American Protest: Now is the time to politicize   

Our nation has undergone another senseless act of terrorism, with one of the five deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history happening this past weekend. Officials are still searching for a motive for why Devin Patrick Kelley murdered 26 people.

This follows closely after the October shooting in Las Vegas, also named one of the five deadliest shootings in U.S. history. According to CNN, of the 30 deadliest shootings in the United States dating back to 1949, 18 have occurred in the last 10 years. Two of the five deadliest took place in just the last 35 days.

After the shooting, I noticed many tweets calling for stricter gun laws — something which can be expected after a mass shooting. Something more interesting that I noticed, though, was that some people were talking about “not politicizing” the shooting, saying it is wrong to make the shooting a political issue by calling for stricter gun laws.

The problem with this train of thought is that these are the same people who call for stricter border patrol and anti-immigrant policies when a crime is committed by a person of color.

We should not be treating this crime differently just because of the race of the person who committed it. We see a white man who commits a mass shooting as “mentally ill” while a person of color in the same situation, we see as a “terrorist.” The bottom line is, if they are a mass shooter, they are a terrorist.  

There is no doubt this shooting was a terrible tragedy — as all mass shootings are. But if we do not act now to try and prevent the next one, when do we act? People are most motivated to make a change in the wake of tragedy and disaster. Now is exactly the time to politicize the issue.

This would not be creating an agenda or being insensitive, it would just be about trying to stop these deadly shootings from happening so often. Personally, I am sick of living in a country where seeing a mass shooting on the news does not shock me.

You cannot pick and choose when to politicize an issue. People are all about pushing through anti-immigrant legislation on the basis of recent shootings, but the minute a white man commits the crime, it is a national tragedy and everyone should stop talking politics and grieve.

This viewpoint is twisted. We cannot shut down the borders because someone came from another country and committed a mass shooting here. If a terrorist wants to get into the United States to hurt people, they will. There is also home-grown terrorism, a tactic which is being utilized more and more  by ISIS. How is shutting down our borders going to stop people already in the country from going out and killing people?

If we decide not to act at all in response to mass shootings, then the mass shootings will continue to occur. How many people have to die before we realize that some serious changes need to be made within our country, changes that do not include shutting down the borders?

Gun laws have to be changed. I am all for Second Amendment rights, and I am not saying we should ban guns, but something has to change. The shooting in Texas was not committed by an immigrant, or a person influenced by ISIS — it was a white man with access to an AR-15 rifle. That type of rifle can be purchased in Texas without any kind of permit or waiting period.

This shooting didn’t allow us to place blame on anyone or anything except for the easy access to guns in the United States, and that is why conservatives are choosing now to not politicize the issue. The shooting didn’t give them any reason to close borders or push anti-immigration politics, it just showed once again that gun laws must be made tighter.

We cannot choose when to politicize an issue — all attacks on U.S. soil are inherently political. Instead, we must respond to these attacks with sympathy and a motivation to prevent it from happening again. This is not about an agenda, it is about saving lives.