These inconvenient facts
In the waning days of Barack Obama’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a set of grants to organizations working to counter violent extremism, including among white supremacists. One of the grantees was Life After Hate, which The Hill has called “one of the only programs in the U.S. devoted to helping people leave neo-Nazi and other white supremacy groups.” Another grant went to researchers at the University of North Carolina who were helping young people develop media campaigns aimed at preventing their peers from embracing white supremacy and other violent ideologies. But soon after Trump took office, his administration canceled both of these grants. In its first budget, it requested no funding for any grants in this field.
Because? We want more violent white supremacy?
“Under this administration,” says Selim, who now works at the Anti-Defamation League, “there’s been a precipitous decline in the dedicated staff and program funding devoted to combatting ideologically motivated violence.”
This decline can’t be chalked up to general budget cuts. Although Trump has slashed funding for many domestic departments, he increased Department of Homeland Security spending by more than 7 percent in his first budget and another 4 percent in his second. The cuts stem instead from two biases. First, in keeping with their law-and-order mentality, Trump officials would rather empower the police to arrest suspected terrorists than work with local communities to prevent people from becoming terrorists in the first place, as the Office of Community Partnerships did. Second, they believe the primary terrorist threat to Americans is jihadism, not white supremacy. The Office of Community Partnerships committed the sin of working on both.
The first one makes no sense at all. It’s better to let people shoot up Walmarts and then punish them than it is prevent them from wanting to shoot up Walmarts in the first place? Even if you love punishing people for its own sake, there are still the victims of the shootings to consider, not to mention everyone who will miss them.
In 2017, the FBI concluded that white supremacists killed more Americans from 2000 to 2016 than “any other domestic extremist movement.” But Trump advisers have shrugged off these inconvenient facts. In an interview in 2017, White House Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka declared that there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot [in the United States] that was unconnected from isis or al-Qaeda.” When critics cited the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Gorka responded, “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t.”
Yes, it is. The stats are clear.
If, like Trump, you hate non-white people, yes, you do.
This post seems as good as any to link a couple vids from Beau of the Fifth Column: a playlist on guns and gun control and a comment on what individuals can do.
As someone who grew up in the country, I never experienced any sort of “gun culture” until I moved to the city. You know what none of my rural family would ever do? Shoot a firearm into the air for shits & giggles. Bullets come back down. And yet, every July 4 and Dec 31, I worry about taking my dog for a walk because fools empty magazines into the sky all night long. People on my street have found bullet holes in their cars. Who knows where else lead has landed?
The Dayton shooter kept a “hit list” and a “rape list” in high school. If only we had some way of knowing in advance who is likely to commit such acts….
I also grew up in the country. My dad did target shooting and taught us all to shoot – and keep guns unloaded in the house and keep ammunition locked up.
BUT…I didn’t have the experience you did. I think it may be more your family than being rural. I think it’s how people perceive the world. In the rural area around here, shooting off guns for shits and giggles is common. In my rural family, my brother shot himself in the hand because he was playing with a gun. He went to work in the city as a security guard at McDonald’s, and shot his gun through the back fence regularly for jollies. (In the city. Where children, adults, pets, whatever, could be walking right behind that fence). Until he got caught at it and fired. Thank goodness no one ever got hurt.
In my (smallish) city, guns are a problem, like in your city. Regularly have episodes of neighborhoods finding their cars shot up in the mornings (never mine, because we use the garage). Guns are everywhere. And the rural kids who come into the city bring their guns with them, brag about carrying guns in places where guns are not allowed (such as on school property), and joke about shooting people. They shoot off their guns in random places and put videos of themselves on YouTube.
In other words, it isn’t a stupid, immoral city vs. smart, wholesome rural folk. That trope angers me, because it is inherently racist, though most people are not aware of it…the city is diverse, often a lot of blacks and immigrants, and a lot of single women, while the country is white and delightsome (to quote one particularly egregious religious text).
It isn’t geography, it’s…I don’t know, personality? Assholes vs. non-assholes? My brother is an asshole in pretty much every way that counts, and so are most of the people around here (my current community) who wave guns around, whether rural, urban, or somewhere in between.
I didn’t really mean to suggest that dichotomy. People with a rural background are people, and people are people. I’m painfully aware of that. As our two histories show, rural populations are not monolithic. Could I have ended up with a similar attitude toward firearms had I grown up in the city? Do rural communities have their own problems with gun violence and injuries? Absolutely!
All I can speak to is my own experience, and I genuinely believe that place played a part in it. Maybe not a determining part, but I can’t imagine that I would have the same attitude toward firearms had I not grown up around people for whom long guns are mere tools and handguns might as well not exist. That they were (and are) farmers had to have influenced that perspective.
Perhaps. Except most of the farmers around here are NRA advocates, and their trucks all have signs about cold dead hands and barrels. Place may be it, but I suspect it transcends place. Very few of the people I knew when I lived in a large city would have any desire for guns, and those that did were more than sensible with them. But a lot of the people in that city (Oklahoma City for one, Denton, TX for another) were just like the people who want to have guns, guns, and more guns.
So I suspect less place than political or social attitudes. Probably social more than political.