President Trump was in Tokyo when the latest mass shooting in Texas killed 25 and came five weeks after the biggest mass shooting in US history in Las Vegas that had killed 55. In both the instances, the perpetrator was a white male. President Trump was not too concerned about the latest tragedy. He said that it was the work of a sick mind and that the United States had its fair share of such sick men as any other country.
President Donald Trump was partly right. The white male, who shot 25 dead inside a Church during a Sunday mass, was in all probability, mentally sick. He was also right in his assessment that the USA had its share of such sick men. Which country does not? However, his compassion for the Texas and Las Vegas terrorists was selective. When the lone perpetrator had killed 8 in Manhattan by running his rented pickup into a cycle path early this month, President Trump called for his death penalty and reinforced his demand for "extreme" vetting for Muslims because the Manhattan killer was both a Muslim and an immigrant. The US President did not think that he too could be mentally unstable.
The President could not have underlined more emphatically that for him, it is colour and religion that distinguish whether a killer is a terrorist or a mentally sick person where guns and automatic weapons are used to terrorise and kill. If the perpetrator is a Muslim, he is a terrorist and it is Islam that is at the root of his terrorism. If the perpetrator is white, it does not matter how many he kills or where he kills them; he is entitled to the benefit of being mentally unstable simply because he is white and he is not a Muslim. It is only where the perpetrator of mass shootings is a Muslim, he becomes a terrorist.
For President Trump and his supporters, it is nevertheless becoming increasingly difficult to defend these gun-related deaths in the United States by hiding the real cause. Islamic terrorism has now declined sharply in the United States and with it, one major weapon of fear-mongering in the name of Islamic terrorism. Americans are now seeing what people like Trump had tried hard to hide that, the real terrorists in the United States are the white terrorists and they are able to carry their terrorist activities with consummate ease because the President is defending them on grounds of mental sickness and they can buy their guns and automatic weapons literally without any questions asked as has been the case with the killer in the Texas terrorism.
The media that in the past had failed to see the real cause of terrorism in the United States is now being encouraged to come out of their denial. The fact that it can no longer find the connection between these major terrorist acts and the Muslims, it is seeing what has always been before it and the American nation that the real cause of deaths through terrorism in their country is its absurd gun laws and has very little to do with so-called Islamic terrorism. According to statistics released this week, 100,000 Americans were killed in the country in 2016 through gun-related violence, placing the USA on top of gun-related deaths, a position that it has no chance of ever losing as long as its gun laws remain the way they are.
The absurd US gun laws make it easier for US teenagers to buy guns and other dangerous firearms than buying cigarettes because the law makes it punishable to sell cigarettes to minors that is not the case for gun purchase.
THE ISSUE OF SECOND AMENDMENT: There is, of course, another major issue that exists only in the United States and in no other country that makes buying guns and firearms so ridiculously easy. It is the country's Second Amendment to the Constitution. If Americans would be willing to take a look into this Amendment and feel the need to revise it, then only would the way out from the dangers of white-perpetrated terrorism be at the fingertips of those who make the laws of the United States or amend it.
The Second Amendment was necessary because the thirteen original states that had come together to create the United States of America in 1789 wanted to restrict the powers of the federal government. The Amendment was introduced to give the states the power to raise their own militia and the individuals, to arm themselves. The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." White Americans have defended this Second Amendment like USA's existence depended upon it. In the country's present two-party system that developed much later, the Republicans have made the Second Amendment the cornerstone of their Party's conservative base but many white Democrats also support the Second Amendment with equal passion.
And this passion of white America for guns and to protect any effort to restrict gun ownership gave birth to the most powerful lobby in the country, the National Rifle Association (NRA) in 1871. It gathered tremendous political clout over the years and ensured that Americans would be able to buy firearms without any questions asked about who was buying them and for what use. The NRA has helped make the right of Americans to keep arms as fundamental and perhaps more than all the other human and civil rights that the US constitution allows.
As gun-related terrorist activities of the so-called Islamic terrorists are falling drastically and conversely, those by the white terrorists rising dramatically, the mainstream media is being forced to focus more on the need to act upon the country's incredible gun laws and the Second Amendment. While the country is still far from feeling the need to do something with the Second Amendment, the voice for clipping the powers of the NRA and making the purchase of guns, particularly those necessary for mass killings difficult, are rising strongly. There are also strong moves from the Democrats for subjecting purchase of firearms to the mental condition of buyers so that guns do not fall into the hands of those that the President wants to protect on their mental conditions.
Nevertheless, these moves are far short of what would be required to check insanity in the United States with gun-related terrorism. In fact, while defending the latest mass killing in Texas and that too inside a church on the perpetrator's mental health to deflect the heat from the gun laws, President Trump had forgotten some facts he cannot dismiss as creation of the fake media. The NRA had put US$ 30 million to his campaign and the President paid it back when he reversed the ban placed by President Obama that had made it harder for individuals with a history of mental health issues to buy guns almost as soon as he sat in the Oval Office. Had he not done so, the white terrorist in Texas would not have had the guns that he had used to kill.
Notwithstanding President Trump and the Republican Party's support for the Second Amendment and the NRA, it is a matter of time when they would not be able to blame the so-called Islamic terrorists to save Second Amendment as it is or the NRA's power for between the two, they have emerged as much greater threats to the lives of the Americans than so-called Islamic terrorism. The latest game that President Trump has played by defending white terrorism on mental health and earlier by blaming Islam for terrorism where the perpetrators are Muslims is not going to last much longer. It is breaking in the seams.
However, as long as it lasts, the Republican Party would continue to prove Noam Chomsky correct. In an interview to the BBC in May this year, he had said that the Republican Party "is the worst dangerous organisation in human history." A party that supports the Second Amendment as sacrosanct and an organisation like the NRA that helps kill such a huge number of innocent people as its ally cannot be anything else.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
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