Mass shootings are bigger than identity politics
Democrats have wasted no time in using this week’s tragic events to fuel their political ambitions and point score against President Trump. It’s not only shameful, but also deeply ignorant of how big this problem is, writes Miranda Devine.
It’s a pretty twisted politician who uses the tragedy of back-to-back gun massacres as an opportunity for a new bout of Trump bashing.
But that’s what America’s Democratic presidential hopefuls have been doing since a white supremacist slaughtered 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, followed 13 hours later by another mass shooting at a bar in Dayton, Ohio.
Their denunciation of Trump as a racist who incited the violence barely skipped a beat even after revelations that the Dayton shooter was a socialist anti-Trumper and registered Democrat.
Moving right along.
In the blame game stakes the worst offender was Beto O’Rourke, the 46-year-old ersatz JFK candidate, who spent all weekend telling CNN that Donald Trump is to blame.
“We have a President with white nationalist views,” he said in an effort to reanimate his failing presidential bid. “He is an open avowed racist and is encouraging more racism in this country and this is incredibly dangerous.”
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Beto even likened Trump’s “anti-immigrant rhetoric” to something out of the “Third Reich”.
“Let’s connect the dots here on … who is responsible for this right now,” he said.
CNN’s Jake Tapper cut to the chase: “Do you think President Trump is a white nationalist?”
“Yes I do,” Beto said.
It was disgusting political opportunism from a man whose first recorded reaction to the news of Saturday’s massacre in his Texan hometown was a weird smile, quickly suppressed, a man so lacking in empathy he once wrote of a teenage fantasy of ploughing his car into two children crossing the road.
But Trump derangement has so engulfed the Democratic party that even supposed moderate Joe Biden likened the President to the Ku Klux Klan and claimed he was “dog whistling” to embolden white supremacists.
At a time when America is searching its soul for an answer to the tragedy of mass shootings by troubled young men, which also occurred during the Obama, Bush and Clinton presidencies, the opposition party has no answers, only hatred.
It doesn’t get uglier than scoring political points on the deaths of 31 people. But we all can play the blame game.
For years leftists have divided the nation with identity politics and defended the fascist ideology of Islamism. Now they are trying to offload responsibility for the emergence of its mirror image: white identity politics and the fascist ideology of white supremacy.
El Paso killer 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, who is set to face the death penalty, took his inspiration from Christchurch mosque killer, Australian Brendan Tarrant.
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Crusius said so in a puerile, big-noting so-called manifesto which was posted on the same 8chan online forum in which Tarrant is glorified as “St Tarrant”.
Like Tarrant, Crusius espouses an anti-capitalist, anti-people radical green ideology.
He rails against farming, oil drilling, plastic, paper towels and “consumer culture”. He sounds like Richard Di Natale.
“My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist,” he says.
He justifies murder as “the logical step [to] decrease the number of people in America using resources”.
So, since we’re playing the blame game, how about all those climate alarmist Democrats on the debate stage last week warning of a looming environmental Armageddon?
Their doomsday rhetoric creates an atmosphere of nihilism which makes susceptible young men despair. Yet we don’t accuse climate alarmists of having blood on their hands.
We simply don’t know why Crusius, or Dayton killer Connor Betts, 24, chose the path of hatred and bloodshed.
What we do know is that, like other shooters, Crusius’ childhood was marred by his parents’ marital dysfunction.
His father, Bryan, has reportedly written a memoir about the four decades of drug and alcohol addiction which led to his second wife throwing him out of the house when his killer son was 12.
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We also know from Crusius’s LinkedIn page that, like Tarrant, he spent an inordinate amount of time online, “about eight hours every day”.
What we know of the Dayton killer, who was shot dead by police after killing nine people, including his sister, is that he was scarily disturbed.
Suspended from school for writing “kill lists” of classmates, he described himself on social media as a pro-Satan “leftist”, who liked amphetamines, hated Trump and the police, and was a fan of socialism and Democrat Elizabeth Warren. He also was in a “Pornogrind” band, a genre of music reportedly specialising in fantasies about the violent rape and murder of women.
A thoroughly twisted unit.
But there are lots of problems in society: family breakdown, drug addiction, gaming addiction, angry young men, mental illness, a suicide epidemic.
You can’t fix root causes overnight.
What you can change is American’s inexplicably easy access to battlefield weapons.
The El Paso killer’s manifesto makes it clear that he wanted to use an AR15 “if I get one” but had to settle for the next best thing, a “civilian” AK47.
At the very least, battlefield weapons should be impossible to procure for someone aged under 25, when the rational part of the brain has not yet fully developed.
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On Tuesday, Trump’s favourite newspaper, the New York Post, where I am based for the next year-and-a- half, ran a front-page editorial addressed to the President: “America is scared … It’s time to Ban Weapons of War.”
The editorial describes Trump as a “pragmatic centrist” on gun control, “who knows there is a vast majority of Americans who are not to the extreme left or right on this issue. They just want the killings to stop”.
Trump seems receptive to any solution. “Hate has no place in our country and we’re going to take care of it,” he said on Tuesday. “We have to get it stopped.”
So, rather than engaging in empty blame games about the “racist” in the White House, thoughtful politicians on both sides should do their job: come together and figure out how to stop this scourge.
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