I have a post all lined up, talking about how Democrats are trying to determine their Presidential candidate. It’s good, and I’ll use it later. But after the events of the last two days, it feels too soon to move on. The news cycle is fast, and I know that we won’t be talking about El Paso and Dayton by the end of the week. But it isn’t appropriate to let them go, yet.
El Paso
With the little information we know, we have a contrast in killers between El Paso and Dayton. The El Paso shooter was driven by white nationalism, wanting to stop the “brown invasion” by driving eight hours from his home and opening fire. He is, frankly, all that many of us have been fearing: a young white man out on the edge of sanity, pushed off by the damaging rhetoric of the President, Fox News, and others.
Are they to blame for the dead and wounded in El Paso? No, not directly. But we all saw this coming, the inflaming language, from “send them back” to the “infestation” of migrants. To partisan Americans who could process the emotions, it was either disgusting or appreciated. To Republicans forced to rationalize what the President was saying, it was probably humbling. From the number of resignations in the House of Representatives, most notably Congressman Will Hurd from the Texas border, it was far too much for some to swallow.
But to the shooter in El Paso, already on the edge of madness, it was enough to load his assault rifle in the car, and head to Wal-Mart to stop the “invasion.” It was a white nationalist terrorist attack on those folks, and on our nation.
Dayton
The even younger white man is Dayton fits the “normal” mass shooter profile. He was a disaffected white kid from an affluent Dayton suburb. He may have been bullied in school, and from his postings we can tell he was struggling. There were rumors of “hit lists” and “rape lists.” He wanted to do just enough to “get by.” He was two years into community college when he stopped attending.
He is a lot like a school shooter; like Parkland and Chardon and dozens more we read about. The other kids knew who it was before the authorities released the name. Just the fact that the shooter was a young man from Bellbrook was enough.
The Causes
So what do El Paso and Dayton shooters have in common? They are both young white men, disaffected from the “norm,” looking for their moment in a literal hail of bullets. One was subsumed into a white nationalist fantasy, one felt so powerless over his own life that he decided to take many others. We have an issue in our society, past assault rifles and high capacity magazines. We have an odd epidemic of these messed up young white boys.
Here’s a macabre trivia question: name a black, or female; mass shooter. While I’m sure there must be some, right off hand I can’t think of any. The “odd one” is the Las Vegas killer, an older white man with a lot of money. But most are these young white boys. Whatever is happening to them, we need to start figuring it out. We know that shootings breed more shootings and that the Columbine killers of twenty years ago are still “admired legends” to a certain sub-class on the internet.
The Guns
But it seems that all of these young white men start measuring their manhood by the length of their rifles. We know the El Paso shooter got his assault rifle over the internet, online, delivered, and perfectly legal. While we don’t know how the Dayton shooter got his yet, it’s a common feature in many of these shootings. So I don’t blame many Americans for blaming the guns.
And they are right. We are the ONLY modern country that allows unlimited access to weapons designed for war to the general populace. And we are by far the nation most plagued with these grotesque mass shootings. Norway had one, United Kingdom had one, Australia had one, and New Zealand had one. We here in the United States, home of the free and brave, had our 250th for just this year.
Just like the political rhetoric, we know that most Americans can handle these weapons. We know that most owners of assault rifles have them because they enjoy shooting them, or because they feel they need protection, or maybe as a last safeguard against a wayward government.
The Constitution
Most of those folks aren’t on the edge of sanity. But we don’t have a reasonable way of defining who is, and who isn’t. So, yes it’s about the mental health issues. The sane don’t do what those white boys did. But it also is about the guns, the access to weapons that are specifically designed to fire fast and create devastating wounds. We can’t turn our backs on that part of the problem, or hide behind the Second Amendment.
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson stated that, “…the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” The Second Amendment isn’t either; we already accept many restrictions on what kind of weapons can be purchased. A Federal license is required to have a fully automatic weapon, for example; it’s been that way since 1934. So it isn’t that we can’t change, it’s finding the will to do it.
The Pain Becomes too Great
We will accept these mass shootings until the pain becomes too great. We will allow our political gridlock to hand these broken individuals the weapon of their choice, until we decide not to. Most of the solutions aren’t hard to do, and they aren’t hard to agree on. Background checks, mental health evaluations, and “red flag” laws: almost everyone agrees to those. Most can even agree to ban high capacity magazines.
So let’s get on that, knowing that there is a looming fight over how much pain we are willing to take for the “right” to assault rifles. We can at least start to solve the problem.
