Two mass shootings in one weekend is a new low even for the United States. No other country regards multiple murder of its own citizens with such apparent equanimity.
It’s hard to know what to say; hard to know if there is anything to say that hasn’t already been said as many times as bullets have ended innocent lives.
Short version: it’s the guns, stupid.
No one president is to blame, they all are – but the present incumbent is the pits. After 29 people were killed in mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend, President Trump made the usual noises of muddled regret. He blamed mental health, saying this “was a problem if you look at both of these cases”.
Perhaps, or perhaps not, but guns are the bigger problem. Guns are always the problem, but the US is welded to some demented old frontier mentality about guns offering protection.
Mental illness may well be an element, but only when combined with the ease of acquiring weapons. And who signed a bill overturning an Obama-era regulation that prevented individuals with mental health problems from buying guns? Your man Donald (photographs of Trump signing that bill are reportedly being hidden).
The attack on a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas is said to have been carried out by a young man who had a grudge against Mexicans taking over the state. Maybe that shooter, still alive, will turn out to be mentally ill. But race hatred is a fact, too. The sheriff of El Paso, Richard Wiles, said on Facebook: “This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics.”
You cannot separate that hate-filled intent from a president who stands up to his fat ankles in a swill of racial hatred. Everybody knows Trump is an avowed racist – however much he backtracks afterwards.
It’s not possible to say Trump’s vile words about migrants and Mexicans (and all people from that place called ‘foreign’) directly lead to such attacks. But it is possible to say Trump gives tacit approval to white supremacy.
The people of El Paso feel they have no choice but to call this a hate crime and an act of terrorism against Latinos. They live in a city much reviled by Trump. Yet that city was largely safe, until a hate-filled young white supremacist arrived.
Yet what does Trump say after the attacks; what words of soothing good sense does he offer? Oh, try this one: “This has been going on for years, for years and years in our country and we have to get it stopped.”
More buck-passing: it’s been going on for years (don’t blame me) and “we have to get it stopped”. Er, you “get it stopped”, mate. You’re the president.
Oh, and Trump also said “hate has no place” in the US. Yes, the most hate-filled president there’s ever been thinks hate has no place in the US. That’s the man who fills the small hours firing off hate-poxed rants on Twitter.
Incidentally, public expressions of hate are not confined to the US. We have our own versions, thanks to Brexit. Leave.EU posted a tweet the other day in which Remainers were described as “vermin”.
When one half of the country starts calling the other half “vermin”, we have a problem.