TUESDAY, AUGUST 6 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A25
A
nother day in America, another
flurry of bullets, another massa-
cre.
Sometimes, the gunman
opens fire at Walmart, apparently be-
cause he believes America is being
invaded by Mexicans, who must there-
fore die, as in El Paso on Saturday
(22 dead; more than two dozen injured).
Occasionally, he shoots up a former
workplace after resigning for murky
“personal reasons,” as in Virginia Beach
on May 31 (12 dead; four injured).
At other times, as in Pittsburgh on
Oct. 27, 2018, according to police, the
killer takes aim at Jews whom he hates
for allegedly plotting to resettle the
U.S. with refugees (11 dead; six injured).
Or a shooter will barge into the offices
of a newspaper against which he has a
grievance, and start mowing people
down, as occurred at the Capital Gazette
in Annapolis on June 28, 2018 (five
killed; two injured).
It is not unheard of for someone
angry over a domestic quarrel to invade
a church and begin shooting indiscrimi-
nately, as on Nov. 5, 2017, at Sutherland
Springs, Tex. (26 dead; 20 injured).
Once in a while, someone will point a
weapon out of an upper-floor hotel
window and, for no particular reason at
all, rain 1,100 rounds on people attend-
ing a country-music concert, which is
what happened in Las Vegas on Oct. 1,
2017 (58 dead; 851 injured).
Then there’s the shooter, “fueled by
rage against Republican legislators,” in
the words of a subsequent report by the
local prosecutor, who attacked GOP
congressmen as they practiced for a
charity baseball game, on June 14, 2017,
in Alexandria. (Six injured; thanks to
the intervention of a Capitol Police
security detail, the suspect was killed
before he could complete what would
otherwise have been a mass political
assassination.)
Another time, on June 12, 2016, in
Orlando, a perpetrator entered a night-
club frequented by gay Latino men and
began shooting, pausing to call 911 and
tell the police that he was a follower of
the Islamic State terror group exacting
revenge for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and
Syria (49 dead; 53 injured).
On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, in
downtown Dallas, a sniper targeted
police officers in apparent retaliation
for the deaths of black men at the hands
of law enforcement (five dead; nine
injured).
It has also happened, in San Bernardi-
no, Calif., on Dec. 2, 2015, that a married
couple, inspired by Islamist terrorist
groups abroad, planned and carried out
an attack on an office Christmas party
(14 people killed; 22 injured).
That was just a few months after June
17, 2015, when a white 18-year-old male,
obsessed with the idea that “blacks were
taking over the world,” according to
police, entered an African American
church in Charleston, S.C., and began
firing at people as they prayed (nine
killed).
And going back a bit further, to
Dec. 14, 2012, there was the time when a
20-year-old in the grip of “severe and
deteriorating internalized mental
health problems... combined with an
atypical preoccupation with violence,”
as an official investigation concluded,
brought a semiautomatic rifle and huge
quantities of ammunition to Sandy
Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Conn. (27 dead; two injured).
Every time, the story is a bit different.
The shooters are white (e.g., El Paso,
Pittsburgh), black (Virginia Beach, Dal-
las), young (Charleston), middle-aged
(Las Vegas), Muslim (Orlando, San Ber-
nardino) or Christian (Sutherland
Springs).
What all the cases on this very limited
partial list of American carnage have in
common is that, each time, someone
bent on mass murder found it possible
— easy, really — to get the weaponry
with which to carry out those inten-
tions.
Sometimes, as in Sutherland Springs,
they did so despite laws (which were not
properly enforced). For the most part,
though, they got their guns legally; the
killer in Las Vegas had no fewer than
24 firearms in his hotel room, of which
22 were assault-style rifles, many with
100-round magazines and “bump
stocks” for rapid firing.
Max Weber, the German sociologist,
provided the classic definition of the
state as “a human community that
(successfully) claims the monopoly of
the legitimate use of physical force” and
“is considered the sole source of the
‘right’ to use violence.”
By that definition, the United States is
not a state; we have a constitution that
distributes the right to use armed force
among the federal government, state
and local governments and, via the
Second Amendment, individuals.
