Brad Pector
In the wake of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, guns should be at the center of our discussion, not ISIS. Undoubtedly, CNN, NBC, and Fox News will tag onto the “Islamic extremist” argument, but it’s a farce that will create more hate; we blame “the other” without first looking deeply into the mirror.
In the United States; we struggle to call mall shooters and theater shooters (mostly white) by their true names: terrorists. We have branded Islam as the only body that can create terror, but we need to look at our statistics at home.
White terrorists commit more mass shootings in the United States than any other ethnic group. We are projecting onto our Muslim allies and forgetting what truly lies at the center: hatred and guns. It’s this combination that will spur more white terrorists to retaliate against Muslims.
We should ask ourselves, “Where do we separate identity from violence and when?” The largest mass shooting in U.S. history now occurred at a gay club that was featuring black and Latina trans women as headliners, with a largely Latina audience during LGBTQ+ Pride Month and Immigrant Heritage Month. If you want to talk about identity and oppression, let’s start there.
Imraan Siddiqi (@ImraanSiddiqi), the leader of Hate Hurts (hatehurts.net), a nonprofit organization focused on publishing hateful acts against the Muslim community, has been keeping tabs on this violence for a long time. CAIR (ciar.com), the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States, has been doing the same. It’s alarming to see what the mainstream media have chosen to ignore; hate against Muslims is not new, and it is growing.
While Islamophobia grows, so do shootings in general (Cedar Rapids has been reporting alarming numbers, and so has Chicago, with 69 people shot over Memorial Day weekend (Chicago Tribune). While these shootings occur for different reasons, “lone wolf” homicidal shooters, regardless of ethnicity, are usually hateful, abusive men. The Washington Post has published an article featuring an ex-wife of the Orlando shooter. She states, “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.” This seems to be a repeating theme.
Even near Iowa City, at the Coralville mall, a shooting occurred in which a 20-year-old woman was murdered. Andrea Farrington was shot three times in the back by Alexander Kozak, a previous security guard for the mall (Omar Seddique Mateen was also a licensed security guard). Apparently, she denied his sexual advances prior to the shooting. This kind of violence is not going away, and if anything, it has come closer than ever before.
In 2012, Mother Jones (motherjones.com), started a piece that has grown every year since it was published, and it was updated again on Sunday. This article, “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America,” shows how there have been “at least 80 [mass shootings] in the last three-plus decades — and most of the killers got their guns legally.” The weapons industry owns Congress, with $3.6 million spent for NRA lobbying (opensecrets.org).
And our weapons issue isn’t just a national one. The tragedy that occurred in Orlando should alert us to our violent global presence as well; the United States sold “$46.6 billion worth of [weapons] hardware” in 2015, according to the International Business Times (ibtimes.com), which is “the second-highest end-of-year figure in Pentagon history.”
It only takes one person with a couple guns to create a massive tragedy, and as long as people are profiting from weapons sales nationally and internationally, none of us are safe. We tend to shift our ideologies in a reactionary way– it takes a tragic event such as the shooting in Orlando to alert the nation, but it may not alert us in the right way. If we blame others for the violent arms we’re promoting, we will have signed a death wish for our friends, our family, and ourselves.