Following two consecutive tragic shootings on Saturday, President Trump has taken to Twitter (as usual) to talk gun control, immigration, white supremacy, and the media. His tweets are nothing short of controversial, of course, and have sparked further heated discussions in the wake of one of the saddest days in recent American history. Given Trump’s own rhetoric throughout his term as President, his reactions to the tragedy and his proposed measures are, to say the least, ultimately incongruous.
The shootings
As you probably know, two mass shootings took place over the weekend, leaving 34 people dead and dozens more injured in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Both were committed by white males in their 20s using high-powered assault rifles. The terrorist at El Paso managed to kill 22 people before surrendering to the authorities, while the shooter at Dayton killed 9 people before being shot by police—who responded in less than a minute after the shooting started. The fact that it took fewer than 60 seconds for a 20-year-old to injure and kill so many people led many to question (again) why any average citizen would need to get their hands on a high-powered assault rifle in the first place.
Trump’s reaction
Trump focused mostly on addressing mental illness instead of gun legislation—in a true Republican manner. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” he said during his televised address Monday morning. “Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul… Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger. Not the gun.”
Shifting the blame to psychology instead of ideology and access to high-powered weapons has been the GOP’s go-to strategy for decades now, and it’s safe to say it is having terrible consequences. The numbers don’t lie, as every single other developed country has shown that strict gun control leads to decreased mass shootings—every single time. It happened in Australia. It happened in the UK. And it happened in basically every European nation.
This year alone, the U.S. has had 250 mass shootings—more than one per day. That’s far more than any other country in the world, and 250 more than pretty much all developed countries out there. This is obviously not a coincidence.
Many have been quick to point out that mental illness, hatred, and extremist ideologies exist in the rest of the world, yet the mass shooting rates between America and other countries are simply incomparable. The key difference? The rest of the world has gun control. And it clearly works.
Trump also blamed “the glorification of violence in our society” in video games and elsewhere, as well as the media and fake news, for the shootings. And though he condemned white supremacism, the president stopped short of acknowledging the impact of his own rhetoric on the divisive atmosphere in America.
“The Media has a big responsibility to life and safety in our Country. Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years. News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!,” he tweeted.
In all fairness, Trump did call for “stronger background checks” in one of his tweets, but did not elaborate on what he meant. Unfortunately, he also suggested tying gun legislation with his political agenda regarding immigration reform—a move that has proven highly controversial given the explicit circumstances of the shootings.
It’s a big problem to conflate these two completely unrelated issues. It is not immigrants who are perpetrating mass shootings, after all—though they are the victims. So, suggesting that the two policies should go hand in hand is strange, at best.
Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was one among many to call out Trump’s flawed logic here, stating that it is “absurd” to link these two issues together in public policy. “He’s linking the issue of basic, common-sense gun reform, that we should be going back into the Senate today to vote on, with this issue of immigration because again he continues to try to demonize people seeking asylum, people needing our help,” Gillibrand told CNN.
It is not the first time Trump has called for stronger background checks following a shooting. After a similar incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last year, Trump suggested similar measures, promising to be “very strong on background checks,” only to later threaten to block and veto bills from House Democrats looking to implement precisely that.
Trump also claimed to be directing the Department of Justice to propose the death penalty for perpetrators of hate crimes and mass murders, with special focus on delivering capital punishment as expediently as possible in these cases.
The motives behind the terrorist attack and Trump’s incongruence
While the motives behind the Dayton terrorist’s motives remain obscure, the shooter at El Paso, a 21-year-old white male, reportedly posted a 4-page anti-immigrant manifesto on 8chan (an online message board well-known for its racist content). Many have pointed out that portions of the shooter’s 2,300-word essay disturbingly mirror Trump’s own xenophobic, racist rhetoric, which itself closely mirrors the language white supremacists use across America. The terrorist stood against what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” an expression that Trump himself has used in almost identical terms. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” Trump declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!”
Among those concerned for Trump’s own role regarding the attacks is former congressman Beto O’Rourke. “I mean, connect the dots about what he’s been doing in this country,” O’Rourke said about the president Sunday. “He’s not tolerating racism, he’s promoting racism. He’s not tolerating violence, he’s inciting racism and violence in this country.”
Even Republicans are worried about Trump’s obvious role in promoting hate across the country. Republican Senator John S. McCollister, for instance, laments that his own party is “complicit to obvious racist and immoral activity,” an all-too-obvious fact that’s getting more and more difficult for the GOP to deny. McCollister claims that “The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy in our country,” and points directly to Trump’s explicitly racist rants and language against non-whites.
In his tweets, McCollister refers to Trump’s recent racist attacks targeting four democratic congresswomen, three of whom were born in America and all of whom are American citizens, telling them to “go back to their country.” Trump has also previously defended white supremacists during a white nationalist march at Charlottesville, where one woman was killed after one of the supremacists ran over a crowd protesting the march. Trump said back then that “there were fine people on both sides.”
The American people are not blind to the irony and dangerous nature of Trump’s stance. As Ivanka Trump condemned white supremacy in the wake of the shootings, many quickly responded by pointing out precisely this issue on her Twitter, calling out her family for being part of the problem they now so conveniently decry.
But we can’t have it both ways. If the president so unabashedly promotes hate throughout the country, hateful consequences like these tragic shootings are hardly surprising.
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