Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton: The blood trail leads to Congress and the White House
You can keep your thoughts and prayers, it won’t bring them back.
The Second Amendment?
Your fucking guns are not more important than the lives in Gilroy, El Paso, or Dayton. Your fucking guns are not more important than your life or mine. Your interpretation of the 27 poorly crafted words of the Second Amendment does not fit mine, and it certainly does nothing to secure the safety and freedoms of the people of the United States. In fact, it is increasingly undermining it.
The body count continued to grow this last week as mass murder again zigzagged the country, and it is time, now, damn it, to do something about it.
Don’t give me that argument that it is too soon to open the conversation.
That’s what they said after Sandy Hook.
That’s what they said after the Washington Navy Yard shooting.
That’s what they said after the San Bernardino shooting.
That’s what they said after Orlando.
That’s what they said after Las Vegas.
It’s what they said after Columbine, Aurora, Fort Hood, Sutherland Springs, Charleston, Parkland, Santa Fe, the Tree of Life Synagogue, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, and all of the other places where human life has been wasted.
And nobody gets a pass. Whether it was under Clinton’s watch, Bush, Obama, or Trump, nobody gets a pass.
Except, we have a different situation here.
While Clinton, Bush, and Obama decried violence, we have a bad actor in the Oval Office today who has used his position to incite the sycophants, inflame the crazies, and mount fear.
He suggested roughing up reporters who he didn’t like. He continued by suggesting the police officers deliver a little street justice while taking suspects into custody. He continues to fan the flames of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, and hatred.
He continues to call for a wall along the southern border because, as he said during his campaign and stands behind today, he believes “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us (sic). They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Excuse me, but Mexico is not sending anybody anywhere.
The numbers — whether from the Cato Institute, the Marshall Project, The Pew Research Center, or even the FBI — do not bear that out.
Findings from the Marshall Project — a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to studying criminal justice in the United States — concluded that “A large majority of the areas (studied) recorded decreases in both violent and property crime between 2007 and 2016, consistent with a quarter-century decline in crime across the United States. The analysis found that crime went down at similar rates regardless of whether the undocumented population rose or fell.”
The report went on to say that “socioeconomic factors like unemployment rates, housing instability, and measures of economic hardship” are more likely to spark violent crime than whether a person is a documented or undocumented immigrant.
“They (undocumented immigrants) typically come to America to find work, not to commit crimes,” Yulin Yang, a member of the Marshall team, said.
Guys like this El Paso shooter, however, don’t let fact get in the way of their warped fantasies and hatred.
Investigators are telling us they are reasonably certain — cop talk for dead-solid certain — that the shooter published a racist, anti-immigrant, four-page manifesto decrying what he called the “Hispanic invasion” of the United States, a term the president has used repeatedly.
The president’s message on Hispanics has been loud, clear, and consistent as when he spoke last May at a Panama City Beach, Florida, rally asking the crowd, “How do you stop these people?”
“Shoot them!” a woman in the audience responded.
Instead of taking the responsible position, instead of taking the moment as one in which to speak out against violence, the president chuckled and said “Only in the panhandle you can get away with that statement.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what inspired the shooter to drive ten hours across the state of Texas to a peaceful border town with rich cultural diversity to carry out an attack on the Hispanic population.
“The President has put a target on the back of the Hispanic community for years now, and there’s a cost to that kind of dangerous and racially divisive rhetoric,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said when reached by reporters in his San Antonio home. “If you look at the shooter‘s manifesto, it’s consistent with the language that President Trump has used to describe Hispanic immigrants as being part of an invasion of the United States.”
The attack was simplified by the overabundance of assault weapons in the United States, which has more weapons than people.
Photos of the El Paso shooter entering Wal-Mart show him carrying what appears to be a WASR-10, a civilian version of the AK-47.
There is no justifiable reason for these weapons to be on American streets. None.
Not even National Rifle Association propaganda can make a decent case for these weapons other than red-faced histrionics about the Second Amendment.
Now, I hold our amendments as important documents on governance. They are supposed to lay a foundation for our liberties and freedoms.
However, when an amendment infringes on our safety and liberty, it needs to be, at very least, rewritten — or in this case, removed.
“Keep that shit on the battlefield, do not bring it into our communities, I don’t want to see it in our malls or in our schools or in our churches or in our synagogues,” Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke, who once represented the El Paso area in the House, said after the shooting.
O’Rourke claimed the president has blood on his hands.
“He is an open, avowed racist and is encouraging more racism in this country,” he said. “We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years during an administration where you’ve had a president who has called Mexicans ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals,’ though Mexican immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than those born here in the country.
“He is a racist and he stokes racism in this country, and it does not just offend our sensibilities, it fundamentally changes the character of this country and it leads to violence.”
And violence is something this country already had in abundance. Now it’s up to us.
There will be the usual diversionary tactics of blaming it all on mental illness. The numbers don’t bear that out. There has not been a substantial increase in mental illness to parallel the upturn in mass shootings.
It’s about weapons and their availability and the culture of hatred.
Look, this blood trail leads to Congress and the White House. We must step up and censure our president for his hate-filled rhetoric.
We must step up to demand that the House and Senate pass veto-proof legislation to ban assault weapons. We have lost too many for too long, and it must stop here.
Most importantly, we must step up and do our part to crush this culture of hate that has overtaken us.
We’re better than this, at least I hope so.
Peace.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
How to submit an article, guest opinion piece, or letter to the editor to The Independent
Do you have something to say? Want your voice to be heard by thousands of readers? Send The Independent your letter to the editor or guest opinion piece. All submissions will be considered for publication by our editorial staff. If your letter or editorial is accepted, it will run on suindependent.com, and we’ll promote it through all of our social media channels. We may even decide to include it in our monthly print edition. Just follow our simple submission guidelines and make your voice heard:
—Submissions should be between 300 and 1,500 words.
—Submissions must be sent to editor@infowest.com as a .doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf file.
—The subject line of the email containing your submission should read “Letter to the editor.”
—Attach your name to both the email and the document file (we don’t run anonymous letters).
—If you have a photo or image you’d like us to use and it’s in .jpg format, at least 1200 X 754 pixels large, and your intellectual property (you own the copyright), feel free to attach it as well, though we reserve the right to choose a different image.
—If you are on Twitter and would like a shout-out when your piece or letter is published, include that in your correspondence and we’ll give you a mention at the time of publication.
YES!
Well said, Ed.
Move to Chicago then Ed…you’re ill crafted, vulgarity filled drivel in this piece is crude and childish. You have no concept of what our Constitution is all about. Why don’t you point your feigned rage at medical malpractice, DUI, blunt trauma assaults, and fast food chains that cause obesity? All of these causes kill more people annually than ALL (including suicide) firearms deaths. Never a poor time to politicize a tragedy; go back to your cave you hack.
Looks like someone is… “triggered.”