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mass shootings
No, We Can't Deport Our Way Out of Gun Violence
Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies. But this is exactly the mindset that motivates mass shooters.
Dec 21, 2025
I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country—the world—into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated... randomly,
On Saturday, December 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. Rhode Island. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia—in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.
So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?
Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the US, mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.
Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking.
But that ain’t gonna happen in the USA—not until God knows when, which seriously expands and intensifies the nature of the questions we must start asking. Yeah, there are an incredible number of guns in the United States. Some 400 million of them. And embedded into American culture along with the presence of guns is the belief that they are necessary for our safety, even as they also jeopardize it. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. What a paradox.
And here’s where the process of change must begin. Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking. One person wins, one person loses. And if I draw my gun first, yeehaw, I’m the winner. This simplistic mindset is, and has long been, part of who we are—ultimately resulting, good God, in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, giving humanity the opportunity to commit mass suicide.
And while nukes may be declared to be simply deterrents for our enemies—threatening mutually assured destruction (oh, the MADness)—the global, and especially the US, non-nuclear military budget is itself almost beyond comprehension: larger by far than what we spend on healthcare, education, diplomacy, or environmental salvation, aka, human survival.
As Ivana Nikolić Hughes writes at Common Dreams: “But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.”
And this thinking isn’t sheerly political. It permeates our social and cultural infrastructure. And it gets personal. “We live in a culture of violence, where weapons are a symbol of power,” Ana Nogales writes in Psychology Today. And having power—over others—also means having the ability, and perhaps the motive, to dehumanize them. And this is the source of human violence—both the kind we hate (mass killings) and the kind we worship (war).
All of which leads me to a quote I heard the other day, in regard to the Bondi Beach shootings, which left me groping for sanity. The speaker was Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks, speaking on Fox News. “In America,” he said, “we have to do more to deport terrorists out of the United States to make sure this doesn’t happen in the homeland, and root out antisemitism around the world as well.”
Flush ’em out! All of them—you know, the ones that are different from us. Skin color, whatever. This is the essence of dehumanization, and it’s how we govern. Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies and declare them... deportable, and if necessary, killable. This mindset is infectious. Just ask the students at Brown University or the Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach.
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What Bondi Beach and Brown University Reveal About Stopping Gun Violence
Australia’s response to a December 14 mass shooting reminds us that violence is not an inevitability to be endured; it is a problem to be confronted.
Dec 19, 2025
Days ago, two tragedies unfolded on opposite sides of the world—each marked by gun violence and grief, yet met with starkly different national responses.
On December 14, on the first night of Hanukkah, a gathering on Bondi Beach in Sydney turned into horror when a father and son opened fire during a “Hanukkah by the Sea” celebration, killing 15 people and wounding 40 in what Australian authorities called an antisemitic terrorist attack. The carnage would have been much worse were it not for the heroic act of Ahmed al-Ahmed, an Australian citizen who migrated from Syria two decades ago.
The day before in Providence, Rhode Island, a shooter opened fire at Brown University during finals, killing two students and wounding nine. As of this writing, authorities are actively searching for a suspect—and a motive.
These shootings—one at a beloved public beach, the other on an Ivy League campus—expose not only shared grief but radically different understandings of responsibility. In Australia, sorrow was quickly followed by collective resolve. The US followed a familiar ritual: shock, condolences, and political paralysis. If I had a dollar for every politician’s “thoughts and prayers,” I could join the billionaire class those officials so eagerly protect.
If we are serious about honoring the victims and survivors in Sydney, at Brown, and everywhere else touched by mass shootings, expressing grief is not enough.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned the Bondi Beach massacre as an act of “evil beyond comprehension,” pledging solidarity with the Jewish community and signaling renewed efforts to strengthen gun laws: tougher licensing, tighter oversight, and renewed limits on gun ownership.
Australians remember what followed the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Within days, the country banned rapid-fire weapons, bought back and destroyed nearly 1 million firearms, and created a national gun registry. The result? Decades with virtually no similar mass shootings.
In the US, by contrast, each new tragedy yields the same results: more guns, more shootings, more grief; this in a country with more guns than people! And once again, the gendered reality of this violence is almost entirely ignored. There's a reason we never hear the phrase, gunwoman.
The overwhelming majority of US mass shooters are male—frequently young, usually white, and commonly driven by grievance, isolation, and entitlement. This is not incidental. It’s a pattern demanding honest cultural reckoning. For decades, we’ve failed to challenge destructive norms of masculinity. No surprise that those norms keep finding their most lethal expression through guns.
Let’s be clear: This is not about demonizing men. It’s about telling the truth. We train boys to suppress vulnerability, to equate manhood with dominance, and to interpret frustration as humiliation. When that script collides with easy access to weapons designed to kill many people quickly, the outcome is predictable. Every time. Full stop.
Australia acted on that reality. After Port Arthur, it banned fully automatic weapons, semi-automatic rifles, and pump-action shotguns—and treated firearms not as sacred objects, but as regulated tools with enormous public risk. Rather than deny their grief, Australians transformed it into collective responsibility, identifying gun violence as a systemic problem requiring systemic solutions.
In the US, mass shootings are still framed as isolated incidents—acts of deranged individuals—or worse, as unavoidable features of national life: school shootings; movie theater shootings; grocery store shootings; church, mosque, and synagogue shootings. Together they form a normalized nightmare we refuse to confront honestly, ignoring the 393 mass shootings so far in 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
At Brown University, students and families are now living with the trauma of a field of learning turned into a killing field. Final exams meant to test academic mastery became tests of life and death. The remainder of the semester was canceled, and students headed home to process a violent assault rather than celebrating the end of the semester.
And yet, even as Brown students grieve, politicians employ familiar distractions—talking about mental health or spiritual resilience—anything to avoid confronting easy access to weapons of mass destruction.
