El Paso shooting exposes our denial about domestic terrorism
When newscasters speak of Dayton and El Paso, I hear my name.
I was born in Dayton, Ohio, and later covered local news there as an intern in the days of typewriters and telephone booths.
Years later, my son would attend the University of Texas at El Paso (Go, Miners!). I met a number of "nice and neighborly" local folks, as we used to say where I grew up, including a promising young City Council member named Beto O'Rourke.
Yet, as Dayton and El Paso grieve over their loss of nine and at least 22 people, respectively, to deranged gunmen Saturday and early Sunday, I also grieve for my beloved adopted hometown of Chicago.
Over the same weekend, two shootings on the city's West Side left seven injured and, a few blocks away, one dead and seven more injured.
Yet, as the Chicago Tribune reported, those tragedies are not called "mass shootings" because the experts who do the counting don't agree on what should be counted as a "mass shooting."
But, let's face it, the more urgent question that follows such tragedies is, what is to be done about it?
That's the question that has come to define today's hardening political divide in this country. President Donald Trump condemned the gunmen who carried out the attacks and the racism that apparently motivated the one in El Paso.
Not surprisingly, Trump blamed the internet, video games and mental health problems -- just about everything, in fact, but guns.
Youths in other developed countries from Japan and China to Europe play as many or more video games than Americans do. Yet none has a gun violence surge that is at all comparable to ours.
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