In 1939, six months before the start of WWII, Raul de Roussy de Sales wrote, in an attempt to define American nationalism, “America is a permanent protest against the rest of the world.” Over half a century later, I would argue America is actually in a permanent protest against itself.
On Nov. 27 a man named Robert Lewis Dear opened fire next to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing two civilians and a volunteer police officer. The following day, President Barack Obama issued a statement saying, “Enough is enough…We can’t let [gun violence] become normal.” Unfortunately, it very much has: as of Oct. 1, there were 274 days in 2015, and 294 mass shootings. Obama has told Americans that “innocent people were killed in part because someone… had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”
I have written about the pandemic of gun violence, and the fact that we live in an anomalous nation that is nominally first-world yet tolerates and perpetuates violent tendencies characteristic of the poorest, most politically unstable countries on earth (in 2013, for example, New Orleans had the same rate of gun violence as Honduras).
But the discourse on firearms in the United States has taken a turn from debate to debacle, and the argument for better gun laws is so straightforward it does not merit delving into. After the shooting at Umpqua Community College in October, a beleaguered Obama, chagrined at his own powerlessness, claimed the American people had become “numb” to gun violence.
Obama is right. Entreaties to mitigate “gun violence” have become stale: we need to shift the rhetoric and refer to shooters more accurately as terrorists.
The word “terrorism” holds a rhetorical weight in current discourse that “mass shooting” or “gun violence” seems to lack, perhaps because of how weapons and violence are normalized in American culture, or due to the simple fact that they happen all the time.
In an effort to highlight the prevalence of gun violence, various news sources have juxtaposed the number of gun homicide deaths in the United States with the number of U.S. citizens killed by “terrorism,” interpreted as attacks by foreigners on U.S. citizens on national territory. But no such binary inherently exists: according to the FBI, terrorism is “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
The almost exclusive denotation of terrorists as foreigners has fed an endemic American xenophobia (particularly Islamophobia), but the terrorism plaguing this country most acutely is all too familiar and wholly American.
Mass shootings — mostly perpetrated by white male loners — are often dismissed as manifestations of mental instability, due to a public reluctance to accept the reality that, if you look at precedent, every young to middle-aged white man with a gun is a potential terrorist. Yet mental instability does not exculpate the shooters, who at core had some guiding fanaticism that led to the attacks and decided the setting and the victims.
Dear’s actions were those of a political terrorist: he targeted a Planned Parenthood clinic because “he was generally conservative… [and] believed that abortion was wrong.” Combined with a propensity toward anger and violence and exacerbated by years of self-imposed alienation, Dear likely became indignant at the notion that Planned Parenthood — which has seen an “incredible escalation of harassment and intimidation” by conservatives over the past few years according to NPR, as well as been the victim of a persistent and ridiculous propaganda campaign that claims it profits from the sale of fetal tissue – was operating close by. So Dear took one of the guns in his collection, traipsed over to the strip mall where the clinic was located, and opened fire.
Dear’s was but another in a long line of terrorist acts on Planned Parenthood clinics, which were set on fire in California, Washington and Illinois over the course of a few months in the summer and fall and continue to be threatened by insane right-wing groups. The shooting of Sen. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in Tucson in 2011 was also an act of terrorism, motivated by political dissatisfaction and, possibly, Republican encouragement to pursue “Second Amendment remedies” to perceived partisan problems. The Kansas City shooting of two people outside a synagogue and Jewish community center was a blatant terror attack, as was the killing of nine people in a historic black church in Charleston. These should be considered not mere crimes, or even hate crimes, but acts of domestic terrorism that target specific groups or individuals in order to make a statement about the social or political status quo.
Hours upon hours of analysis are devoted to answering the question of why Middle Eastern terror cells hate the United States; more time should be directed toward discussing and resolving the matter of why Americans hate each other, so much that we regularly kill each other, and fail to recognize it for what it is: terrorism.
Tamar Ziff is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at t.ziff@cavalierdaily.com.
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