The Patriot Post® · American Violence, Gun and Other
It’s an avalanche — violence of every kind, in every place, over and over. Surely, we’ve all noticed — but we seem to be looking the other way, not facing up to it.
In our little corner of the world, we’ve had two mass shootings in the past two weeks — five killed and 25 injured by an assailant at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, and six more in a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. Each received a flurry of attention, but the background noise of dozens of shooting deaths each week in American cities is largely ignored.
It’s not just shooting. A still-unidentified killer stabbed four University of Idaho students to death two weeks ago. The 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was bludgeoned with a hammer by an intruder in his own home. The New York City subway system has become a preferred venue for muggings, unprovoked attacks, even pushing unsuspecting commuters onto the tracks.
And there are too many other lethal incidents to mention in this brief column. Is it an exaggeration to characterize the clear uptick of violence, here and worldwide, as an epidemic? It’s beginning to feel like that.
I don’t profess to understand its causes, although It’s not unreasonable to assume that it is linked in a very real way to the years of pandemic with its physical and cultural disruptions, periods of isolation, lost opportunity and income, distinct reduction in personal human contact.
We can’t un-bake that cake — but as we wrestle with its consequences and cast about for solutions, some evidently critical considerations jump right out:
The explosion of violent behavior in America is pervasive, societally endemic and deep seated. So-called “gun violence” is only part of the problem, and that part is fundamentally a violence problem, not a gun problem.
There is an obvious correlation between the level of violence we’re seeing today and the hyper-partisanship pulling Americans apart. Once upon a time, we simply disagreed with one another on political matters. Now we hate one another. Each side presumes the other to have the most malign motivations imaginable. As an op-ed writer, I see that presumption — and feel it — constantly.
We must stop treating each ugly incident as a political opportunity (i.e., never letting a good crisis go to waste), assigning blame and grasping for a simplistic fix. That’s just spinning our wheels and digging us into a deeper hole.
Examples abound. The color of a victim’s skin need not point to racist motivations. A violent crime at an LGTBQ venue need not imply that it was a hate crime was driven by disapproval of sexual orientation. Because a target is a political figure on one side of the partisan divide does not necessarily imply political violence.
In the immediate aftermath of the Colorado Springs murders, it was assumed that the assailant was right-wing and anti-LGBTQ. Then we learned that the killer was a non-binary transgender. Go figure. After the attack on Paul Pelosi, the president himself linked the assault with the January 6th assault on the Capitol almost two years ago. But early on, we learned that the intruder was a drug-addicted, mentally unbalanced vagrant.
What matters is the consequence, not the sensationalism of the crime. We pay particular attention to “mass shootings,” but six individuals gunned down by a single shooter are not more tragic than six individuals gunned down separately. The loss of five human lives at an LGTBQ club is no less — or more — tolerable if the murderer is motivated by bias, or by greed, or because of mental instability.
- Don’t underestimate the huge influence of leadership. Every leader casts a shadow, for good or for bad, and that leader’s followers emulate the leader’s behavior, good or bad. It always works. The shadow-of-the-leader principle always works, in every kind of organization — sports teams, cub scout packs, corporations large and small, political parties … and nations.
It’s unfortunately true that both our current president and his predecessor both routinely express, in word and deed, utter contempt for their political opponents. We need a president who can act on the pledge to unity that Joe Biden articulated in his inaugural address two years ago — and that he immediately abandoned.
On Inauguration Day 2021, he said, “We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace.” Perhaps at the time, we did not realize the truth of that assertion. Now we do, and now is the time to start walking the talk.