Facts suggest that white men should be targets of profiling

By Rex Huppke

Chicago Tribune

After a Muslim-American claiming allegiance to the Islamic State killed 49 people in an Orlando, Fla., nightclub using a legally purchased assault-style rifle, many dismissed the issue of gun control and said concern should focus on the “fact” that America is under direct attack by Muslim extremists.

“They’re coming,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre warned on Fox News. “These terrorists are coming.”

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump went so far as to suggest profiling Muslims in America: “We really have to look at profiling. We have to look at it seriously.”

If you care to dabble in facts, there are two key problems with what LaPierre and Trump, and a slew of pundits and Twitter alarmists, are saying.

1) Despite the Orlando attack and the deadly terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, there is no evidence to support the claim that the “terrorists are coming.”

2) In the context of mass shootings, if you look at data stretching to 1982, the appropriate people to profile would be white men who have legally purchased firearms.

Many fearful

Those statements will make some people angry. I understand that and, frankly, I understand the fear that has gripped many if not most Americans since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. I felt that fear in the wake of the Orlando attack, and the San Bernardino attack as well.

But fear rarely leads to logical conclusions. Facts, on the other hand, do. Islamic State-inspired attacks here and around the world are accomplishing what they’re meant to accomplish – they terrorize us, grab our attention, overamplify the actual size and power of the enemy and lead us to rash decisions.

A 2015 report called “Muslim-American Involvement with Violent Extremism” by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University found this:

“Five plots engaged in violence in the United States in 2015, killed 19 people and (raised) the total since 9/11 to 69 fatalities. Over the same period, more than 220,000 Americans were murdered.”

The author of that report, Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor who specializes in Middle East and Islamic studies, told me that since the middle of last year, the number of arrests and incidents involving Muslim-Americans linked to violent extremism “has declined markedly.”

He also said that in America there has been “a decreasing rate of success in recruitment by the self-proclaimed Islamic State over the past year.”

“The broader context is we have an unfortunately violent society,” Kurzman said. “We kill one another at a rate that is not matched by any other developed nation. Of those, very few are politically, ideologically or religiously motivated. Even with horrible incidents like the killings in Orlando or San Bernardino, those add up to less than 1 percent of all murders each year in the United States. And yet they attract a disproportionate amount of fear and are stoked by political grandstanding, and are supported by billions of dollars worth of government programs intended to negate this particular threat, even though it constitutes a small portion of the overall threat to public safety in our country.”

Database

A database on mass shootings assembled by Mother Jones magazine shows 81 mass shootings in America since Aug. 20, 1982. (Up until 2013, a shooting in a public place with four or more victims was defined as a mass shooting by the FBI. In 2013, a federal mandate changed that definition to three or more victims. The data follow those definitions.)

Only four of those mass shootings – Orlando, San Bernardino, the attack on a military recruitment center in Tennessee, and the Fort Hood massacre in 2009 – have been attributed to Muslim extremism. And none of the attacks was found to be directly coordinated by Islamic terror groups.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been 418 people killed in mass shootings. The total killed by white men is 185. The total killed by Muslim extremists is 81.

Of the 81 mass shootings that have occurred since 1982, 47 were committed by white men, and all but nine of those shootings involved legally purchased firearms.

We have ample reason to be concerned about the deadly messages groups like the Islamic State are spreading, and it’s imperative that our intelligence agencies, law enforcement and fellow citizens remain vigilant.

But when it comes to mass killings in this country – with the notable exception of the 9/11 attacks, a murderous event on a scale that has yet to be even remotely replicated – Muslim people are not the primary culprits.

Gun deaths

And the number of Americans being killed each year by guns – thousands upon thousands – dwarfs any tally of Muslim terrorism committed on American soil.

That’s not opinion; it’s fact.

“The shocking violence in Orlando and before that in San Bernardino seems to have hidden the overall trend that this has become less of a threat now than it was a year ago,” Kurzman said. “And then it was a very small threat compared to other forms of violence. Mass shootings are a small portion of overall killings in the U.S., and ideological extremism is a small portion of mass killings, so we’re talking about fractions of fractions.”

It’s easy to be afraid. It’s easy to give credence to the loudest among us who shout that the end is near and encourage the demonization of an entire group of “other” people.

But if you’re like Donald Trump, a white man who claims to own a legally purchased firearm, be careful taking that easy path. The facts might reveal that your group is the one we should actually fear.