It's not ideology killing people at bars and churches

It's time to move past blaming groups and start looking for solutions. I'm not optimistic.

The violence does not seem to be subsiding. This weekend, a man in a boat shot up a waterfront bar in Southport, killing three people and injuring eight. Another man in Flint, Michigan set fire to a Mormon church and then shot worshippers, killing at least four and wounding others. The gunman in Michigan died at the scene and the one in North Carolina was arrested.

While the right is screaming that leftists are fomenting violence in the country, the real culprit is mental illness and access to guns. The guy who killed Charlie Kirk wasn’t driven to violence by any ideology. He was motivated by anti-social behavior, mental illness, and access to guns. You can make the same argument about the guy with the hit list full of Democrats who killed former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.

Still, the right blaming the left for violence is laughable. Violence perpetrated by the right outstrips violence perpetrated by the left and it’s not even close. The Daily Caller, the right-wing website, ran an op-ed titled, “Enough is enough…I choose violence!” The first line reads, “Dear reader, I know calls for violence are generally frowned upon. The issue is … I simply don’t care.”

Of course, conservatives are victims. They’re always victims and they use their perpetual victimhood to excuse bad behavior and promote bad policies. Now, they’re using their victim status to call for violence against the left.

They should be using this time to take a moment of self-reflection instead of looking for some group to blame. This year has been especially traumatic. In addition to the killings this weekend and the Kirk and Hortman murders, children in a Catholic school in Minneapolis have been killed and parishioners in Kentucky were killed by a man who had just had a domestic violence complaint against him dismissed.

The political violence committed by individuals often has more connection to random murders committed by mass shooters than any ideological conspiracy. The perpetrators are usually lone wolf types who want some sort of narcissistic glory and attention as much as they want to achieve political goals. The mass murderers at schools, churches, festivals, and crowded businesses often keep news clippings or articles about other killers.

We live in a country where mass shootings happen on a regular basis. Despite Republican promises that more guns will make us safer, they’ve made us much more dangerous. Good guys with guns rarely stop bad guys with guns. Instead, deranged people easily access high-powered weapons and surprise unsuspecting people in supposedly safe places—churches, restaurants, schools, stores—and easily kill them before anyone can react.

We’ve largely become immune to these horrific events. I doubt many people outside of Southport or Flint will remember the killings in another month or so. Gone are the days when Columbine or Sandy Hook or Mother Emanuel Church shook our nation to its core—and then failed to elicit any significant action.

Instead of looking for somebody to blame for all of the killings, we need to be looking for answers to prevent the next ones. No one group is responsible for the deaths of all these people. No ideology is driving people to kill other people, though that could change as the rhetoric heats up. We should be looking for people with dangerous obsessions, threatening behavior, and access to firearms, not people who disagree with us politically. Unfortunately, we lack the leadership to steer us in a more constructive direction.