“Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger”: Trump’s speech about shootings ignored the real problem

The president’s speech about mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton was an exercise in gaslighting.

The statement President Donald Trump read from the White House on Monday morning in response to the mass shootings that took place over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, amounted to an effort to talk about everything and anything besides guns.

Trump did at one point directly denounce the type of white supremacy that motivated the El Paso shooter, saying “in one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.” But when it came to proposing policy responses, his response to shootings that left at least 31 dead and 52 injured amounted to a grab bag of ideas that avoided the real problem.

The president proposed working with social media companies to “detect mass shooters before they strike,” regulation of violent video games, “involuntary confinement” of “mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence,” and an expansion of the death penalty in cases of hate crimes or mass murders to be “delivered quickly, decisively, and without years of needless delay.” He explicitly downplayed the role high-powered guns played in the shootings, saying “mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.”

As Trump began to wrap up reading his statement, he seemed to suffer from a bad case of dry mouth, and he mistakenly claimed that the shooting in Ohio took place in Toledo, not Dayton.

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While Trump was right to identify white supremacy as a major factor in the El Paso shooting, there are a few obvious rebuttals to things he said in his speech. First, people in many other countries indulge in violent video games without mass shootings being regular occurrences, so the suggestion that gaming is to blame is, at the very least, insufficient if not outright mistaken. Second, considering First Amendment rights and the fact that the internet is international, there are questions about how efficacious government regulations of social media can be in preventing mass shootings. Third, mass shooters often commit acts of violence without expecting to survive, so the notion that expanding the death penalty will deter them is dubious. And finally, people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence than they are to perpetrate it.

In a statement released Sunday, American Psychological Society President Rosie Phillips Davis pointed out that “[r]outinely blaming mass shootings on mental illness is unfounded and stigmatizing. Research has shown that only a very small percentage of violent acts are committed by people who are diagnosed with, or in treatment for, mental illness.”

“The rates of mental illness are roughly the same around the world, yet other countries are not experiencing these traumatic events as often as we face them,” David added. “One critical factor is access to, and the lethality of, the weapons that are being used in these crimes. Adding racism, intolerance and bigotry to the mix is a recipe for disaster.”

As my colleague German Lopez explained, the real problem is guns, and Americans’ easy access to them:

America doesn’t have a monopoly on racism, sexism, other kinds of bigotry, mental illness, or violent video games. All of those things exist in countries across the world, many with much less gun violence. What is unique about the US is that it makes it so easy for people with any motive or problem to obtain a gun.”

But based on what Trump said on Monday morning, he still seems unwilling to confront that reality.

Trump’s White House statement came shortly after he posted tweets responding to the mass shootings that could’ve been lifted directly from the El Paso shooter’s racist manifesto. Trump suggested that the legislative response to the shootings should include hardline immigration reform and then followed that up by tweeting that “these terrible problems will only get worse” unless news coverage starts “being fair” — his suggestion seemingly being that mass shootings will continue unless the media covers him more positively.

The one thing that Trump is not talking about is restricting access to the sorts of firearms that enable gunmen to shoot 15 people in less than a minute. Until he does, statements like the one he struggled to read on Monday amount to an attempt to obscure the real problem.

Source: VOX, Aaron Rupar, August 5, 2019

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