And we have a special interest lobby,
with near-total control over the Republi-
can Party, that exploits and distorts the
nation’s founding document to block
reasonable firearm regulations that
would be consistent with individual
freedom but protective of modern soci-
ety.
No doubt there are benefits (hunting,
self-defense in remote areas) to this
situation. What’s now more apparent
than ever, however, is the cost — the
traumatic, bloody, unbearable cost.
[email protected]
CHARLES LANE
The one thing
that links all
mass shootings
“It is remarkable by how much a
pinch of malice enhances the penetrat-
ing power of an idea or an opinion.
Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully at-
tuned to sneers and evil reports about
our fellow men.”
— Eric HofferI
t is 1,218 miles from the Aaron
Bessant Park Amphitheater in
Panama City Beach, Fla., to the
Walmart at 7101 Gateway Blvd. W
in El Paso. It was in that park that
President Trump, on May 8, was
amused by the answer someone in his
audience shouted in response to his
shouted question about would-be im-
migrants at the southern border. His
question was, “How do you stop these
people?” The shouted answer was,
“Shoot them.” Trump, with a grade
schooler’s delight in naughtiness,
smiled and replied, “Only in the Pan-
handle you can get away with that
statement.” But does what happens in
the Panhandle stay there?
When mass shootings occur, the
nation quickly returns to worthy de-
bates about three questions. One is
whether gun-control measures can be
both constitutional and effective in
making mass shootings less likely. A
second debate concerns the ability and
propriety of law enforcement (in
which private citizens properly have a
collaborative role) attempts to identify
individuals, usually young males, who
might violently act out their inner
turmoil.
The third question, which is braided
with the second, acquires special ur-
gency because of the nature of today’s
most prominent American: Can we
locate causes of violence in prompt-
ings from the social atmosphere?
To the first question, part of the
answer is that a reasonable reading of
the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller deci-
sion, which affirmed that the Second
Amendment guarantees the individu-
al a right to bear arms, permits many
measures regulating certain kinds of
weapons and ammunition magazines.
The second question must be in-
formed by the third — and by science.
James Q. Wilson (1931-2012), the
most accomplished social scientist of
his time, noted that genetics and neu-
roscience suggest that self-control is
more attenuated in men, and especial-
ly in young men, than in women. The
part of the brain that stimulates anger
and aggression is larger in men, and
the part that restrains anger is smaller
in men. Wilson emphasized that this
does not mean that violent men are
absolved of blame. It does mean that as
biology and the social environment
interact, this environment must be
treated with care by prominent peo-
ple.
It is not implausible to believe that
Trump’s years of sulfurous rhetoric —
never mind his Monday-morning
reading, seemingly for the first time, of
words the teleprompter told him to
recite — can provoke behaviors from
susceptible individuals, such as the
alleged El Paso shooter. If so, those
who marked ballots for Trump — we
have had quite enough exculpatory
sociology about the material depriva-
tions and status anxieties of the white
working class — should have second or
perhaps first thoughts. His Republican
groupies, meanwhile, are complicit.
The grotesquely swollen place of the
presidency in governance (now that
governance has become, for Congress,
merely a spectator sport) and society
has been made possible by journalism
that is mesmerized by, and easily ma-
nipulated by, presidents — especially
the current one, whose every bleat
becomes an obsession. This president
is not just one prompting from the
social environment; he, in his ubiquity,
thoroughly colors this environment,
which becomes simultaneously more
coarse and less shocking by the day.
Eric Hoffer (circa 1898-1983), the
longshoreman philosopher, said that
“rudeness is the weak man’s imitation
of strength.” This anticipated the es-
sential fact about the 45th president —
Trump’s fascination with what he ut-
terly lacks and unconvincingly emu-
lates: strength. Hence his admiration
for foreign despots and his infantile
delight in his own bad manners.
It is one thing to have a president
who, drawing upon his repertoire of
playground insults, calls his alleged
porn-star mistress “Horseface.” Polls
indicate that approximately a third of
Americans, disproportionately includ-
ing religiously devout worriers about
the coarsening of America’s culture,
are more than merely content with
this. It is quite another thing to have a
president who does not merely pollute
the social atmosphere with invectives
directed at various disfavored minori-
ties; he uses his inflated office not just
to shape this atmosphere but to be this
atmosphere.
