The Lost Boys

 

Cole Allen, Cal Tech grad and would-be assassin

The Lost Boys

20-30 million semiautomatic assault rifles, more guns that people, hate speech everywhere = political violence

Today’s blog is short and not exactly sweet. Political violence – particularly feeling justified in killing leaders that are associated with fostering agendas that the shooters have learned to hate (from healthcare to military figures to heads of state) – is hardly new. Assassination has been a part of history at least since recorded history began. And whether it is crass rivalry, anarchy, religious zeal, a search for fame or martyrdom or a belief “I must stop them,” killing what you hate or are taught to hate has accelerated as weaponry has increased in sophistication, volume killing capacity, range, lethality and effectiveness. Whether recruited fanatics, foreign operatives with defined targets or passionate lone wolves, in the modern world, every assassination attempt or success finds large cadres of supporters cheering, sometimes silently or to their core believers.

The April 25th Correspondents Dinner was cancelled after an alleged attacker and presidential wannabe assassin, 31-year-old parttime teacher, Cole Allen, failed to penetrate a very effective shield around President Trump and his political team. Even as he was a registered guest at the Hilton Hotel venue, Allen managed to bring a shotgun, a handgun, lots of ammunition and a passel of knives into his hotel room with assassination seemingly on his mind. But since most of these assassination attempts are by younger men, I feel justified calling them the “lost boys.”

Lumbering under a profoundly flawed interpretation of the Second Amendment (Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Heller vs DC), the first Supreme Court decision in over two centuries to rule for an almost ubiquitous right of American citizens to own firearms, even military-grade assault weapons… was never the intent of James Madison who penned the Bill of Rights (which included the Second Amendment). We have since become the most violent developed nation on Earth, bringing a gun culture to dominate American life… and death.

We are now told that anyone opposing our leadership is the enemy, often deserving prosecution and execution, unpatriotic operatives that must be silenced. The nation has been divided into basically two camps, now identified with colorful red and blue markers. The mass and social media of each camp has demonized, marginalized and targeted the other side with a litany of hate and blame the United States has not witnessed at this scale since our Civil War. Vituperative rhetoric, the dehumanization of political opponents with hate-filled labels, has brought us to where we are today, often accompanied by warnings from other governments to their traveling citizens to beware of the dangers of traveling to the United States.

We did this to ourselves, and the language of hate and blame continues unabated, with some minimal signs that perhaps these labels are false, and that extremes on either side of this nasty debate are, simply, wrong and out-of-touch. We need to learn these lessons better, reject leaders who goad us to extremes. We need to stop outsourcing our political beliefs to extremists with simple and obviously undemocratic solutions… and learn to seek out facts vs conspiracy theories.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what we have before us is what happens when common sense is so vilified that it has simply left the building.