CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is
African-American, said on his broadcast Monday night that “white men”
constitute the “biggest terror threat” in the United States, as MediaIte reported, and he faced an immediate backlash, mostly from conservatives on Twitter.
Lemon’s statement came after three separate terror incidents in the previous week, all of them carried out by white men. As a CNN
report recounted, on October 24, 51-year-old Gregory Bush walked into a
supermarket in Louisville, Kentucky, and shot a 69-year-old
African-American man and a 67-year-old woman, also African-American,
killing both; on Friday, 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc of Florida was arrested
and charged with mailing explosives to more than a dozen prominent
critics of Donald Trump; and on Saturday, 46-year-old Robert Bowers
massacred 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue. All
three alleged perpetrators of the terror acts were white men.
“We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat
in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right,
and we have to start doing something about them,” Lemon said on his
Monday CNN broadcast, quoted by the Hill. “There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban on — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban.”
Statistics, however, indeed show that a disproportionate number of
violent, terroristic incidents are committed by white men. According to
the data site Statista,
of 104 American mass shooting incidents from 1982 through September of
2018, 59 were committed by non-Hispanic whites. The next most frequent
group initiating the shootings was black Americans, who were responsible
for 17 of the incidents. Asians, which includes people of Middle
Eastern descent, committed eight mass shootings in that 36-year span.
In the same time period, only three mass shootings were committed by women of any ethnicity, Statista reported.
Statistics from the United Kingdom indicate that Lemon’s statement would also hold true there, according to the Independent
newspaper, which reported that in that country, “white suspects
accounted for 38 percent of terror-related arrests” between June of 2017
and June of 2018, more than any other ethnic group.
You can read the full story and watch the video by clicking here.
Say what you want but Don Lemon spoke the truth and there are actual facts to back up what he said. Sometimes the truth is not pretty and not meant to feel good, so therefore many people live in denial. Lets not forget about Columbine. It have gotten so bad people don't even feel comfortable in church anymore. Parents are scared to send their children to school now. So good for Don Lemon for speaking up.
