US ‘terrorists’ are its own citizens

US politicians and activists have made headlines and won votes by stoking fears of immigrants and refugees who, they argue, need to be kept out of the country to protect Americans from terrorism. The truth is that the vast majority of the violence in the US isn’t terrorism, isn’t perpetrated by foreigners and isn’t the result of “mass killings”. Rather, homicides happen in ones and twos and threes, often at home (about 43% of homicides are committed by acquaintances or relatives of the victim) and are not usually driven by a political or religious agenda but by anger or revenge, or in the commission of another crime.

The presence of a gun makes it five times more likely that a domestic violence incident will turn deadly. Ready access to deadly weapons too easily turns a flash of anger or a flash of fear into a fatal encounter. That’s why stronger laws that put reasonable limits on the ability to obtain lethal weapons are necessary.

We must not jeopardise our national safety to assuage the National Rifle Association or the gun manufacturers’ lobby.

The nature of our everyday violence puts the Trump administration’s obsessive targeting of immigrants and refugees — whom the president insists on portraying as threats to national security — in a curious light. Terrorism is real, and we don’t discount it as a threat, but one’s chance of being killed by someone other than a foreign-born terrorist is 253 times more than by a foreign-born terrorist, according to the Cato Institute.

Studies also find that immigrants commit violent crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

The problems that led to the carnage in Las Vegas lie within. If Trump was sincerely concerned about making Americans safer, he’d attack the clear and present danger — our own violent culture and our easy access to firearms — and put his anti-immigrant dog whistle in a drawer. Los Angeles, October 4.