a second calling, Gonzalez teaches gun safety to like-minded citizens, particularly to those who legally carry concealed firearms. He left the show having purchased two giant plastic bags of .45 caliber and 9 mm bullets, 500 of each, for a total of 1,000. His younger son pronounced himself less than thrilled by the visit to a gun show, his first.
“Boring,” Diego said. “Because there’s nothing to do. All we were doing was watch you buy ammo.”
The father paused and shared his feelings about legal gun ownership with The Daily Beast. His foremost reason for carrying a handgun is to protect his family. He said “God help” anyone who tried to hurt his sons and declared himself ever ready to defend their lives with his own.
“Because I love you,” he told them.
The father added, “The enemy will not win if he comes against us.”
Diego said, “You don’t know that for sure.”
The father said, “I am at peace. I don’t worry about dying.”
The two bags of bullets to be used for self-defense training were loaded into the back of the family minivan. Father and sons then set off for Chicago, where a boy the same age as Nico had been targeted when three gang members in a black SUV saw him on the swings in a park after school back on Nov. 2.
Tyshawn Lee was the son of a reputed member of the New Money gang, which has been in a protracted war with the Bang Bang Gang (BBG). One of a trio of BBG members exited the black SUV, sauntered into the park, and picked up a basketball that Tyshawn had set down when he clambered onto the swing.
The BBG member spoke to Tyshawn and apparently persuaded him to cross the street into an alley behind the boy’s grandmother’s house, where there was a basketball hoop. A second BBG member followed. At least one of the gang members then produced a .40 caliber pistol and executed the boy.
The BBG member who remained in the SUV is said to have informed on the other two. One, Corey “Tez Poe” Morgan—whose brother had been killed and his mother wounded by New Money members in October—was arrested and charged with murder. Kevin “Ace” Edwards remained a fugitive at last report.
On the foggy morning the gun show opened down in Crown Point, the swing in Dawes Park hung empty save for the memory of the murdered boy who had been coaxed from there to his death by gun. Somebody had affixed a pair of wooden signs to a tree.
One sign read, “Rest in Heaven Tyshawn Lee,” the other, “Mothers against Street Shooting.” At the base was a cross fashioned with sticks and a ribbon tied in a bow.
The Chicago police had pledged to crush both BBG and the New Money gang, but there were more than enough pistols handy from gun shows and gun shops, and the gangs remained ready to use them. New Money members followed a member of another gang called Bloody 8 home and seriously wounded him. BBG shot and killed a reputed New Money member named Willie Clifton late last week. Clifton, the 21-year-old father of a baby girl, is said to have been waiting in an alley for his girlfriend with bags of laundry when he was ambushed.
One might have thought that yet another killing by a gang accused of deliberately targeting a 9-year-old would have sparked a public outcry. But the murder passed with little notice, and the killings promise to go on and on and on.
The next Crown Point gun show is on the weekend of Jan. 23 in a New Year that challenges us all to end the madness.
By: Michael Daly, The Daily Beast, December 22, 2015
“A Terrorist Organization”: Editor Is Fired, But Not Silenced, Over The NRA
Five days after the shootings in San Bernardino, California, Jan Larson McLaughlin sat down in her home office on her day off and wrote her weekly editorial for the Sentinel-Tribune, circulation 9,000, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
McLaughlin has worked for the newspaper for 31 years, the past 2 1/2 as editor-in-chief. She usually writes her editorial in the newsroom, but this one required special care. She was taking on the National Rifle Association, and she was doing it in Ohio.
Her editorial began: “It is time for reasonable gun owners to take back control of the association that supposedly represents them.
“We as a nation are still mourning one mass shooting when the next occurs. Yet the NRA refuses to discuss any type of gun control, any form of background checks, any type of study that might lead to some answers.
“Instead, when legislators consider measures to reduce gun deaths, the NRA and its tentacle groups assign them failing grades and label them as anti-gun.”
She then focused on the Buckeye Firearms Association for its “blasted criticism” of Bowling Green State University faculty members who had written to state Rep. Tim Brown asking that he not support legislation to allow concealed carry of firearms on Ohio college campuses. Brown voted for it.
