OPINION
BY SAMUEL GODFREY, Freshman
When a Christian man commits a crime, his faith is almost never questioned. When a Jewish person commits a crime, most people won’t bring his faith into it.
Well, that’s all fine and good. However, when a Muslim commits a crime, it seems to give some people an excuse to call for the punishment of all followers. Why is that?
While some may argue that 9/11 fueled Islamophobia, or that it’s only radicalized followers of the religion that commit such crimes, the fact remains that every religion has it’s radical nutcases that need to get acknowledged.
A fitting example of inequality in this field was when the Colorado Springs shooting on Nov. 28, 2015 occurred, which left three people dead and nine wounded. The perpetrator called himself a warrior for the babies, and was willing to murder people to get his point across, but people won’t call him a radicalized terrorist, even though he is the textbook definition of one. (Definition: Someone who uses violence, mayhem, and destruction — or the threat of those things — to coerce people or countries into taking a certain action)
Recently, in San Bernardino, California, a mass shooting occurred where Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, both suspected of Islamic State connections walked into Syed’s workplace and opened fire, killing 14 people and injuring 21 others. The suspects later died in a shootout with the police, and the incident sparked a national debate on radical Islam and gun control.
Once again, it’s a similar incident, but the fact that the perpetrators were Muslim is ultimately what makes this particular situation more likely to sell than the last.
While the main subject of this article is racial and religious bias, the above situation brings another controversial topic into the mix: gun control.
I’m all for defending our constitutional rights, but the Second Amendment in particular is a document that needs to get updated. It was written in a time when a select few people had access to firearms, and incidents like the San Bernardino shooting one of 1,044 mass shootings in 1,066 days wasn’t even conceivable.
However, instead of simply letting a law get updated to leave potential terrorist with nothing but their hands, some GOP frontrunners insist on spending tax money on the turning away of an entire religious group.
Donald Trump, for example, has suggested that we should prevent all Muslims entering the United States until we can “figure out what’s going on,” but he fails to see that we have the most damning evidence of what causes most of the violence here: We have the most mass shootings of any country right now, and we also have the loosest gun laws in a majority of our states.
As of Dec. 17, 2015, the San Bernardino shooting was the 355th mass shooting in this year alone, which means that incidents like this occur almost daily. In fact, at the time of writing this, that statistic had increased to 457 mass shootings, meaning there were literally more mass shootings than there were days this year, which is problematic.
However, those statistics still don’t stop hate crimes being perpetrated towards the Muslims of America, as one 6th grade girl in New York was attacked by schoolmates who tried to rip off her hijab and refer to her as “ISIS”. This occurred less than a week after the attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead.
It’s hard to predict whether or not the point trying to be made here will sit well with people, but it’s still a considerable idea to shift the focus away from thinking similarly to Hitler, and instead make it harder for potential terrorists to carry out would-be hate crimes against the people of America.
