Another Tragic Weekend – El Paso and Dayton

Another Tragic Weekend – El Paso and Dayton

Another tragic weekend with over 30 dead from mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.  And more rhetoric and platitudes by the vociferous few, who blame the implement, rather than the deranged individual who perpetrated the crimes.  As if the hammer or the sword, or the knife, or the SUV, or the bus or the firearm acted on its own to kill and maim.

And the same heart-felt, but empty, demonstrations of sympathy for the dead and wounded.  Prayers and flowers and teddy bears and candle-light ceremonies assuage our own anger and frustrations about these senseless killings, and adjectives like “senseless”, “horrific” and “abominable” are cast about with very little of substance being accomplished.  The democrats trot out their old, shop-worn, “assault weapon” (as if that defined anything), ban legislation; and the republicans hide behind the Second Amendment.

The resultant and current villains and “whipping boys” after these two almost simultaneous mass shootings are “white nationalist terrorists”, as if appending “white nationalist” to “terrorists” defines the whole issue of mass shootings in the U.S.  Singling out one group, no matter how intolerant and prone to violence, does not accomplish much.  As a result of media focus, white supremacists are just the “flavor of the day”, just as the guns that are responsible for those deaths.

That is not to say that this virulent, intolerant, xenophobic white supremacist movement should be given a pass.  They should be identified, prosecuted as the law allows and prevented from spreading their hatred more widely.  They have First Amendment rights, like all of us, but that should not prevent identifying them and stopping them, before they commit violent crimes, passing appropriate laws if necessary.

Terrorism of any brand needs to be addressed.  Antifa is also a terrorist organization composed of hateful, intolerant leftist radicals who pursue their extreme agenda through aggressive violence.  Any groups that use violence as a political tool should be identified and curtailed, - again, as allowed by the First Amendment and the law.

But more endemic to these mass shootings than neo-Nazis or Antifa, are the unaffiliated loners that sit in their parents’ basements in front of high-speed internet, and play violent combat games, while reading and disseminating hate-filled screeds and memes.  Their next step is to go out and buy (or steal) a ubiquitous and readily available firearm like an AR-15 or an AK-47, or some other weapon, and go to a crowded mall and commit real-life violence.

After this weekend and as usual, there will be the same calls relating to “gun control”, mainly by leftists who sense a progressive or socialist talking point, and who have very little knowledge about the reality of firearms, other than the charged emotions caused by mass shooting incidents such as El Paso and Dayton.  They prattle about “assault weapons”, a contrived and meaningless term, firearms registration and confiscation, and other empty leftist political positions.  There are about 320 million people in the U.S., and the same number, or slightly more firearms.  The rights of possession and use of firearms for sport, hunting and self-protection is embedded in our constitution.  Please see my extensive blog on types of firearms and their use. Here.

Another favorite target of our well-meaning reformers trying to get at the causes of our national propensity for violence is “mental health”.  And again, any such efforts at identifying and diminishing potential violence by these means is welcome.  Of course we have to keep in mind the deinstitutionalization that took place in the latter half of the twentieth century that effectively released millions of prior mental patients back to society with instructions to take the appropriate psycho-active medication to stay “balanced”.  The large homeless population in this country indicates that some of these patients and their progeny have not stayed “balanced”.  How many of the radical loners described above are in this category?

One can posit a sociological solution, both to the asocial and disenfranchised loner and the homeless individual living on the street.  That is for our society in general, to return to the values that foster stability, well-being and a spiritually enabled life.  These include family, respect for law and authority, integrity, positive altruism and a return to religion, rather than away from it.   These are conservative values, and antithetical to the continuing secularist movement away from our God-given values and heritage.  Leftists will call these values “racist”, as they do all things these days with which they don’t agree.  But they are not “racist”.  They embody our American values (whether our origins are Indigenous, European, Black, Muslim, Asian or from some other place or ethnic group).  If we all acknowledged what our truly American values are, and tried to live accordingly, we might just have less violence and upset in our society.

Ray Gruszecki

August 5, 2019