The gun group used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the list of faculty members who had written to Brown. It published their names and email addresses, singling out geology professor James Evans for special retribution by publishing his photo, too, because he called the NRA a “terrorist organization” in his email to Brown. McLaughlin described the rush of threatening emails to Evans from members of the firearms association. (Evans confirmed this in an interview Tuesday.)
After defending the faculty members, McLaughlin ended her editorial with a plea:
“We’ve tried arming every citizen who is so inclined. It hasn’t solved the problem. So let’s look for other solutions, ones that reasonable gun owners can support. But that will mean responsible gun owners are first going to have to take back control of their national organization, which seems more concerned about the gun industry than the average gun owner.”
Early the next morning, McLaughlin sent her editorial to Publisher Karmen Concannon, whose parents own the broadsheet, which publishes Monday through Saturday. McLaughlin also sent the editorial to three of her six staff writers. This is her practice in the small newsroom so that they can catch errors and offer criticism.
McLaughlin described what happened next: That Tuesday evening, the publisher told her she had killed the editorial, with little explanation. On Wednesday, the six staff writers submitted a letter to Concannon, asking her to reconsider. She refused to read it.
The next day, McLaughlin walked into the publisher’s office, asking for an explanation, but Concannon said she didn’t owe her one.
The following Monday morning, Concannon told McLaughlin she was fired and ordered her to surrender her keys before being escorted out of the building. She was allowed to return to the newsroom that evening to empty her desk.
McLaughlin’s termination letter stated that she was fired for insubordination — for doing what she always does, which is to share her editorial with staff writers. The publisher’s explanation doesn’t pass the straight-face test, which may be why Concannon has refused multiple requests for interviews.
Hours after McLaughlin’s firing, my Gmail and Facebook inboxes began filling with messages from upset readers and fellow journalists. Many McLaughlin supporters tweeted the hashtag “istandwithjan.” Someone, she doesn’t know who, leaked the killed editorial, bringing it back to life on social media and, later, on the Toledo Blade‘s website.
You could reasonably ask, “Why should I care what happened at a small-town newspaper in Ohio?”
I suggest a different question: How often is this happening in our communities?
Earlier this month, it was great to see the front-page editorial in The New York Times under the headline “The Gun Epidemic.” Lots of policymakers surely saw it, but most Americans — most constituents — don’t read The New York Times.
Editorials such as McLaughlin’s matter because they reach the rest of America and can embolden citizens to pressure elected officials for gun law reform. Silencing the Jan Larson McLaughlins in this country emboldens only the NRA.
On Tuesday, McLaughlin was still reeling.
“I’m still kind of stunned,” she said. “I love the Sentinel-Tribune. I care about the staff. This is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
On Wednesday, she heard there were plans for a rally to protest her firing. Such outpouring of community support moves her. “It feels good that people recognize the value of the work of the Sentinel-Tribune.”
Still, it worries her, too. “I don’t want people to cancel their subscriptions,” she said. “Our writers make so little, and they work so hard. I don’t want them to lose their jobs.”
McLaughlin said that before she left the building, the publisher offered her a severance package.
For her 31 years of service, the paper was willing to pay Jan Larson McLaughlin $5,000 — but only if she agreed not to talk about what had happened.
To the benefit of all of us, she declined.
By: Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning Columnist, The National Memo, December 16, 2015
“Long Past Time We Got A Hold Of Ourselves”: Why Do We Freak Out About Terrorism, Anyway? Here’s Why We Shouldn’t
There’s a new poll out today from the Public Religion Research Institute showing that nearly half of Americans say they’re either very worried or somewhat worried that they or a member of their family will be a victim of terrorism.
You might say that’s understandable, given how much terrorism has dominated the news recently. But the truth is, they’re wrong. On a national scale, terrorism isn’t a threat, it’s a nuisance. We’re having a collective freakout about it right now, and that freakout serves the interests of those who are encouraging it. But we need to take a step back and look at just how dangerous terrorism really is.
Here’s a question we all ought to ask ourselves: When it comes to terrorism, what exactly are we afraid of? I know it seems self-evident — terrorism is scary! — but what exactly is it? If you try to articulate an answer, you quickly realize how infrequently we actually ask the question.
