Robert Bowers, the man charged in the fatal and virulently anti-Semitic rampage at a Pittsburgh synagogue, had 21 guns registered in his name.
He carried out the massacre that killed 11 and wounded six others in the Tree of Life Congregation on Saturday with an AR-15-style assault rifle and three handguns, according to authorities.
Just a few hours later, our President Donald Trump correctly called the shooting “pure evil,” and told reporters, “It’s a terrible, terrible thing what’s going on with hate in our country and frankly all over the world, and something has to be done.”
That something, however, apparently doesn’t mean either tempering his often hateful words or toughening the nation’s gun laws. He deflected on reporters’ question of whether America should revisit gun laws and instead put the responsibility for safety on the church.
“This has little to do with it [gun laws] if you take a look. If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better. If there was an armed guard inside the temple, they would have been able to stop him,” Trump told reporters as he boarded a flight that would take him to an agriculture convention in Indianapolis and one of his signature campaign rallies in Murphysboro, Illinois. He also told the reporters that stiffening the death penalty for these kinds of incidents “whether in temple or in church” would probably help.
Apparently he was looking to comfort both America and the National Rifle Association, which has seen a calamitous downturn in memberships and donations since Barack Obama left the White House and Trump moved in.
The death penalty is already in play. The 29 charges against Bowers – 11 counts of using a firearm to commit murder and multiple hate crime counts of obstructing the exercise of religious beliefs resulting in deaths and in bodily injuries – could result in a death penalty sentence if he is convicted.
Dylann S. Roof, a self-radicalized white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners at a historic black church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, was found guilty in 2016 and sentenced to death last year.
Devin Patrick Kelley, the gunman who stormed into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, last year and opened fire during a Sunday service, killing 26, also killed himself – as did Wade M. Page, an Army veteran with ties to white supremacist groups, who in 2012 killed six congregants of a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
In 2008, shots rang out at Knoxville’s Universalist Unitarian church. Two people were killed and seven were injured at the hands of Jim David Adkisson, a gunman who had the desire to “kill liberals” and Democrats. Adkisson is now serving a life sentence.
Saturday’s synagogue massacre has shaken our nation anew, falling in the last days of an exhausting and bitter political season filled with rising vitriol and growing threats of violence. Last week and Monday, federal law enforcement agents were called out in multiple states to investigate a series of at least 14 pipe bombs mailed to Democratic critics of President Trump, including two former presidents and CNN. That madman, 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc, faces up to 48 years in prison.
Trump’s critics argue that his own rally prattle and bullying tweets are partly to blame for the recent violence because he has stirred the pot of nationalism, and nationalism is something quite different from patriotism. Trump dismisses that notion, just as he dismisses the need for revisiting our gun laws.
But mass shootings have become a recurring part of American life, and religious institutions are but one recurring setting.
Some of the many settings where it might be our fault if we’re shot in a mass shooting without our own armed guard now include a temple or church or a mosque, school or college, work, the movies, a concert, a nightclub, a mall.
We also – or at least our Congress and state legislatures – can’t seem to pass any sensible gun safety regulations. For some reason, it would be anathema to have universal background checks to buy a weapon or to ban assault rifle sales or to raise the age from 18 to 21 to purchase certain firearms.
Yet, according to an early-October Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans said they feel laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict than they are now. Only 8 percent said less strict; 30 percent said the laws should kept as they are.
Again, let’s review the settings where it might be our fault if we’re shot in a mass shooting without bringing along an armed guard. We can’t go to a temple or a church or a mosque. We can’t go to school or college. We can’t go to work. We can’t go to a movie theater or a concert or a mall.
So we have to go to the polls.
Vote for candidates who want common-sense gun safety laws.