United States experienced the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. At least 58 people are dead and over 500 more wounded. Stephen Paddock, a white American of Mesquite, Nevada, had 19 rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammo in the 32nd-floor hotel suite used as a place to shoot people at a country music festival in Las Vegas.
United States is a nation that has more guns than people. The odds of you being shot dead in USA are far greater than of you being killed in a terrorist attack in Europe. Every day seven children and teens are shot dead in the US. Firearms are the biggest killer of young black people and the second biggest killer of all children, after traffic accidents.
No wall along the Mexican border can prevented this truth. No Muslim ban stopping immigrants and refugees from reaching US shores can slowed this down. But unbelievably, Trump’s “Muslim ban“, the order bars citizens of Muslim-majority countries from entering the US, is the only goal about US safety.
For centuries, when an act of violence has been committed by an African-American, racists followed the criminalization and dehumanization of an entire black people. Today when an individual claiming to be a Muslim commits a horrible act, many tell us Islam itself is the problem and Muslims often get labeled as “terrorists” before all the facts have come out.
But the white people involved in mass shootings are not considered “terrorists” but “Lone wolfes”. For example, the 2015 killing of nine people at a historically black church in South Carolina by a white supremacist, Dylann Roof, was not prosecuted as a terrorism case. James Holmes was called a “lone wolf” when he shot and killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. And Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot and killed the pastor and eight other parishioners, was quickly declared a “lone wolf.”
No one remembers US federal law defines terrorism more specifically as the “unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” For that reason Barack Obama, after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, before the identity of the attackers or their motivation had been established, said: “Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror”.
Trump instead called the Las Vegas shooting an “act of pure evil” but did not mention terrorism. Even more unbelievably, President Trump pledged his allegiance to the powerful National Rifle Association, he told in NRA convention in Atlanta: “As your president, I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms”.But in the eight months since Trump took office, more Americans have been killed in attacks by white American men with no connection to Islam than by Muslim terrorists or foreigners.
The US Administration should change its position improving upon their mistakes and learning from his cousins. The Port Arthur massacre was a massacre in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded. It occurred in 1996 and it was the deadliest mass shooting in Australian history, and amongst the most notable in history. Following, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, introduced strict gun control laws and formulated the National Firearms Programme Implementation Act, restricting the private ownership as well as introducing uniform firearms licensing. The massacre happened just six weeks after the Dunblane massacre, in Scotland, which claimed 18 lives, the United Kingdom passed its own changes to gun laws in 1997. In these coutries these killings of civilians no longer continued to be made.
It would be necessary for Trump and US Governament to realize that the way they are going about people security is wrong, that the weapons industry in the USA is a serious problem and that to fire on helpless people is always terrorism regardless of the color, religion or the murderer’s ethnicity.
5 comments for “US white terrorism”