The simplest answer, of course, is that we’re afraid that terrorists will kill people. Okay, so how many people? According to the New America Foundation, since 9/11 there have been 45 Americans killed in jihadist terrorist attacks, and 48 Americans killed in right-wing terrorist attacks. Let’s put aside for the moment the fact that even though these two numbers are comparable, we don’t treat right-wing terrorism as something that requires any kind of policy response or even sustained attention. But you can’t argue that jihadi terrorism is something to be concerned about and afraid of because of the damage it’s been doing. An average of about three people killed per year in a country of 320 million is next to nothing.
So if it’s not because terrorists have managed to kill a lot of people in the last few years, are we petrified of terrorism because terrorists could kill lots of people in the near future? That’s possible. But how many could they kill? Another dozen, like in the San Bernardino shooting? A hundred? Five hundred? Since September 11 we’ve made it much harder to pull off a large-scale, spectacular attack. Terrorists aren’t going to be able to hijack airplanes and use them as missiles. It’s possible that there could be repeats of the San Bernardino shootings, and that’s something to be concerned about. But we have mass shootings in America all the time. Why — again exactly — should we be more concerned about a repeat of San Bernardino than a repeat of Aurora, where nearly the same number of people (12) were killed?
Both were terrible, and both could happen again. But only in the case of San Bernardino does the event cause large portions of the public and elected officials to contemplate sweeping policy change, even up to and including the idea of starting another full-scale Middle East war because we’re so frightened. (Anytime there’s a mass shooting, Democrats push for gun control measures; but Republicans only call for a major policy response when it’s terrorism.)
There are some people who would argue that even if terrorists haven’t killed a lot of Americans lately, and even if it’s unlikely they’d be able to kill truly large numbers of Americans in the future, we still need to freak out about terrorism because a group like the Islamic State represents an “existential threat” to America. But if you get specific in the questions you ask, it becomes obvious that this idea is utterly deranged.
Back in the Cold War, the Soviet Union presented a true existential threat to the United States. It had enough nuclear missiles pointed at us to kill every man, woman, and child in America (and on the rest of the planet to boot). The Islamic State has no such capability. Is the Islamic State going to launch an invasion of the United States, sweep through the nation from Manhattan all the way to Seattle, take control of the whole country, and force America to live under its brutal rule? Of course not. Is it going to launch a coup from inside our government and raise its flag over the White House? No.
So what exactly is it we’re afraid the Islamic State will do to America? Right now I’m not talking about what it could do to Iraq or Syria, because that’s a very different question. What could it do to America? The absolute worst it could do is launch some successful attacks that might kill a dozen or even a hundred of us. And that would be awful. But about thirty Americans are murdered every day with guns, and a hundred die every day in car accidents. Eighty-three Americans die every day in falls, but we haven’t declared a “War on Falling,” and nobody tells pollsters that their biggest fear is that someone in their family will suffer a fatal fall.
If you actually force yourself to think in specific terms about the substance of the threat the Islamic State poses to us, you have to admit that the actual threat is miniscule. So why are we having a national freakout about it now? The answer, I think, lies in the presidential campaign, particularly in the Republican primary. You have a bunch of news organizations following around a bunch of candidates who know that the way to gain the support of their base is to prey on that base’s fears and prejudices. Add in the fact that the front-runner is a demagogic bigot, and you quickly get into a cycle of hysteria: a terrorist attack happens, it’s extensively covered in the media, the candidates seize on it to propose ever more radical policy changes (Keep out refugees! Put troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria! Keep out all the Muslims!) all the while proclaiming that the threat from terrorism is horrifyingly large and growing larger. The media report on their statements, voters get more nervous, and the candidates respond by feeding the panic.
Even outside their campaign coverage, the media give enormous attention to an event like San Bernardino, spending weeks analyzing not just the occurrence itself but who the perpetrators were, what motivated them, what they had for breakfast on the day of the attack, and everything else that can be uncovered. This coverage isn’t problematic in and of itself, but its sheer volume serves to reinforce the idea that terrorism is a huge threat that we all need to be terribly afraid of.
But it isn’t, and we don’t. We should be concerned, and we should take reasonable steps to minimize the risk we face from terrorism, just as we do with all the other risks we face. But right now we’re acting like a bunch of cowards. It’s long past time we got a hold of ourselves.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, December 10, 2015
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