On Buffalo

Image credit: Sky News

Commentary

To keep our communities safer, we must first think in terms of community — and of each other as neighbors, first.

Another warm, pleasant Saturday afternoon; another horrific mass shooting. This time, the motive was clear from the start: the gunman, an 18-year-old from Broome County, New York, had driven the 200 miles or so to Buffalo in his parents’ car because it was the nearest city with the highest concentration of black people. His only purpose was to open fire on innocent civilians for no other reason than the color of their skin.

It was an act of unthinkable, premeditated violence. We mourn with those grieving the loss of a friend, acquaintance or loved one. And we hope and pray they can find some solace in each other as they grapple with the implications of the reasons for this brutal assault.

We know the motive because the shooter himself made it clear in a manifesto he posted a couple days before making his deadly trip. In it, he refers to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory — a belief held among a growing number of people on the political Right who blame Democrats, specifically, for pursuing a policy (with Jewish complicity) to replace white people with immigrants and people of color in order to gain an electoral advantage.

As with all conspiracy theories, this one fails on the grounds of basic logic. There is, after all, no guarantee someone is going to have a particular political alignment simply because of their race, ethnicity or religion. And it is, of course, blatantly racist and bigoted to think so.

But for the shooter — and the many people who cheered him on from the sidelines on the very websites, especially 4chan, where he was radicalized — that’s not a problem. Not only do they make no effort to mask their hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism; they take great pride in it.

Where things start to become more subtle, and infinitely more dangerous, is in our broader political discourse. Thanks to the efforts of the media personalities most intent on normalizing and promoting the conspiracy theory, it’s gaining significant traction.

The fact that traction has come almost exclusively on the Right, where the notion is being ever more enthusiastically embraced, is a point of utter dismay and disgust to old school-conservatives. Whether they still remain the majority within the ranks of America’s right wing is a matter of debate, but it’s hard to dispute their voices are being drowned out by the virulence of what increasingly seems to be a surging “popular front.”

Which leaves us with a very, very troubling situation. For one thing, at least some key figures in the national leadership of the Republican Party have gone all-in for all this. Most, if not all, of the others have been far too silent about it for far too long. And without resistance, the long march will continue.

For another, once a grand conspiracy theory is adopted, it’s very hard to get an individual to abandon it. Reasoned argument doesn’t work. Facts and evidence don’t matter. In fact, most efforts to persuade have the opposite of the desired effect, driving adherents deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole rather than leading them out.

All of which is, of course, well known to our international rivals, especially Russia. (China takes a more subtle, economically oriented tack.) At this point we can’t be entirely sure how much of this is their handiwork, although we know they’ve been pursuing a destabilization campaign persistently since at least the 1970s. The end of the Communist era brought only a brief pause; the rise of social media supercharged it in the late 2000s.

So, there can be little doubt they’re on the internet, prowling around its darker corners and manipulating the psychologically vulnerable while using more mainstream social media tools to poison our civic, cultural and political discourse. And there can also be little doubt they’re being aided and abetted by domestic crisis merchants and conflict entrepreneurs who benefit financially from pushing conspiracy theories, inflaming our already-existing divisions while creating new ones.

Sowing discord can be good business, if you don’t let your loyalty, patriotism and conscience get in the way.

But in the end, how much of this burgeoning threat to our Republic is our own doing and how much of it is foreign influence hardly matters. The problem is ours to solve. And given our constitutional guarantees of individual liberty, combined with the openness of our society, it’s a profound challenge.

Which brings us, first, to the subject of guns. Predictably (and, to be honest, somewhat understandably) the Buffalo massacre has brought calls for stricter gun control from some quarters. The fact there were at least three other high-profile mass shootings over the weekend— including 21 people wounded in Milwaukee Friday night, 17 of them in a single incident — only served to strengthen the impression of a country in chaos.

Yet, an analysis of the statistics tell a different story. Most gun violence occurs in the same high-crime communities, over and over again. And the current gun control regime seems to do little to prevent mass shootings in other areas; Stephen Paddock, the perpetrator of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, purchased all of his weapons legally across four different states — one of which was California.

We believe a more comprehensive approach is needed, one which leverages the American passion for community boosterism and civic association to bring together all the relevant stakeholders — gun owners, law enforcement, government and the general public — to ensure guns don’t fall into nefarious hands, as well as to enable local authorities to identify potential threats before they can develop into a massacre.

Our policy, the Firearms Responsibility Program, is still being refined, but the general outlines place the primary duty for regulating firearms at the county level. And the two primary tools are the Firearms Responsibility Group, where safety training, compliance monitoring and threat surveillance would occur; and the Purchase and Possession Permit, which would be issued by the county sheriff as part of a federal system to allow all law-abiding citizens to both easily and responsibly exercise their Second Amendment right.

There will be more on that later, including on the ways we root our approach in our traditional understanding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For now, we think the emphasis on community is the place to begin when discussing guns and public safety, and we think it’s the place to begin when tackling the misinformation and subversion campaign being waged by and against us as well.

By thinking in terms of what’s best for the communities where we live our everyday lives, we can get beyond the unproductive pro-gun/anti-gun dichotomy. And by joining together in goodwill (the very foundation of what a community represents) we can combat the falsehoods which plague our national discourse before they can take root and permanently infect those among us who are most susceptible to them.

The Great Conversation, after all, happens among neighbors. We need to help each other, to treat each other with respect, and to work together to make the places where we live safer, more secure and more peaceable. We can at least stop the cancer of discord from growing directly around us. Ultimately, the shooter in Buffalo was somebody’s son, somebody’s classmate, and at various times maybe somebody’s teammate or bandmate — or maybe just somebody’s friend.

He could have, and probably should have, been stopped.

Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org.

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The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.

Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or its members.