Bosnian children (a NATO photo)The latest violent expression of our national gun culture occurred last week when Sulejman Talovic, 18, entered the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City and started shooting. Before the police killed him, Talovic managed to shoot five people dead and injure four more.
Since deadly shooting rampages are far from uncommon in this country, it’s upsetting to me that the media didn’t take latest opportunity to probe deeper into the ghastly phenomenon and address some of the cultural questions about the role of violence in our society and the debate over gun control. Instead, the majority of the coverage centered on the gunman and specifically, his Bosnian Muslim heritage.
An article in The New York Times highlighted the Bosnian ambassador’s trip to Utah. Ambassador Bisera Turkovic met with the mayor of Salt Lake City and members of the Bosnian-American community there. Through tears, she felt the need to assure the people of Utah that Bosnians are peaceful people who are horrified by the mall-goers suffering. For suffering is something Bosnians are all too familiar with.
Perhaps the ambassador saw the trip as necessary damage control, considering the barrage of angry phone calls and emails pouring into the offices of Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson and other city officials. These people hold the Bosnian community in Utah and Muslims in general responsible for the horrendous incident. Mayor Anderson called theses conclusions “outrageous,” perhaps because this type of rampage has become a perverse pastime in this country.
It’s a real shame that instead of taking the occasion of another public shooting spree to come together and take an introspective look at the underlying causes of gun violence, we get caught up in the urge to blame someone, which pushes us further apart. This time we blame the shooter’s crime on his foreignness, his culture and his religion.
But the reality is that Sulejman Talovic was a furious young man with a violent past (he had threatened people at knifepoint twice) and access to guns, that’s it. The fact that he’s a Muslim, or a Bosnian, or an immigrant or whatever, likely has nothing to do with his act of horrific violence. Talovic, like so many other shooters that America can claim as native sons, was full of hate and had a desire to destroy. He lost respect for human life, and his rampage that killed five innocent people was nothing more than a twisted attempt to feel powerful.
As journalists and as a society we are asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking ourselves how Talovic’s “otherness” factored into his crime, we should turn the cameras around and try to discover what poison exists in our culture that drives so many people to vent their frustration by murdering innocent people.
