Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado was right to call mass shootings “a form of terrorism.” Even as politicians and those in Congress pump up public fears at the supposed threat of refugees fleeing Syria, every day in America people — mostly white men — are walking into movie theaters, restaurants, churches, grade schools and health care centers armed to the teeth, determined to take as many people out as they can. – New York Times, Editorial Board, 10/30/15.
Fact Check: The Times here claims that “white men,” presumably native-born, are “mostly” responsible for mass shootings. Did the Times heedlessly toss in this phrase just to score a politically-correct cheap shot against the oft-maligned “white male?” In reality, during the past decade, non-European immigrants have played a significant role in mass murders. And given that immigrants are a minority of the U.S. population, it may be that they are proportionately more likely than white natives to carry out these killings.
Shortly after the Times article, columnist Ann Coulter compiled a list of non-native killers of non-European descent. At the time the identity of the San Bernardino killers was unknown. But it turns out that they could have been on the list. One was the son of Pakistani immigrants, and the other was an immigrant from Pakistan. They killed 14 people.
On Coulter’s list: Chris-Harper Mercer, an immigrant who killed nine people at Oregon Community College two months ago. Last year another immigrant, Elliot Roger, slaughtered six people in Isla Vista, California. In 2013 two Chetchen immigrants, Dzhokhar and Tamerian Tsarnaev, set off bombs at the Boston Marathon (three dead). The year before Haitian immigrant Kester Dufrene killed three people in Miami. In 2011, Mexican immigrant Eduardo Sencion committed a massacre in Carson City, Nevada (four dead).
A Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Wong killed 13 people in Binghamton, NY, in 2009, and Korean immigrant Seung-Hui Cho set the record for a mass killing by murdering 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech in 2007.
Coulter notes that the Times and other media outlets tend not to focus on the massacres committed by immigrants. Pointing out immigrant mass killers is not to suggest that most immigrants are killers. Certainly they are not. But to ignore that a small but disturbing number who are is inappropriate. It might suggest a broader problem with assimilation. People who feel they do not fit in may be inclined toward anti-social behavior, even if most stop far short of murder and other serious crimes. Our excessive level of immigration makes it difficult for immigrants to assimilate—a problem for them and us.
Meanwhile, the Times and its ilk divert attention away from those problems. Commonly they label Americans who raise them as “anti-immigrant.” As they stridently ignore the negative impact of mass immigration on our country, one might wonder if they are anti-American.