The most absurd, pointless exercise last week was all the tortured rhetoric politicians went through while deciding whether to call the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 people and wounded 21 others an act of terrorism.
There’s no word other than terrorism to describe bloody massacres of large numbers of people with weapons made and sold expressly for that purpose.
Two people shooting up a holiday party with semi-automatic assault rifles equipped with high-capacity magazines to fire 65 to 75 rounds of ammunition within minutes as intended victims duck under tables and flee for their lives is terrorism.
So were the mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a few days earlier, the 2012 Christmas slaughter of 20 beautiful children and six educators at Newtown, Conn., the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting that killed 12 and wounded 70 and the prayer meeting shooting in Charleston, S.C.
So were all the mass shootings Milwaukee remembers so well—in the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, the Azana Spa in Brookfield and a church service held in a Wauwatosa hotel.
To call these everyday acts terrorism understates just how often such mass shootings happen in America. The average is more than one a day.
The San Bernardino shooting actually was the second mass shooting that day after one earlier in Savannah, Ga., that killed one person and wounded three others.
Last Wednesday was the 336th day of the year. San Bernardino was the 353rd mass shooting this year (defined as one in which four or more people were killed or wounded). At that point, a total of 462 Americans had been killed and another 1,314 wounded in mass shootings this year.
You can keep track of the latest scores yourself on shootingtracker.com.
GOP Whips Up Anti-Muslim Frenzy
With deadly mass shootings in the U.S. so common, what was so special about San Bernardino that some politicians were eager to publicly proclaim that particular one an act of terrorism?
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That became obvious when we learned the two perpetrators, a Pakistani American citizen and his foreign-born wife from Saudi Arabia, were Muslims.
You see, Republican politicians have always argued there is absolutely nothing we can do about mass shootings in this country because of their twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Even though the amendment refers to “a well-regulated militia,” Republicans claim that means government can make no regulations at all to keep military assault weapons designed to annihilate enemy armies out of the hands of mass-murdering civilians, who overwhelmingly turn out to be estranged and often deranged white American loners.
Oddly, Republicans don’t hold any other freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution anywhere nearly so sacrosanct as the right for dangerous people to stockpile and use deadly weapons to commit mass murder.
That’s especially true of the First Amendment, which guarantees the right of anyone living in this country freedom of speech, assembly and freedom to practice their religion.
The current mob of Republican presidential candidates is running around the country trying to whip up racism and religious intolerance in the name of fighting terrorism by Islamic extremists.
Republican candidates advocate closing down Muslim houses of worship, denying entry into this country of Muslims fleeing terrorism by admitting only Christian refugees and creating a national database of every Muslim American to keep them under close surveillance, denying them the privacy and personal freedoms guaranteed to every other law-abiding American citizen.
That’s why Republicans were so excited at finding two mass shooters who were Muslims out of the hundreds who have been committing mass murders in this country month after month.
They’ve used it to ramp up their malevolent campaign of fear and hatred toward Muslims in the U.S. and their hysterical calls for indiscriminate carpet-bombing of followers of Islam abroad.
That’s why President Barack Obama did his best Sunday night to explain to the nation that sending American soldiers to die in another extended Republican war abroad and destroying the values of freedom and equality in this country would simply play into the hands of radical anti-American groups and recruit more terrorists.
What political leaders in both parties could do working together is pass sensible laws to keep military assault weapons and high-capacity magazines designed for warfare out of the hands of civilian mass murderers, whether they’re Christians, Muslims or followers of any religion.
Until now, unbelievably, Republicans have refused to deny the right to purchase such weapons of mass destruction even to individuals the government places on a terrorist watch list under suspicion as potential terrorists.
Republicans say they worry about everyday Americans losing their constitutional rights. What? The right to stockpile enormous arsenals of weapons of mass murder?
If both political parties are serious about protecting Americans, they should simply end the easy civilian access to military assault weapons used in America’s everyday acts of terrorism.
