Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
— National Rifle Association of America bumper sticker
There are 250 to 280 million firearms in the US. Nearly 50% of US homes own a firearm, that’s 120 to 150 million people. — American Firearms Institute
Amardeep Singh Kaleka has a childhood memory of his father, Satwant. One day when Amardeep came home from school, he saw an enormous American flag flying in front of his house. “Papa, this thing is an eyesore,” he told Satwant. The older man told him to look down the street where the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the Milwaukee breeze from other houses. “You’re in America now,” he said. Satwant Singh Kaleka was gunned down last Sunday by Wade Michael Page, a war veteran, white supremacist and far right punk rocker in the gurdwara shooting at Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek. Satwant had arrived in Wisconsin to pursue the American dream with little money and big hopes. He was the perfect example of the hard-working immigrant who made good in the land of the free and the brave like so many of his compatriots who had made America their home.
America is home to half a million Sikhs, many of them who had migrated from Punjab—Sikhs arrived in the US first in the West and Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s. It is also home to 100 million handguns owned by 40 to 50 million adults.
America is home to almost 40 million immigrants, or 13 per cent of the total US population of 309.3 million according to the Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey (ACS). Of these, 11 million are illegal.
The data suggests that immigrant population increased by more than 1.4 million between 2009 and 2010, or by nearly 4 percent (compared to 1.5 percent between 2008 and 2009). After 9/11 (Sikhs described the Wisconsin shooting as “collateral damage” of the World Trade Center attacks), nationwide gun sales increased by 21 per cent. Mohammad Atta and his demented cohorts changed the world forever when they flew airplanes into New York’s Twin Towers, killing around 3,000 people. They unleashed a xenophobic tsunami in an America that has been obsessed with guns ever since Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday enforced the law in Tombstone with blazing six-shooters. The fact that the gurdwara shooting happened only days after James Eagan Holmes, a student at the University of Colorado, killed 12 moviegoers and wounded many more at a theatre screening The Dark Knight Rises only reaffirms America’s love for guns. Twelve states in the US permit residents to openly carry a handgun without a licence; in 13 states often all that is needed to carry a firearm openly or concealed is a mere permit; openly carrying guns is legal in 17 states which have no local laws banning anyone with a criminal record carrying one. In 2009, according to the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 60 per cent of all murders in the United States were committed with guns. The gun-related death rate in America is eight times higher than in countries with economic and political similarities. A Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery survey found that the rate of gun-related murders in the US is almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest and most populous nations combined. Among the world’s 23 wealthiest countries, 80 per cent of all gun deaths are American and 87 per cent of all children killed by guns are American. The incidence of homicides committed with firearms in the US is much greater than most other advanced countries. There are three gun-related homicides per 100,000 Americans, while in Britain—where immigration tensions are high—it is 40 per cent lower (0.07). For Germany it is 0.2. An average of 58 murders using guns are recorded a year in Britain, while the number is 8,775 for the US. Ironically, in Switzerland, 8 million households own 1.2 to 3 million guns, but the firearm homicide rate is only 1 per 250,000. Eighty-seven Americans die due to gunshot wounds every day and an average of 183 are injured, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the Centers for Disease Control. A multiple-victim shooting happens every 5.9 days in the country. The annual cost of gun violence is $100 million. A dozen guns are legally sold every minute in the US. The firearms explosion has also made it cheaper to buy guns: Holmes’s arsenal cost only $3,000. He used an AR-15 rifle with a 1oo-round magazine; the cartridges cost around 50 cents a piece.
GUNS AND POSSES
After the planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the insular society of America, hatred against Muslims, or anyone dark-skinned or wearing turbans and beards spiked. According to New York-based advocacy group Sikh Coalition, the first Asian killed after the September 11 attacks was Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh and a gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona. On September 15, 2001 he was shot five times by aircraft mechanic Frank Roque. “Post 9-11, we’ve seen an increase in interest in firearms, particularly for personal protection,” said National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. “It’s a natural feeling that after 9/11, people want to be proactive and take necessary actions to protect themselves and their loved ones in these uncertain times.”
Anger and racial prejudice escalated, along with fear, even among ordinary Americans like Bryce Howe who are not skinheads. At the annual Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show, where more than 3,800 vendors peddle their guns and ammunition and thousands pack the weapons flea market at the fairgrounds, Howe was a first time visitor. He never owned a gun before, and was looking for the perfect little handgun for his wife and teenage daughter—perhaps a .38 calibre that would fit perfectly in their palms. He had already signed them up for shooting lessons. Eventually he paid $800 for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. “I am not panicked, but I am concerned that things are going to get out of hand in time,” said Howe, who lives in Edmond, Oklahoma. “I’m a little embarrassed talking about it, but in case I have to move quickly and defend my family, I want to be ready. I told my wife, ‘I hope this turns out to be a big waste of money.’ None of us want to do this, but we see the need to be prepared.”
