The tragic events of last week showed us what we already knew and that is that the real threat to the safety and security of this country and our people are not undocumented immigrants who come here to seek a better life, but rather the threat that we face is armed Americans.
Trump likes to focus on immigrants as the source of all of our problems and spread the false and dangerous rhetoric that immigrants are bad and that there is an "invasion" of what he calls "bad hombres", but that is just racist propaganda that he likes to push to get his racist base riled up and engaged.
You see, he feels he is losing his core support so he must hold onto the base and that is why he holds these rallies where he demonizes immigrants and lies about them as the problem in this country when we can clearly see that there was never an invasion of what he called very bad people, but rather families and children who in many cases were escaping violence and poverty and needed to get to a safe place.
Sadly, America is anything but safe.
This "invasion" rhetoric inspired the El Paso shooter to carry out his evil act and this is not the worst time that Trump's hateful and racist words have inspired violence nor will it be the last. His words towards immigrants and people of color are damaging and dangerous as we saw this past week and it is clear as day that the real threat in America is not immigration and the families seeking a better life.
There are two threats. The first is Americans with guns. The second is white supremacy. Both are very big threats that Republicans fail to acknowledge or fix and both pose grave threats to the safety of this country. What you have is a situation where there are more guns than people in this country and where at any given moment innocent Americans can be shot and killed as they shop, dine, go to a movie, go to school, work, worship in church, or any number of other things we do everyday.
Much of the mass shooting problem is fueled by white supremacy as these shootings are done by mostly white males, but our gun violence problem goes far beyond mass shootings and racism. It is extensive and it is an epidemic that puts all of us in danger every single day in America and something must be done about it.
Trump bans Muslims and wants a wall to keep out immigrants yet he does not want to do anything about guns or white nationalism, both of which pose a greater threat to this nation than Muslims or immigrants ever have or ever will. If we treated the mass shooting epidemic like we treated the immigration issue then we would have fixed this threat a long time ago, but we ignore the gun problem and focus on harming poor brown families.
The real threat that we face as a nation is clearly white nationalism and gun violence and as long as we put our focus on harming the many non violent immigrant families and ignore the real threats we face as Americans then we will continue to lose our fellow citizens to tragedy and nothing will change.
Until we stand up and say enough, it will remain the same. The time is now to change things and realize that our own with guns are the ones we should be afraid of, not immigrants and Muslims who Trump tells us to hate.
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