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.
Emergency personnel work the scene, block off several buildings, and establish a crime scene security cordon at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Saturday, December 13, 2025, after a mass shooting that killed two people and wounded eight others.
(Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Robert C. Koehler
Dec 21, 2025
Common Dreams
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.
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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Robert C. Koehler
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
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Opinion - Trump wrongly inflicts collective punishment for shootings on millions
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opinion contributor
Sun, December 21, 2025
Collective punishment is a hateful and unjust practice that has been used by bigots throughout history to harm entire groups of people for the actions or alleged actions of a few individuals. President Trump is now cruelly imposing collective punishment on millions of people around the world in response to deadly shootings in Washington, at Brown University and near MIT.
Following the attack on two National Guard members near the White House in November, Trump imposed new restrictions to keep people from 39 countries out of the U.S.
An Afghan immigrant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, faces murder and other charges in the attack that killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom and gravely wounded guardsman Andrew Wolfe. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
After a December shooting attack at Brown University left two students dead and nine wounded, followed by the fatal shooting of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, Trump suspended a diversity lottery program that awarded up to 50,000 green cards annually to enable people from countries (primarily in Africa) with few citizens in the U.S. to immigrate to America.
Portuguese immigrant Claudio Neves Valente, whom authorities said was responsible for shooting the Brown students and the MIT professor, was found dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound Dec. 18.
No one other than Lakanwal and Valente is believed by authorities to have been involved in the shootings.
Trump’s collective punishment of millions people for the alleged actions of two immigrants makes no sense
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was born in Louisiana. Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was born in upstate New York. By Trump’s faulty logic, the millions of people living in Louisiana and New York should have been collectively punished following those heinous crimes.
Numerous studies dating back to 1870 have found that immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. A Cato Institute study published in September found that among people born in 1990, “native-born Americans were 267 percent more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants by age 33.”
The overwhelming majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. are grateful for the opportunity and want to work hard, play by the rules and achieve the American Dream. About 52 million immigrants live in the U.S., including about 14 million who are unauthorized, and together they make up 19 percent of the nation’s workforce, the Pew Research Center reported in August.
Trump — whose mother, paternal grandparents and two of his wives all came to the U.S. from Europe — has spent years demonizing other immigrants, especially those from non-European nations. The shootings of National Guard members, Brown students and the MIT professor gave Trump just the excuse he needed to justify intensifying his anti-immigrant campaign.
The president has attacked nonwhite immigrants from Somalia and other countries with particular fury. He recently compared allowing Somali immigrants into the U.S. to taking “garbage into our country” and denounced Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a U.S. citizen who is a legal Somali immigrant. “Ilhan Omar is garbage,” Trump said. “Her friends are garbage.” He later falsely stated that she’s “here illegally” and said “we ought to get her the hell out.”
Trump’s bigoted characterization of human beings as subhuman garbage is dangerous and reminiscent of the way Adolf Hitler dehumanized Jews by referring to them as rats, lice, cockroaches, vultures and other animals. In the same way, enslavers of Africans in the United States considered them subhuman animals who could be owned like cattle or horses.
Categorizing people as subhuman means it is fine to deprive them of human rights and inflict unlimited collective punishment on them — up to and including murder.
Leaders around the world have scapegoated racial, religious, ethnic and other minorities since ancient times — collectively punishing vast numbers of people. Black Americans have been frequent targets.
For example, in 1921, a Black man in Tulsa, Okla., was falsely accused of attempting to rape a white female elevator operator. Whites then rioted in a Black neighborhood and in a horrific case of collective punishment killed up to 300 Black residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses, looting and burning them in what is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I’m well aware that xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and other forms of prejudice remain an ugly reality in America and around the world, used by the haters among us to justify all sorts of collective punishment. But until Trump came onto the political scene, I never imagined that a president of the United States would publicly embrace evil and immoral hatreds in the 21st century. Sadly, Trump has proven me wrong.
A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.
Sun, December 21, 2025
Collective punishment is a hateful and unjust practice that has been used by bigots throughout history to harm entire groups of people for the actions or alleged actions of a few individuals. President Trump is now cruelly imposing collective punishment on millions of people around the world in response to deadly shootings in Washington, at Brown University and near MIT.
Following the attack on two National Guard members near the White House in November, Trump imposed new restrictions to keep people from 39 countries out of the U.S.
An Afghan immigrant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, faces murder and other charges in the attack that killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom and gravely wounded guardsman Andrew Wolfe. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
After a December shooting attack at Brown University left two students dead and nine wounded, followed by the fatal shooting of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, Trump suspended a diversity lottery program that awarded up to 50,000 green cards annually to enable people from countries (primarily in Africa) with few citizens in the U.S. to immigrate to America.
Portuguese immigrant Claudio Neves Valente, whom authorities said was responsible for shooting the Brown students and the MIT professor, was found dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound Dec. 18.
No one other than Lakanwal and Valente is believed by authorities to have been involved in the shootings.
Trump’s collective punishment of millions people for the alleged actions of two immigrants makes no sense
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was born in Louisiana. Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was born in upstate New York. By Trump’s faulty logic, the millions of people living in Louisiana and New York should have been collectively punished following those heinous crimes.
Numerous studies dating back to 1870 have found that immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. A Cato Institute study published in September found that among people born in 1990, “native-born Americans were 267 percent more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants by age 33.”
The overwhelming majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. are grateful for the opportunity and want to work hard, play by the rules and achieve the American Dream. About 52 million immigrants live in the U.S., including about 14 million who are unauthorized, and together they make up 19 percent of the nation’s workforce, the Pew Research Center reported in August.
Trump — whose mother, paternal grandparents and two of his wives all came to the U.S. from Europe — has spent years demonizing other immigrants, especially those from non-European nations. The shootings of National Guard members, Brown students and the MIT professor gave Trump just the excuse he needed to justify intensifying his anti-immigrant campaign.
The president has attacked nonwhite immigrants from Somalia and other countries with particular fury. He recently compared allowing Somali immigrants into the U.S. to taking “garbage into our country” and denounced Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a U.S. citizen who is a legal Somali immigrant. “Ilhan Omar is garbage,” Trump said. “Her friends are garbage.” He later falsely stated that she’s “here illegally” and said “we ought to get her the hell out.”
Trump’s bigoted characterization of human beings as subhuman garbage is dangerous and reminiscent of the way Adolf Hitler dehumanized Jews by referring to them as rats, lice, cockroaches, vultures and other animals. In the same way, enslavers of Africans in the United States considered them subhuman animals who could be owned like cattle or horses.
Categorizing people as subhuman means it is fine to deprive them of human rights and inflict unlimited collective punishment on them — up to and including murder.
Leaders around the world have scapegoated racial, religious, ethnic and other minorities since ancient times — collectively punishing vast numbers of people. Black Americans have been frequent targets.
For example, in 1921, a Black man in Tulsa, Okla., was falsely accused of attempting to rape a white female elevator operator. Whites then rioted in a Black neighborhood and in a horrific case of collective punishment killed up to 300 Black residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses, looting and burning them in what is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I’m well aware that xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and other forms of prejudice remain an ugly reality in America and around the world, used by the haters among us to justify all sorts of collective punishment. But until Trump came onto the political scene, I never imagined that a president of the United States would publicly embrace evil and immoral hatreds in the 21st century. Sadly, Trump has proven me wrong.
A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.
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