Among the executive orders he has been busily signing is a ban on the resettlement of Syrian refugees as well as suspending the issuance of immigrant visas to anyone from Syria and other countries determined to be ‘high risk.’
When it comes to labeling a country “high risk” the question must be asked: A “risk” to whom?
At the time Trump is preventing vulnerable refugees and legal immigrants he considers to be ‘security risks’ from entering America, he will most likely be bowing to the wishes of the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) that spent millions of dollars to help get him elected by loosening the restrictions on America’s guns.
But if the Americans who also helped to get Trump elected really want to feel safer within their own borders, then it is their gun-toting countrymen they will need to keep closer tabs on, not the long-suffering Syrian refugees who are just looking for a place to live in safety themselves.
The truth is that plenty of Americans are killing their fellow Americans every day. Till this week of January, there have been 1,052 gun related deaths since the beginning of the New Year.
That’s an average of more than 40 deaths per day and not one of them was caused by an ISIS jihadist or a Syrian refugee.
In fact that number is comparable to the number of deaths on many days due to the bombing of civilians in Syria itself.
By utilizing theatrical grandstanding techniques and his reality TV acting skills, Trump managed during his campaign to empower and embolden America’s rage filled anarchists who bought into his worst case scenario fantasy of living in a besieged America under constant threat of terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists.
He managed to fill the minds of others with fearful visions of Syrian refugees entering the country with the intent of doing harm when in reality more than 60% of Syrian refugees who have been resettled in the U.S. have been young children and more than half of the remaining 40% have been women.
In fact, the risk of being harmed in America by a growing number of white supremacist bigoted xenophobes who have been feeling sanctioned and legitimized since Trump’s election is far greater for those refugees who came to America hoping to find a safe place to raise their children.
The culture of fear that Trump took advantage of to get elected thrives on falsehoods and outright lies and continues to be willfully ignorant of several important facts when it comes to refugees.
Syrian refugees, in fact any of the world’s refugees who apply for resettlement through the UNHCR, do not get to choose where they will be allowed to go.
Those who have been resettled in the US (a very small number in comparison to those who have been welcomed by other member countries) were carefully chosen by the UNHCR after doing their own initial vetting process which makes resettlement an extremely ineffective method of gaining entry into the US for terrorists.
The real security risk for Americans is not the potential for refugees to be closet terrorists, but the very real potential for angry and mentally disturbed Americans to use their legally owned weapons on refugees as well as their fellow Americans.
According to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a non-profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun-related violence in the United States, 23 mass shootings (each resulting in more than one victim) were also reported and verified since the beginning of the year; yet none of them has been labeled terrorist attacks because they were not committed by either Muslim jihadists or foreigners.
When Craig Stephen Hicks shot and killed Deah Barakat (an American dental student of Syrian and Palestinian descent), along with his wife Yusor and her sister Razan, in the newlywed couple’s home in 2015, his crime was labeled a “dispute over a parking space” instead of an act of “terrorism” simply because the victims were Muslim instead of the perpetrator of the crime.
While Trump stands smugly behind his assertions that keeping out vulnerable Syrian refugees will make America greater and safer, the newly crowned commander-in-chief ignores the fact that the greatest threat to national security lies within the simmering caldron of religious intolerance, prejudice, bigotry and animosity that he has been stirring with his provocative rhetoric that did not cease with his election.
As Nash Riggins of the International Business Times (IBT) recently pointed out, “America’s freshly-anointed president refuses to acknowledge that acts of gun-fueled, domestic mass murder are even an issue.”
“Instead, he’s vowed to abolish gun-free zones in schools, axe his predecessor’s executive orders on tougher background checks for criminals, and pledged to expand so-called second amendment rights.
“In Trump’s twisted reality of autocracy and hyper-conservatism, guns are nothing to worry about.”
If Trump truly cared about the safety of the American people he would do whatever it takes to establish constructive dialogues that would lead to the establishment of some truly effective gun control measures.
How many times must Americans be subjected to mass shootings by other Americans with a history of violent behavior and severe mental illness before the government figures out which national security threat has got to take precedence?
It is not only for the security of Americans, but also for the security of those vulnerable Syrian children whose parents brought them to America as refugees because they thought it was a safe place to be in.
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