With the attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Syria, there have been discussions of how to keep the United States safe from terrorists, including barring Syrian refugees from entry into the country.
However, many acts of violence are committed by US citizens. A man by the name of Robert Lewis Dear opened fire at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic in November of 2015. He killed three people and injured nine more, four of whom were police officers. Dear was taken into custody alive and unharmed.
After what some have called a “crime against women”, social media users including authors of the EurWeb: Electronic Urban Report blog, called the media out for using loaded language to report crimes such as this. In reports from news outlets such as the Mirror, The Herald Voice Daily News, and Irish Independent, the Planned Parenthood location is referred to as an “abortion clinic” instead of a “women’s health clinic” though only three percent of the services the Planned Parenthood clinic provides are abortive.
The term “domestic terrorism” is also being used in the media. Domestic, or homegrown, terrorism is defined under the 2001 Patriot Act as illegal activities that are violent and are intended to affect the conduct via intimidation or coercion of the government using mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping within the US.
The Eurweb article called out the language used when referring to white Americans in the media. Reports on the Planned Parenthood attack referred to Dear as a “gunman,” “shooter,” or “suspect” instead.
A 2015 study by New America, a non-profit public policy institute, found that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, white Americans have killed nearly twice as many people in terror attacks than Muslim extremists. Of the 19 attacks, 4 included at least one woman along with male accomplices. From January to November of 2015 alone, there were 351 mass shootings in the US, 34 of which had at least three victims including the shooter.
2016 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee shared his thoughts on the language used in media during his CNN interview on the Planned Parenthood attack.
“We’re not going to have the kind of language that you heard from John Kerry where he talked about legitimizing or rationalizing terrorist actions,” Huckabee said. “There’s no legitimizing, there’s no rationalizing. It was mass murder. It was absolutely unfathomable.”