El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio mark 251 mass shootings in the United States this year (216 days since January 1). This puts 2019 on pace to be the first year since 2016 with an average of more than one mass shooting a day. Altogether, 125 people have been killed in the US in mass shootings in 2019.
The number of mass shootings across the U.S. so far in 2019 has outpaced the number of days this year, according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, which tracks every mass shooting in the country. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as any incident in which at least four people were shot (not necessarily killed), excluding the shooter.
The Democratic pack running for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination have lost no time in blaming President Trump and his supporters for the loss of life. The progressive left, supported by the social and national media are claiming that Trump’s narrative about liberals, progressive elites, the Democratic Party, and their unwavering support for unrestricted migration on America’s Southern border (so as to cynically engineer social and demographic changes in America’s heartland) is the cause. By opposing these, President Trump and the Republican party are being held responsible for the latest mass shootings.
These progressive, liberal, Democratic Party Presidential wannabees and representatives like the “Squad” have claimed in justification of their vilification of President Trump and American society as a whole, that America was founded on racism, on racial terrorism, and various systems of oppression and discrimination. They express an open hostility towards white men and hold them responsible for the latest attacks. With President Trump being cast in the role of the “usual suspect” and the most visible “White Man” in the room ; Democratic contender O’Rourke was even quoted stating “He doesn’t just tolerate, he encourages the kind of open racism and the violence that necessarily follows, that we saw here in El Paso.”
Sadly, these Democratic nominees are blinded by their own myopic ability to understand the roots of homegrown terrorism, a development most associated in recent years with no other than President Obama and the Democratic administration he led. During his term of office President Obama refused to associate or even condone singling out and referring to the Islamist ideology behind the terror attacks that rocked America.
The 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, the 2009 Fort Hood massacre and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, had fundamentalist Islamic ideology written all over them in bold letters. Fort Hood was infamously described as “workplace violence” even though it was inspired by Islamist hatred and Al-Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki. The Boston bomber terrorist even got a glowing cover of Rolling Stone, and transcripts of the Orlando attack purposely removed their declaration of allegiance to ISIS.
President Obama and his Democratic administration purposely used the term “violent extremism” regarding these kinds of incidents, not referencing the religious motivation that culminated in these mass shootings. The goal of not wanting to offend or link these acts of terror with Islamic ideologies has created the situation that America finds itself in today.
This logic of not wanting to offend Muslims and the Islamic religion has filtered down into law enforcement agencies at the national as well as local levels and has impeded these law enforcement agencies from confronting mass shootings as homegrown terrorism in the United States. The identity of a small number of white men involved in recent mass shootings, this out of 251 mass shootings since the beginning of the year, has been the focus of the media, rather than the organizational handicap and years of the internalization of political correctness of law enforcement agencies instituted during the Obama period.
Allocation of resources, confronting networks of hate online and getting to these homegrown terrorists before they carry out their so called “mission” to save America were severely debilitated during the era of President Obama’s policies of not wanting to offend and not doing what is necessary to confront homegrown terror.
President Trump must not treat Islamic terror and white supremacy terror as mutually exclusive threats but as one strategic challenge along the all-inclusive wide spectrum of home grown terror.
Law-enforcement agencies will be given the green light to enlist all the resources necessary to reach those that spread network and internet based hate creating motivation and inspiration for those on the threshold of wanting to go out and act to either destroy America or to "save" America.
In some of the recent terror attacks, the terrorists left manifestos on internet websites before they carried out their attacks, enabling these terrorists to have been fished out prior to executing their planned terror attacks.
Law enforcement agencies will have to un-learn much of the political correctness that has guided their preventive operational activities put in place since the Obama period.
On Christmas Eve 2016, Professor George Ciccariello of Drexel University in Philadelphia, “was” in the words of CNN “dreaming not of a white Christmas, but of a white massacre.” What were Professor Ciccariello’s words? “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”
In today’s fast paced world of digital information, the outrage delivered through digital media tends to distort and magnify one’s sense of threat, one’s sense of vulnerability. We must begin to ask the difficult question of how did we get to this place, in which hating white people is deemed acceptable and wishing them all murdered is deemed a virtue.
Terror is terror, whether it originates in the back room of a Mosque or in the back room of Dallas garage. By not making the distinction between them, American society can begin to respond effectively to the challenges of terror in America.
The writer, a 25-year veteran of the I.D.F Medical Corp., served as a field mental health officer. Prior to retiring in 2005, served as the Commander of the Central Psychiatric Military Clinic for Reserve Soldiers at Tel-Hashomer. Since retiring from active duty, he provides consultancy services to NGO’s implementing Psycho trauma and Community Resilience programs to communities in the North and South of Israel. Is a former strategic advisor on Public Diplomacy for the Office of the Chief Foreign Envoy of Judea and Samaria.