By ann summers

The problem is as it’s always been – the ethnocentrism of the European colonizers and their American-born descendants, basing their bias on property and power and in the case of recent GOP politics on the fear of the Other defensible, it seems, only by force of arms.

And yet the data says otherwise – the number of muslim radicals is smaller than those who are white(sic) and blacks and Latinos are a danger only because their crimes might be race and class based and however territorially constrained by neighborhoods.

All that fear is good for new gun sales to incompetent consumer-operators, but it sucks for public safety institutions already predisposed to oppress POC. The real problem seems to be frightened white folks and more pointedly, their control of increasingly militarized police services geared up for terror.

In a Pew Research Center poll in July, the voters most likely to put gun rights ahead of controlling access were white men and women without a college education. Those voters are shrinking within the overall electorate, and, as they tilt more toward Republicans, they are receding even faster within the Democratic coalition. Whites who didn’t finish college provided about half of Bill Clinton’s votes in 1992 but only about two-fifths of Gore’s in 2000 and a fourth of Obama’s in 2012.

Despite what Donald Trump and many other politicians have told you, the major threat to America isn’t Muslim extremism. In fact, statistics show that the real danger lies with domestic extremists who aren’t of the Muslim faith.

The New York Times reported back in June that since Sept. 11, 2001, almost twice as many people have died at the hands of white supremacists and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.

Using data compiled by New America, a Washington Research center, a study found that 48 people have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim—including the mass killings in Charleston, S.C.—compared to the 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists. However, this does not factor in yesterday’s tragic shooting or less publicized incidents like the Las Vegas couple who murdered two police officers and left a Swastika on one of the bodies.

These stats reveal a vast difference between public perception and the number of actual cases in which Muslim extremists have claimed American lives. So why aren’t more people outraged about domestic terrorists? Because then we’d have to admit that white supremacy is still a problem.

The militarized police war on civilians continues and citizens continue to kill each other, although oddly, more civilian gun production/ownership is proportional with no appreciable (mass shooting) increases in fatalities…

The US spends more than a trillion dollars per year defending itself against terrorism, the president said, which kills a tiny fraction of the number of people killed by ordinary gun crime.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34424385

Did police or laws protect anyone from the following events or weapons: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/03/us/how-mass-shooters-got-their-guns.html?_r=0 and are liberals being stampeded into more restrictive civil liberties in the heightened perception of public spaces as places for mass shootings even when “mass” is synonymous with “and-1“.