Wednesday, May 18, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Editor’s note: Las Vegas Sun readers who are survivors of the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Music Festival shooting or other mass shootings may wish to forgo reading this commentary. We see you, we support you, and together we are still #VegasStrong.
“Screams of anguish from family members bent over in shock and grief! Increasingly, this is the painful snapshot on the TV news (in Buffalo and many cities across the U.S.) due to their loved ones — infants to grandparents — lost in the rampage of gun murders. Evidence of the major contributing factor is obvious. It’s the ultra-easy access to firearms.”
Those words were written almost three years ago by Katherine Massey. This weekend, the screams of anguish came from Massey’s family members, bent over in shock and grief over the slaying of the 72-year-old community organizer herself — one of the 10 people killed in Saturday’s racist rampage targeting Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.
Massey couldn’t have known how prescient her words would be in 2022, but she did know that despite all of the political rhetoric, access to guns — especially those designed to shoot as many rounds as possible, as quickly as possible — posed a direct threat to the communities both you and she call home.
Here in Las Vegas, we know this reality all too well. It was less than five years ago that Las Vegas joined the growing list of cities across the nation to be victims of mass shootings.
Perhaps if state and federal officials had done more then, this past weekend’s hate-fueled attacks in Buffalo and Laguna Woods, Calif., could have been avoided. In the latter case, the suspect, a Nevada resident, legally purchased the firearms used in his shooting spree right here in the Silver State.
Gun-rights advocates will correctly note that the Laguna Woods incident did not involve a semiautomatic rifle or other type of weapon popularly described as an “assault weapon.” Of course, in pointing out that fact, they also concede that the choice of weapon made by the shooter may have been his greatest miscalculation. And that, despite the incredible heroism of the pastor and congregation where he staged his assault, the use of a pistol likely contributed to the fact that only one person was left dead in that shooting whereas 10 were killed in Buffalo.
The Buffalo shooter explained how he chose his weapon in a manifesto he titled “Strategies for Success.” The 18-year-old man describes that while “there are very few weapons that are easier to use and more effective at killing than firearms,” the choice of firearm is important. He describes how a hunting rifle that holds a small number of bullets and requires the user to work the bolt between each shot would be far less effective for killing people than a gun that “can fire ammunition as quickly as needed, can fire many rounds of ammunition without reloading, and can reload quickly.”
His choice was the Bushmaster XM-15. If that model sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same model that was used to kill 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, and killed 10 adults in the Washington, D.C., area in 2002.
Bushmaster’s website says the company “proudly defends freedom.” Yet it’s hard to see how when its weapon’s most notable accomplishments of the past 20 years are the deaths of dozens of innocent people, including a retired police officer, and has landed the owners of the guns in prison.
Of course, if the slaying of 20 elementary school children a decade ago, when politics seemed almost sensible, didn’t lead to federal gun-control legislation, its unlikely the deaths of Black people in Buffalo and Asian people in Southern California will lead to change.
After all, for the first 188 years of our country’s history, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, non-white people were legally less than fully human. Given continued economic disparities, the ongoing fight to teach history and economics that includes the impacts of historic laws on people of color today, and ongoing police violence against Black and brown people, a strong argument can be made that full humanity still has not been fully extended to people of color, especially Black and Indigenous people.
Either way, there have been more years in American history in which non-white people were considered less than fully human than there have been years since humanity was extended.
But that reality also creates a space for the federal government to finally take proactive steps to shut down the resources and hateful rhetoric of white supremacist organizations and other hate groups.
Unlike possessing a gun, which has through some legal and linguistic gymnastics gained constitutional protection under the Second Amendment, militant hate groups that threaten the lives and livelihoods of other people have no such protection.
The Supreme Court has made clear that free speech and free assembly have limits, and that the government can take action to suppress speeches, gatherings and other actions that threaten the freedom, liberty and lives of our fellow Americans.
Rather than spending millions of dollars a year in the perpetually failing war on drugs that targets Black and brown communities for further dehumanization, we should instead be investing those resources into a war on hate.
That means educating and engaging in conversations with our children about the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, and the impact of these institutions on our society today. It means stopping the flow of money to paramilitary groups of all stripes that threaten the safety and stability of free people and free elections. It means holding hate groups accountable for their action under RICO statutes that target the leaders and the infrastructure of hate, not just the individuals engaged in it. And coincidentally, it means cracking down on the illegal trafficking of drugs and guns that fuel hate in this country — a step that has a real chance at getting assault weapons and other guns off the streets and out of the hands of known violent offenders.
A war on hate is a war that Americans of all backgrounds and political stripes can agree on. And, as Katherine Massey wrote three years ago, “adults are publicly praying for God Almighty’s assistance in stopping the violence. May those ongoing prayers be answered.”
