As last week’s horrific events in Dallas flashed in vivid color across the television screen, my thoughts went instantly to the black-and-white images that stunned us on that terrible November day nearly 53 years ago.
Once again, the city of Dallas had become the focus of undeserved attention as the site of a headline-making assassination.
But last week’s murder of five Dallas police officers has as little in common with the 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy as those awful earlier events in Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino and Orlando had with one another,
The races, the backgrounds, the motivations of the perpetrators were as different as their targets.
But they had one thing in common: Each killer used firearms of the sort primarily used by one human being to kill another. Most would likely have been illegal had the 1994 ban on the manufacture and sale of assault-type weapons and high-capacity magazines remained in effect.
Their weapons — semiautomatic assault rifles and pistols — seem far removed from the kinds of firearms millions of Americans use legally for sport or for protection, despite the misleading contentions from the National Rifle Association and its allies. They say advocates of even the most modest restrictions want to bar everyone’s legitimate guns and scrap the Second Amendment — as if that were advisable or even useful.
These killers might have gotten weapons even if it were harder for those on the terrorist watch list to purchase them, or if the assault weapons ban remained law. True, it was flawed and had loopholes. And those who want to harm others can always find something — a knife, a hammer, a baseball bat. But nothing can kill as quickly and efficiently as a gun.
But NRA-led scare tactics have succeeded in thwarting most attempts at legislation remedies. A bipartisan Senate effort to curb access by suspected terrorists to firearms failed because both parties have conspired to ensure a majority no longer rules there.
In the House, the dramatic sit-in led by civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis prompted less discussion of legislation than talk within the Republican majority of punishing the demonstrators for violating House rules.
As for curbing the enormous number of guns in society, the trend seems going the opposite way. President Barack Obama was right when he said “police have a very difficult time in communities where they know guns are everywhere.” The police in Dallas, he said, faced a special challenge “because this is an open carry state (where) there are a bunch of people participating in the protest who have weapons on them.”
Obama also said — and this is both important and true — that events like the Dallas shootings, and the racial aspects of recent incidents between police and citizens, should not obscure progress for the country, and the city of Dallas, on race, violence and police-citizen relations.
When I arrived in Washington five months before Kennedy was killed, the U.S. Congress had two black members. There were still signs stating “no colored allowed.”
Those signs are long gone. Today, we have 48 black senators and representatives, and an African-American president. Two of four Republican presidential finalists were Hispanic Americans. Dallas has an African-American police chief and an almost half-minority city council.
The number of violent crimes, the FBI says, has declined by one-third in the last 25 years. The numbers of murders has dropped even more. The recent events we so deplore were followed by predominantly peaceful bi-racial protests, not the racial riots they would have incited in the 1960s.
Economic disparities, lack of mutual understanding and overt racism remain serious problems. Twisted individuals will periodically incite more such incidents, their impact perhaps exaggerated by the immediacy of social media. There is no single panacea.
Better detection and treatment of mental health problems would help, as would better relations between police and their communities. So would more jobs and lowered voices of our political leaders.
The country needs more of the calm projected this weekend by President Barack Obama, Gov. Greg Abbott, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and less of the blame-placing like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s quick condemnation of the Dallas protesters.
But it also needs to curb the proliferation of murderous weapons and the ability of unsuitable people to get them.
Unfortunately, as a leading gun control advocate, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, asked after Newtown: “If 20 dead first graders lying on their classroom floor doesn’t change this debate, then what will?”
Carl P. Leubsdorf is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Readers may email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com