Australia’s response reminds us that violence is not an inevitability to be endured; it is a problem to be confronted. Their approach is not perfect; nor is their country. Their strategy reflects a fundamental belief: Government exists to protect lives, not to fetishize weapons. The US, trapped in a twisted love affair with the Second Amendment, continues to block meaningful reform.
Still, this country has a choice. We can center honest conversations about masculinity and how we raise boys. We can invest in early interventions for alienated youth. We can regulate weapons of mass killing. Or we can keep normalizing trauma and, laughably, calling it freedom.
When Brown students return to campus, many will have already spent weeks organizing for tougher gun laws. I predict students across the country will join them.
If we are serious about honoring the victims and survivors in Sydney, at Brown, and everywhere else touched by mass shootings, expressing grief is not enough. Action—the antidote to despair—is required. Now.
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No, Diversity Is Not the Cause of Violence
The true problem lies elsewhere, such as in economic and power interests, the old drivers of wars and genocides.
Dec 16, 2025
On December 13, 2025, a man with a gun killed two students in a classroom at Brown University and left half a dozen seriously injured. This tragedy did not make headlines around the world because shootings are a tradition in the United States. According to various statistics, for a century (it would be necessary to add the colonization of centuries before, carried out by religious fanatics against Indians, Blacks, and Mexicans), mass murderers have tended to be supporters of the supremacist right, but it is they who blame diversity for all the ills of their societies. Fear is big business.
This massacre took a back seat when, the following day, 11 people were killed in Sydney, Australia. The victims were members of a Jewish community celebrating Hanukkah. Since the ban on semi-automatic rifles and strict regulation of firearms in 1996, massacres in Australia are a rarity.
Immediately, social media was flooded with explanations about the danger of Islam to the world, even when it was revealed that the man who stopped and disarmed one of the two attackers in the midst of the massacre was a 43-year-old Muslim, father of two children, who was shot twice. Benjamin Netanyahu will probably honor him with the Israel Prize in Human Values and Civil Heroism.
A couple of hours later, the richest Argentine in the world and resident of Uruguay, Marcos Galperin, who presents himself as the “founder and executive chairman of Mercado Libre” and Konex Prize winner, commented on the massacre with the same prejudice that the killers surely share: “Welcome to the new multicultural and diverse Australia.”
The now demonized multiculturalism is as old as the domestication of fire.
Could it be that the problem perceived by those who are against diversity is skin color? Why are non-Caucasians always the problem? When, for centuries, white people devoted themselves to assaulting, destroying, and massacring the rest of the world, they were only bringing civilization to those “shithole countries,” to use President Donald Trump's language to refer to the countries of the South. “Why do we accept people from these shithole countries, like Somalia, and not accept people from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark?” Perhaps because, to them, we are the shithole country.
The common factor is always the same: The problem is not cultural diversity, but something as superficial as skin color. When they find out that the native British and Belgians were black-skinned people, their blood sugar rises.
The now demonized multiculturalism is as old as the domestication of fire. There was no trade, let alone free trade (an ancient activity until it was destroyed by capitalism), without cultural, linguistic, religious, and technological exchange. From the 10th century until the beginning of the European slave trade, the Kingdom of Nri achieved almost 1,000 years of coexistence based on the principles of “peace, truth, and harmony.” The Nri culture, located in what is now Nigeria, shared with the Ubuntu philosophy of the southern continent its collective conception of the individual and its conception of peace and social harmony as higher goals. Its communal ownership of land and production, and its intense trade with other nations as far away as Egypt, ended with the arrival of Europeans and the novel slave trade based on skin color.
The same was true of Native American peoples. In most Indigenous cultures, foreigners who were adopted not only ended up integrating into the new society, but also tended to occupy a place of great respect in the social pyramid. The same cannot be said of the deeply racist societies of the revered Free World (“the free race,” white)―unless we are talking about sepoy soldiers.
In the Great Peace League of North America, the Iroquois adopted foreigners from all cultures and languages, including Europeans, who often did not want to return to “civilization.” Native diversity also included members of different genders (men and women “of two spirits”). These were not naive savages. For centuries, they defeated European armies armed with advanced technology, not because of their arrows but because of their superior social organization. They even expanded throughout the Ohio River basin in response to attacks by British and French armies. It was not for nothing that the natives mocked the white man's concept of freedom: “We are free,” they said. “We are not desperate to be rich, nor do we obey the orders of our leaders when they do not convince us. You submit to anything: kings, captains, priests...”
We could continue with other cultures, such as the Arab Empire, which lasted several centuries. Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted, prospered, and multiplied for centuries in one of the most outstanding civilizations in science, rational analysis, and technology.
Of course, if we look at the entire history of humanity, we will always find plenty of examples of violence, massacres, and genocide. No one can say that in these centuries of coexistence there were no conflicts, wars, and brutalities, because that is a chronic ailment of the human species. But if we compare realities, we can say that our contemporary world, which prides itself on being advanced and civilized, has stood out for its exceptional brutality. Suffice it to mention the world wars, the atomic bombs, or the imperial dictatorships imposed by the “sacrificed white man” (Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt) on the rest of humanity. Always victimizing themselves for their own crimes. As Ukrainian Golda Meir said, “We can never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children.”
Although we cannot say that there are welcome forms of hatred, we can say that there is no single type of hatred. Slaves hated their masters for what they did, and masters hated their slaves for what they were. It is one thing to hate for what one is and another to hate for what one does.
If there is a problem with the ancient culture and morality of diversity and tolerance, it is that racists who promote civil and imperial violence are protected by the law. In fact, we reward them. Otherwise, it would be impossible to understand why the sect of global billionaires is racist, sexist, and hates the poor, whom they divide and parasitize every day.
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