Last Monday, two teenage gunmen opened fire outside the Islamic Center of San Diego, murdering three Muslim men. Unfortunately, this is the type of horror Americans have been conditioned to expect. After years of political stagnation on gun safety and ongoing hateful acts of violence, our president has signaled once again to children, to the Muslim community, and to everyone else: he does not care if you get shot.
Gun violence has been on the rise in the United States for too long. Perhaps the most harrowing consequence is that gun violence is now the leading cause of death among children. Whether from school shootings, homicides, suicides, or accidents, the gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000. In fact, the number of domestic deaths due to gun violence is about as many as U.S. military deaths in every war since World War I combined. More children have been lost to gun violence since 2020 than troops lost since 9/11. Yet even with such a striking death toll—and one affecting children no less—happening on our own soil, Vice President J.D. Vance calls it a “fact of life.”
If an ever-present fear of gun violence exists among American families, then we are living in an era marked by terror. When school shootings become the price of doing business, children may reasonably fear going to school, and parents may reasonably fear sending them. In fact, in 2022, a survey showed that almost half of all parents were worried about their children getting shot. Vice President Vance recommends bolstering security at schools as a remedy, but when the solution involves developing security plans that resemble those of military bases, maybe we should be talking about gun violence as the national security threat it is.
Though gun lobbyists say, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill peopleuns don’t kill people. People kill people,” as a means of misdirection, it may still be worth considering what is driving these people to kill. The answer lies heavily in a President who has been making racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic attacks since before he was ever elected to anything. Now, he has the power to codify his malice (Trump v. Hawaii is just Korematsu in disguise) and deputize it (earlier this year in San Diego, Somali daycare providers–many of whom are Muslim–were harassed and threatened; the California Attorney General called the tactics “straight out of the Trumpian playbook”). As of Friday, Trump announced green card seekers are going to have to go back to their home countries to apply, while just this past week, Colorado law enforcement flagged that ICE’s recruitment tactics were using neo-Nazi symbology so blatantly that they feared white supremacists might take the content as a call to violence. These aren’t dog whistles, these are cat calls—with real consequences.
Trump has no interest in dousing the flames of hate; he prefers to fan them. He has no interest in funding social and mental health services; he prefers to cut them. And of course, he refuses to regulate the means of violence often used to execute this hatred. One of the San Diego shooters was previously flagged by the FBI; with better gun laws, these murders would never have happened.
The President’s selectively applied grief reveals his true priorities. Following the assassination of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk last September, Trump established a National Day of Remembrance, and many Americans were summarily fired for failing to show adequate deference. Yet when innocent children were threatened, and when innocent protectors of those children were murdered in a fury emboldened by the executive’s own racial animus, the President could barely feign sympathy, offering a detached: “It’s a terrible situation...we’re going to be going back and looking at it very strongly.”
The President does not mind the expense or burden of federal intervention when it comes to his own safety. Just last month, he leveraged the presence of a gunman floors away from him at a hotel to demand that taxpayers foot the bill for his own personal, military-grade security infrastructure (read: his ballroom). He has consistently used the power of his office to protect his ideological allies, issuing pardons to those who attacked the Capitol and recently creating a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay out reparations to insurrectionists that looks more like an advance down payment for future incidents. One pardoned January 6th rioter has already gone on to molest two children whom he then attempted to silence with promised hush money that “he [hoped] to get from [the] slush fund.” If you are Donald Trump or willing to commit acts of violence that serve his interests, you are shielded. If you are a child in a classroom or a minority in a house of worship, you are on your own.
On that note, we may have been grieving another massacre of innocent children last week if it were not for Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nader Awad, three men who stood in the crossfire to protect them. As San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera noted at a vigil at the Islamic Center last week, echoing Imam Taha: “Amin, Nader, and Mansour were the best of us. And they repelled evil.” To honor the memories of these three neighbors–these heroes–may we harness our own capacity to help others. Our president may be trying to lead us into a post-compassion era, but we are not obligated to follow.
In the absence of federal leadership or even basic empathy from the White House, we must become the defenders of our own communities. Comprehensive federal action may be stalled, but we can focus our energy locally. Municipal policies can help curb access to dangerous weapons and expand funding for mental health services. Plus, we as individuals can model unifying, community-building rhetoric and action, and work to elevate leaders who do too. If our compassion is to serve as the final line of defense, then we must work together to reinforce it.
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