When Gerald Ford became presi-
dent after Richard M. Nixon’s resigna-
tion, he told the nation: “Our long
national nightmare is over.” Today’s
long — and perhaps occasionally lethal
— national embarrassment will con-
tinue at least until Jan. 20, 2021. If it
continues longer, this will be more
than an embarrassment to the nation,
this will be an indictment of it.
[email protected]GEORGE F. WILLThe coarse
ubiquity
of Trump
G
iven what a narcissist our
president is, you wouldn’t
think he would find it so hard
to look in a mirror.
It tells you how low our expectations
have sunk for Donald Trump that
when he addressed the nation Monday
in the wake of the horrors that oc-
curred over the weekend in El Paso and
Dayton, Ohio, it was considered com-
mendable that he could bring himself
to actually utter the words “white
supremacy” and “domestic terrorism.”
But in calling upon “our nation” to
condemn these poisonous forces “in
one voice,” he only underscored how
unwilling he has been to do that on his
own.
This, after all, is the same president
who did not hide his amusement when
a supporter at a May rally in Panama
City, Fla., called out “shoot them” in
response to one of his diatribes about
“these people” coming over the border
illegally.
“Only in the Panhandle you can get
away with that statement,” the presi-
dent said in tones of affirmation for
such a twisted mind-set. “Only in the
Panhandle.”
That is the unfiltered Trump. We see
him over and over, juicing conspiracies
and fear among his most devoted
supporters, reveling for hours in their
adoration.
The less authentic version appeared
Monday in the White House’s Diplo-
matic Reception Room. He strained for
just under 10 minutes to get out the
words that had been written for him on
a teleprompter.
Though his remarks had been care-
fully scripted, there was a malfunction
somewhere, either in his brain or on
the screen in front of him, or possiblyboth. Trump closed by asking God to
“bless those who perished in Toledo,” a
city 150 miles from where nine people
died early Sunday, when the sound of
gunfire interrupted a summer night in
a peaceful neighborhood of restau-
rants and bars.
In his speech Monday, Trump
blamed video games and social media
and “the glorification of violence in
our society.”
But when it comes to the instru-
ments with which that glorification is
translated into tragedy, he offered
syntactically challenged imagery
pulled from the talking points of the
National Rifle Association: “Mental
illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not
the gun.”
Trump did not even go so far as he
had suggested he would in a tweet
earlier in the day, when he mentioned
the possibility of rallying Democrats
and Republicans behind strong back-
ground checks on purchasers of fire-
arms.
As it happens, bills to expand federal
background checks on gun sales and
extend the review period to 10 days,
from three, were passed in February by
the House. They are sitting in the
Senate awaiting action, though none is
likely, given that the White House has
threatened to veto.
In his tweet, Trump raised the
possibility that he might be willing to
consider tighter background checks —
a sensible move to make sure that guns
are not finding their way into the
hands of dangerous people — if it could
be combined with immigration legisla-
tion.
Thus, even as Trump acknowledges
that new gun laws could save lives, he
is willing to hold those lives hostage tohis border wall.
Authorities have yet to name the
motives of the two young men alleged
to have been responsible for the car-
nage over the weekend.
But in the case of the one who
allegedly opened fire in an El Paso
Walmart, there is a manifesto linked
to him and written shortly before that
echoed some of the hateful themes
that Trump has sounded about an
“invasion” of immigrants. Would
Trump have been blaming video
games and social media if the ideol-
ogy the shooter espoused was that of
the Islamic State?
While it is true that white suprema-
cy has festered in the fetid corners of
the Internet, and represents a darker
side of the American character that
goes back to the nation’s earliest years,
Trump has brought racism into the
mainstream. He has glorified intoler-
ance, even made it sound like a form of
patriotism.
Whether this kind of toxicity is what
exists in the president’s heart, or is
merely a cynical play to gin up his base,
is irrelevant. What is important is that
Trump has proved himself incapable of
changing. He is not the person to pull a
shattered, bewildered country togeth-
er and unite it behind a renewed sense
of purpose.
“America will rise to the challenge,”
he said near the end of Monday’s
speech. “We will always have and we
always will win.”
Winning. That is one of Trump’s
favorite words. It is how he defines
everything he does. Shortly after his
address, the cable networks updated
the death toll from the weekend’s mass
shooting from 29 to 31.
