The Gilroy shooter was interested in white supremacist ideology in the days leading up to his attack. The El Paso gunman left a screed online echoing Donald Trump's anti-immigrant bluster. The Dayton shooter compiled "hit lists" in high school and followed antifa posts on Twitter. What the three had in common was being hate-filled white males wielding rapid-fire semi-automatic rifles that no civilian has a legitimate use for in public.
By the way, I'm not forgetting the seven people killed in a drive-by shooting in Chicago in the same week. I keep seeing opponents of gun control citing this as something gun control advocates are overlooking, as if additional gun violence wouldn't buttress the argument in favor of stricter, stronger, and more stringently enforced gun control. As far as I'm concerned, this qualifies as a mass shooting, terrorism, whatever you want to call it; the only difference is the color of the gunman's skin.
I've singled out House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in this cartoon, but he's not the only Republican to try distracting attention from the U.S.'s gun problem by blaming violence in video games. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (who has graced this blog before) did the same, also faulting the lack of mandated prayer in schools. And an Ohio Republican, State Rep. Candice Keller, went so far as to blame "transgender, homosexual marriage and drag queen advocates, and Mike Huckabee (R-Fox News) said this kind of thing wouldn't happen if people were religious.
And, of course, whoever wrote Donald Trump's televised speech Monday morning also cited video games, mental illness, and a bunch of other stuff that weren't guns.
Now, while it would strain credulity to think that these gunmen have never played video games, cleverer cartoonists than I have pointed out that video games are hugely popular from Portugal to Japan to Australia to Argentina to Canada, yet nowhere else have they resulted in hundreds of mass shootings every year. Not even close.
The American Psychological Association has so far failed to list racism, bigotry, misogyny, antifa sympathies, or gang membership as mental illnesses, and right-wing media would howl in protest if they did. (Yes, even in the case of gang membership. Right-wing media wouldn't want gang-bangers getting to plead insanity in court.) None of this week's gunmen were ever diagnosed with any mental illness, and even if they had, one of Trump's first executive actions as president was to repeal a regulation preventing people with certain mental health issues from buying firearms.
Nor do I think marriage equality crossed the minds of any of this week's gunmen. The Pulse shooter was antigay to be sure, but blaming "transgender, homosexual marriage and drag queen advocates" for that 2016 massacre is akin to blaming wife-beating on her serving chicken when he wanted steak.
As for religious values, there is a great deal to be said for spirituality, and I'd like to see more people show up in the church, synagogue, mosque, prayer room, what have you, of their choice. But much evil has been done in God's name as well: ISIS, Boko Haram, the Klan, the Irish Republican Army, the Crusaders, Jehu, Hazael and Elisha all pray or prayed quite regularly.
Republicans can't keep arguing that gun laws don't work and proposing instead a whole bunch of other solutions that won't work. Requiring a clean bill of mental health to own a gun might cut down on some of the carnage, but you can't force people to pray and you can't outlaw "Call of Duty."
To paraphrase a certain firearms lobby, video games don't kill people. Guns kill people.
No comments:
Post a Comment