Who is Responsible for American Carnage?

My brother and his family, four children and two grandchildren, live in Israel. Sometimes people ask me if I worry about their safety because of the possibility of terrorism or a missile sent from Gaza or one of the surrounding Arab nations. No, I really don’t. Not because it’s not a possibility, but because the odds are less any of them will be killed or injured that way than that they or I or any of us in the United States will be injured or killed in a car accident…or here, in a deadly shooting. 

This week’s deadly mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh hits home for me in several ways. Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill community is an area I have visited several times over the years when my band visited the area to play for dances. I’ve walked the two block long business district of small shops and eaten in its restaurants. I’ve spent the night in homes in the area. And I know there are people among my circle of friends there who attend the Tree of Life Synagogue. I am seeing their posts on Facebook telling friends and family they are safe or noting the loss of someone they knew. 

Churches, synagogues, mosques, any place of worship are supposed to places of safety, of spirituality, of peace. Attacks on them, on the people who attend them, must require an extra measure of hate if such a thing is possible. Your “average” mass murderer has become enraged with people at his workplace or in the country in general when their sad, lonely, depressed and angry emotional lives cause them to lash out at their imagined enemies.

Then they procure or gather their arsenal for attack. And here’s where the difference between gun laws in Israel and the United States make Israeli’s so much safer. If you live or travel in Israel, you will see guns, even semi-automatic weapons, everywhere. Soldiers and police on or off duty carry them. Israel might as well have our 2nd Amendment citing the necessity for a well regulated militia as a justification for citizens to bear arms. Nearly every citizen in Israel, male and female, is required to serve in the military after they graduate high school, and many continue their service in the reserve, sometimes keeping service weapons in their homes. Yet Israel has strict gun control laws and a firearm homicide rate 1/4 of that in the U.S. “Israelis must meet a detailed list of criteria to be allowed to own a firearm. They must ask the state for a license, are permitted only one gun at a time, and must even ask for permission to sell their gun. And the Firearms Licensing Department is no rubber stamp: Roughly 40 percent of requests are rejected” (https://www.timesofisrael.com/comparing-america-to-israel-on-gun-laws-is-dishonest-and-revealing/). 

We’ve experienced two attempts at mass murder as we approach the 2018 midterm elections, elections many view as “the most important in our lifetimes,” a description usually reserved for presidential elections. One, thankfully, has been unsuccessful—the attempts at pipe bomb assassinations mailed to critics of the president by a man whose love of Trump is apparently only exceeded by his hatred of the targets of Trump’s verbal attacks. The other it appears, involves a man with a hatred for Jews who believed his murderous attack would prevent Latin American immigrants in a caravan approaching the United States seeking asylum from “invading” the United States and killing Americans. His animus was directed at a Jewish aid organization that is focused on providing services to refugees. 

It would be easy to say that this is just a crazy idea concocted by a deranged mind if we didn’t have a president, backed up by a right wing media machine, who calls the stream of refugees an “invasion” that contains terrorists from the Middle East and he must send the army to deal with them.

Trump has said the absolute minimum of the required words about these crimes and called for unity, and in his next breaths has continued his attacks on his critics in the media and across the spectrum of political ideas. He has correctly called anti-Semitism a scourge, while not reducing his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Trump may not be legally responsible for these criminal acts, but he is guilty of inspiring them.

Will Clinton or Trump Help Families of Murder Victims?

A mother or wife who has lost a child or a spouse to a shooting steps up to the podium, briefly identifies herself and describes the promising life that has been cut short. She tells the audience that the candidate she supports will stop more senseless killings like this one and the crowd, sympathetically cheers their courage. Clinton or Trump? Both. 

Clinton has brought to the stage families of African Americans who have died at the hands of police and Trump the mothers and spouses of those killed by undocumented immigrants.

Are the candidates using these families for crass political gain or are they giving voice to their grief in order to highlight a grievous wrong that they intend to fix as president? And is there moral equivalence in the solutions they espouse?

Because I support Clinton and abhor Trump, my knee jerk reaction was that there is no equivalence, and that there is something untoward in one white woman after another coming to the stage to name the Latino criminal responsible for a death. But, I asked myself, why was that different than the black women who came to the stage to talk about their children or spouses? 

The answer may have come slowly, but it came. There is equivalence in the pain these family feel, but there is no equivalence in the solution the candidates offer to solve the problem their family members’ deaths represent.