[email protected]KAREN TUMULTYTrump is not the one to unite
a shattered, bewildered country
ELLEN WEINSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTN
ever in my political lifetime has
an American president had less
moral standing to address a
national threat. Nearly every
phrase of President Trump’s televised
response to the El Paso and Dayton
shootings could be matched with some
discrediting contrast in his own voice.
Trump said: “We are a loving nation.”
And this love he has previously expressed
by stereotyping migrants as “rapists” and
“animals.”
The president said: “In one voice, our
nation must condemn racism, bigotry
and white supremacy.” But after the
bloody Charlottesville protests, the rac-
ists, bigots and white supremacists, ac-
cording to Trump, counted “fine people”
among them.
The president said: “The Internet has
provided a dangerous avenue to radical-
ize disturbed minds.” This from the
leader who declared that he “wouldn’t be
surprised” if a caravan of Central Ameri-
can migrants was funded by George
Soros.
The president said: “We must stop the
glorification of violence in our society.”
This from the candidate who said of a
protester: “I love the old days. You know
what they used to do to guys like that
when they were in a place like this?
They’d be carried out on a stretcher,
folks.”
The president said: “Now is the time to
set destructive partisanship aside.” A task
that was not made easier when Trump
recently gloated over the burglarizing of
a Democratic congressman’s home.
The president said: “Each of us can
choose to build a culture that celebrates
the inherent worth and dignity of everyhuman life.” This from a leader who
wanted crying children torn from their
parents and held in cages as a deterrent
to illegal immigration.
The president said: “Hatred warps the
mind, ravages the heart and devours the
soul.” Here, at least, Trump is leading by
example.
Throughout his career, Trump has
given permission for prejudice and, in
extreme political need, permission for
hatred. Faced with electoral headwinds
near the end of the 2018 midterms,
Trump did not turn to economic popu-
lism, or even anti-elitism. He warned that
a group of brown people was invading
the country and entertained the prospect
of shooting them at the border. This is
what Trump views as his secret weapon,
his political ace in the hole. “People hate
the word ‘invasion,’ ” he once said, “but
that’s what it is. It’s an invasion of drugs
and criminals and people.... And in
many cases, and in some cases, you have
killers coming in and murderers coming
in, and we’re not going to allow that to
happen.”
When such ideas marinate in a dis-
turbed mind, and violence follows, is the
president to blame? Concerning political
rhetoric, it is recklessness that incurs
responsibility. Is it reckless for a leader to
use dehumanizing language about mi-
grants and military language about con-
fronting them? Of course it is. Does that
make a president directly responsible for
the actions of a ruthless shooter? Not in
any way that diminishes the primary
responsibility of the murderer himself.
But this analysis does not account for a
president’s positive responsibility to di-
minish social division and promote whatPresident Franklin Roosevelt called “the
warm courage of national unity.” It is not
a skill that can be displayed in a moment
of need without years of practice. All
Trump’s words of healing and inclusion
come back to him as pointing fingers of
judgment. In talking of love and human
dignity, he delivers a damning indict-
ment of his own brand of politics, which
employs cruelty and hatred as organizing
tools.
When Robert F. Kennedy spoke on the
topic of national division at the Cleve-
land City Club shortly before his death, it
was the culmination of a very different
public role. “Too often we honor swagger
and bluster and the wielders of force; too
often we excuse those who are willing to
build their own lives on the shattered
dreams of others.”
That is exactly what many in the
corporate world, and many conservative
Christian leaders, are doing in their
devotion to Trump: honoring swagger,
bluster and force, and excusing a leader
who constructs his political success on
the cultivation of contempt and slanders
against the weak. By their nearly blind
support, such leaders are complicit in
Trump’s rule by resentment.
“But we can perhaps remember,” said
Kennedy, “that those who live with us are
our brothers, that they share with us the
same short movement of life, that they
seek — as we do — nothing but the chance
to live out their lives in purpose and
happiness, winning what satisfaction
and fulfillment they can.”
It is only on empathy — the virtue most
foreign to the president — that unity can
be built.
[email protected]MICHAEL GERSONFor Trump, empathy is a foreign language