Another man from Kansas, who refused to part with his name, was more vehement. “The police cannot protect us,” he said. “If someone comes to blow up my block, sure, the police will be there to clean up. Well, that’s a little too late. What are we supposed to do—sit back and relax?”
Post the September attacks, America is anything but relaxed when it comes to Muslims and Sikhs; they are called towelheads and ragheads by many. Most Americans cannot differentiate between the two faiths; their anger responds to racial stereotypes. Mistaken for Muslims for their beards and turbans, Sikhs in America have faced more than 700 attacks or bias-related incidents since 9/11. In December 2001, two white Americans assaulted Sikh store owner Surinder Singh 20 times with metal poles in Los Angeles, all the while shouting, “We’ll kill bin Laden today”. In July 2004, Rajinder Singh Khalsa was beaten unconscious by six men in New York City after they mocked him and a Sikh friend about their turbans.
In August 2006, Iqbal Singh was stabbed in the neck with a steak knife, while he was standing in the carport of his house in San Jose, California. His assailant told the police that he wanted to “kill a Taliban” In October 2008, Ajit Singh Chima was punched and kicked in the head while he was out on his daily walk in Carteret, New Jersey. In January 2009, men shouting racial abuse assaulted New Yorker Jasmir Singh outside a grocery store; two years later, his father was also attacked.
In November 2010, Sikh cab driver Harbhajan Singh was beaten up by two passengers in Sacramento, California—one of them called him “Osama bin Laden”. Last year in March, two elderly Sikhs, Gurmej Singh Atwal and Surinder Singh, were shot dead in Elk Grove, California, while out on their afternoon walk. Places of worship were not spared either; in March 2004, vandals spray-painted, “It’s not your country” on the wall of the Gurdwara Sahib temple in Fresno, California. It had been vandalised a year earlier. In February 2012, a Sikh temple under construction in Sterling Heights, Michigan was defaced with images and the word ‘Mohmed’.
Time magazine reports that recent surveys of Sikh communities in New York City and the San Francisco area show that over 70 per cent of Sikh children have ‘reported some sort of name calling, and over 20 per cent have experienced unwanted physical contact or hitting.’ South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) records 645 cases of racial bias between September 11 and September 17 ranging from racial slurs to assault, arson and shootings. Twenty-seven per cent of complaints of office discrimination involved Asians and Middle Easterners. Student groups accounted for 15 per cent of racial abuse. South Asians were involved in 36 per cent of incidents with incidents involving Sikhs making up over half the South Asian total.
THE TERROR BACKLASH
Though America’s romance with guns began long before 9/11, the event was a seminal moment in the history of American xenophobia. The hatred against Muslims in the United States is on the rise for the past two decades. A Washington Post-ABC News poll held in April 2009 noted 29 per cent of Americans felt mainstream Islam advocated violence against non-Muslims and 48 per cent had an unfavourable view of Islam, the highest proportion since 2001.
In August 2010, a Pew Forum survey found that 35 per cent of Americans felt Islam encouraged violence more than other religions. A Gallup poll of March 2011 found 36 per cent of Americans believed that Muslims in the United States are too extreme in their religious beliefs. It also revealed that 28 per cent of Americans—almost 90 million people — felt that Muslims who live in the United States are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. Their fears were fuelled by incidents of domestic Islamic terrorism. The Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security reported that there had been 161 terrorist plots involving Muslim Americans since 9/11, of which 69 were planning attacks on domestic targets. Eleven of them actually carried out their attacks, killing 33 people—US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed three when he opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. The “Beltway Snipers” John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo killed 11 Americans. A Pew Research Center survey of 2007 found that 15 per cent of American Muslims under the age of 30 believed that suicide bombing could be justified.
In spite of President Obama’s appeal for racial tolerance, many American public figures have fueled the anti-Muslim hate campaign. “As an American Muslim, what is of most concern to me is that it is no longer only a small cadre of dedicated Islamophobes who are expressing bigotry and even hatred towards the American Muslim community — but sadly, also many among our elected representatives and government officials,” Sheila Musaji, moderator of the website The American Muslim, wrote in an e-mail to the Intelligence Report.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, attacked the planned Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero in New York City, saying approving the center would be akin to allowing Nazis to erect a monument outside the US Holocaust Museum. Congressman Peter King declared that there are “too many mosques” in America and claimed—without offering any evidence—that fanatical extremists controlled 80-85 per cent of them. The tirade went from abuse to conspiracy fears; two Tennessee legislators introduced a bill that named some Sharia practices as prima facie evidence of an intent to overthrow the US Constitution. Texas lawmaker Louie Gohmert warned in Congress of a Islamic plot to bring pregnant Muslim women to America to have babies— later lampooned as “terror babies” — who could, years later, act as terrorists with American citizenship and passports.
THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE
The collateral damage of Islamophobia is mainly borne by Indians. Indian Americans constitute America’s third largest ethnic minority—around 3.1 million people. The 2010 United States census records that the Asian Indian population in the US had a growth rate of 69.37 per cent; from almost 1,678,765 in 2000 (0.6 per cent of US population) to 2,843,391 in 2010 (0.9 per cent of US population), and is one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States. This has caused unrest among the American right, even the successful ones are not spared. Tea Party bloggers attacked 38-year-old Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic Congressional candidate of Indian-origin for Illinois’ newly created district as an illegal immigrant. Prosperity in the Indian community has made them vulnerable to attack: Indian Americans are being attacked by robbers in states including Virginia and New York.
Ironically, the response of the police was to train Indians specially to shoot. Indophobia or hatred of Indians— a word coined by American Indologist Thomas Trautmann—began in the late 19th century, when Chinese railroad labourers were named ‘The Yellow Peril’, leading to the founding of the Asiatic Exclusion League whose mission was to eradicate Asians from the American workforce. When Punjabi Sikh immigrants arrived from British India, they were referred to as the ‘Turban Tide’ or the ‘Hindoo Invasion’. In 1987, the Dotbusters—a white supremacist hate group that targeted South Asians, especially Indians —made their appearance in New Jersey. Since most Hindu women and girls wore bindis, they were demeaned as dotheads. Between 1987 and 1993, numerous Indians were attacked and left for dead, their homes burglarised and their businesses attacked. In 1991 alone, 58 hate crimes were reported against Indians. Kaushal Saran, a doctor who had migrated to New Jersey in the 1980s was in coma after a racial attack; his reported assailants walked free because he could not remember. Soon after he moved to Oklahoma, some 1,300 miles away from his bad memories where he lives on disability dole. “I look back and I think …we did everything, but it didn’t work out,” he told a reporter recently.
Most of these hate crimes, especially against Sikhs, are due to ignorance about cultures and geography. The new study by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 per cent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members—cartoon characters—while only one in 1,000 people could name all five First Amendment freedoms. Only 5 per cent of Americans could correctly answer three-fourths of the questions asked about economics; 11 per cent could answer questions about domestic issues; 14 per cent could answer questions regarding foreign affairs, and 10 per cent on geography.
In 2003, the Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad investigated Americans’ knowledge of world affairs. The task force concluded: “America’s ignorance of the outside world” is so great as to constitute a threat to national security. Newsweek magazine recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test; the results were shocking: 29 per cent didn’t know the vice-president of the United States, 73 per cent didn’t know the reasons of the Cold War, 70 per cent didn’t know what the Constitution was, and 6 percent didn’t know Independence Day. Only 58 per cent of Americans know what the Taliban is, in spite of the US being embroiled in a war that’s lasted over a decade. One fifths of Americans cant even identify their own country on a world map.
According to US Census 2011 predictions, poverty in America is the highest in 50 years, the official poverty rate climbing from 15.1 per cent in 2010, to 15.7 per cent. America’s unemployment rate went up to 8.3 per cent in July 2012; historically, from 1948 until 2012, the United States unemployment rate averaged 5.8 per cent. Anti-immigration lobbies fear that settlers are taking jobs meant for Americans. The Economic Report of the President, February 2005, noted that ‘foreign-born are associated with much of the employment growth in recent years. Between 1996 and 2003, when total employment grew by 11 million, 58 per cent of the net increase was among foreign-born workers… This should not be taken as evidence that the foreign-born displace native workers; rather, it reflects the fact that immigrants have made up all of the growth in the low-skilled workforce.’ Philippe Legrain he author of “Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them” quotes from Fareed Zakaria’s book, The Post-American World: “America has succeeded not because of the ingenuity of its government programs but because of the vigor of its society. It has thrived because it has kept itself open to the world – to goods and services, to ideas and inventions, and, above all to peoples and cultures.”
Forty-four years since Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot and killed, more than one million people have died by the gun in the United States. In the long night of its bigotry, America’s vigour is being turned against itself.