“There's no evidence that immigrants are either more or less likely to commit crimes than anyone else in the population," says Janice Kephart, a researcher for the Center for Immigration Studies. This fact flies in the face of Trump’s insinuations that immigrants from Mexico are primarily criminals. Roughly 2-3% of Americans may commit a violent crime. Yet in order to prevent violent crime of those who might commit it within the population of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States Donald Trump proposes on most days to deport all eleven million, and on some days to deport immediately any that have been arrested for anything and decide later what to do about the rest.

In order to reduce the shooting of blacks by police, Hillary Clinton proposes to increase training for police departments on the use of force and to help them buy body cameras so that after an incident police can be either prosecuted or exonerated based on hard evidence rather than witness testimony only.

So, on one hand, disrupt the lives of millions of people including millions of innocent women and children, some of whom are American citizens, and on the other hand spend some money to help communities improve their police forces. Where is the moral equivalence?

And for the record, while Clinton doesn’t specifically address violent crime by undocumented immigrants, she does plan to focus resources on detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety and reduce gun violence by getting more illegal guns off our streets and keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them by closing the gun show loophole and expanding background checks. Hillary has plans that will keep our country safe while preserving our freedom and our unique status in the world as a nation of immigrants. Trump would neither keep us safe nor keep us great. Trump’s America is like no America we have every seen.

Guns Serious, Climate Emergency

Which is a greater threat to our health and safety—gun violence or climate change? President Obama suggests that everyone concerned about the stranglehold the NRA has over Congress should make the support of “common sense gun reform” a litmus test. In West Virginia, this would give us few choices on election day.

The NRA is at the heart of most politicians’ fears of supporting even the mildest restrictions, such as expanded background checks. But they have gotten a lot of help from the conspiracy theory President Obama referred to in a recent town hall meeting that the federal government has a secret plan to register, then confiscate all private firearms in preparation for implementing a totalitarian regime. 

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories and wholesale rejection of science that we used to be able to laugh off as ideas held by tiny slivers of the population are now cynically used by mainstream politicians to garner support from increasing numbers of misinformed, suspicious Americans. And the prime example of that is climate change, which I would suggest is a much more important litmus test for 2016.

Yes, guns in America kill and injure thousands, and reducing that number is an important goal, but failing to reduce the greenhouse gases (GHG) being added to the atmosphere every day has the potential of resulting in catastrophic impacts on a global scale. I should not have to list them: rising sea levels, increased droughts, disease, hyper-destructive weather events, extinctions, populations on the move, and more.

Most Republican politicians, and West Virginia politicians from both parties still either deny the planet is warming, deny that it is human caused, or claim that there is nothing we can do about it. They often say that China and India will continue building coal burning power plants that will offset any of our efforts.

The recent Paris Agreement belies this claim. Almost 200 nations, including China and India, agreed on a plan to implement measures to limit global temperature rise to under 2 degrees Celsius, considered a tipping point beyond which already serious effects become catastrophic. 

No one is calling this agreement perfect. It is non-binding. Each country must set its own goals, decide how to achieve them, report back to the world on their progress every five years, and to the extent they are able, decrease their emissions goal over time. 

As a world leader, historically the world’s largest overall emitter of GHG, and the largest emitter per capita, we have a unique responsibility to make and meet goals under the Paris Agreement. This will not be easy, but it is certainly possible.

Let’s face it—we are addicted to cheap fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas. They have literally fueled American prosperity. We see gas fall under $2.00/gallon and cheer. We love our low electricity bills that have been provided by cheap coal. Hydraulic fracturing has brought cheaper natural gas into our homes. But what do they really cost? What will we pay in increased flood damage and worsening storms?  

As a nation, we were addicted to tobacco, and I remember buying cigarettes for $.30 a pack. What did it really cost America in lost time at work, doctor visits, heart disease, lung cancer and emphysema? Today cigarettes cost about $6.00 a pack, and many fewer people are willing to pay that price, which is saving lives. 

If we increased the cost of fossil fuels by applying a fee for their production and importation, we would make them less desirable and set the stage for the development, growth, and acceptance of alternative energy sources. Citizens Climate Lobby (citizensclimatelobby.org) has a proposal to impose such a fee and return all the money collected to households, which would in most cases reimburse them for the increased costs of fuel during the transition to alternative sources.

Find out what the position of candidates for office is on climate change and carbon fee and dividend legislation, and support those who face the future with optimism by dealing realistically with the biggest challenge of our time.

Paul Epstein is a retired teacher, writer, and musician living in Charleston.