President Obama’s “side-by-side” Comparison (op-ed)

In June 2013 Think Progress (a political online news source) reported, “The U.S. has averaged over one mass shooting per month for the past four years.”  


In February 2014 The Guardian (US Edition) reported, “Gun violence is erupting in America’s schools and colleges at a rate of more than three incidents a month, with thirteen school shootings recorded in the first six weeks of 2014 alone.”


2015 began with a mass shooting sign up.


School Danger (a website) posted a fifteen-year-old from an Illinois high school sent electronic messages soliciting assistance to carry out a “Columbine-Style shooting” in January. The student was arrested, his home was searched, nothing was found, no charges were filed, and the student agreed to seek help for possible mental illness.


Illinois was spared, but violence doesn’t take long to find victims.


Recently in Oregon there was a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College. President Obama addressed the nation. This was the fifteenth statement of his presidency in response to gun violence. The President said, “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough … It does nothing to prevent this carnage … The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not
have sufficient common sense gun-safety laws -- even in the face of repeated mass killings.”


(Is there a difference between common sense gun-safety and gun-safety? Or is the difference common sense? But there’s an old saying: Sense isn’t common.)


The President continued, “I would ask news organizations -- because I won’t put these facts forward -- have news organizations tally up the number of Americas who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports.  We spend over a trillion dollars … preventing terrorist attacks … yet we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths.”


How can that be? The President asked.


(Vox (website) did the math: More than 10,000 Americans are killed every year by gun violence. By contrast, so few Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks since 9/11 that when you chart the two together, the terrorism death count approximates zero for every year except for 2001.)


I’m sure many agree with the President, but what if an opposition group stated, “The President is traumatized and is certainly right to have that kind of empathy in terms of the death taking place in America. But we have to distinguish between state-sponsored violence against Americans and violence American citizens inflict on each other. They are not the same thing.”


That statement would be condemned for its apathy and disregard for the violence Americans face.


But that statement is a re-wording of Cornel West’s answer to Fox news’s Megyn Kelly when she asked West: Why doesn’t Black Lives Matter protest Black on Black violence?


Obama demanded a side-by-side comparison of gun violence and terrorism to challenge the wisdom of prioritizing federal resources for the latter.


This is the same argument black conservatives make when they compare black-on-black shootings to police shootings and question the priorities of protest groups. (Protesters shout down these black voices for diverting attention away from the race of the police officer. But the President’s argument will be praised for blaming the Republicans.)


Many Americans would agree when the President said, “This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few month in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”


I’m sure supporters of Black Lives Matter also agree but only with the first sentence.



First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 10/7/15