When guns harm 'the other'

One of the greatest challenges of living transgendered is the fear of violence, Danni Askini said. 

The fear can be suffocating, because violence could arrive in all kinds of ways. It could take the form of a random attack, like the beating of transgender man Michael Volz on the eve of Seattle Pride. It could be targeted to prevent transgender people from frequenting a certain store. Or obtaining essential services, like health care. Often, the violence comes from a romantic partner.

“There’s this idea that transgender people transition to deceive other people,” said Askini, a trans woman and the executive director of the Gender Justice League. “If people can frame us as being deceptive, then we are perpetrators of violence … which flies in the face of what we in the community know to be true.”

Askini was one of several participants in an Aug. 11 panel on hate and gun violence hosted by Gay City on Capitol Hill. The panel was organized by the Washington-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility following the mass shooting at gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, and is set to precede a future discussion of concrete policy solutions to gun violence planned for Sept. 23, Alliance Executive Director Renee Hopkins said.

The Alliance currently has an initiative on the ballot intended to curb gun violence via the court system. If Initiative 1491 passes in November, police, family or other members of a household will be able to obtain “extreme risk protection” orders temporarily prohibiting firearms access to persons showing signs of mental illness, violent tendencies or otherwise harmful behavior.

“It feels like this is a really timely topic but, unfortunately, it’s not a new topic,” said moderator Pamela Banks, of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle. Banks rattled off several recent high profile shootings, including the Pulse massacre — which primarily targeted Hispanic lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people — and the 2015 mass shooting of the black congregation of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal  Church in 2008. She added that 2016 marked 10 years from the March 2006 “Capitol Hill massacre,” in which a shooter killed six attendees of a rave afterparty on East Republican Street.

“It’s striking to me that all of these are happening in what are supposed to be safe events,” Banks said. “These are crimes that are meant to terrorize our communities.”

Dr. Ben Danielson, a pediatrician working for the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in the Central District, said gun violence was nothing short of a public health crisis. 

“I made the mistake recently of looking at one of those websites that track where a shooting occurs,” Danielson said. What he discovered was a map generously dotted across the Central District. “These are not unique. These are ubiquitous and that sends a message in a powerful way to our youth.”

Danielson cited one 2015 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found that schools near locations of the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks saw a drop in overall math and reading proficiency following the shootings. The authors of that study hypothesized one possible cause of the decline was due to disruptions incidental to the shootings, such as school closures and student/teacher absences.

Yet Danielson said he believed most shootings go largely ignored by the media and the public because of an obsession with the “numbers game” — only shootings that result in exceptionally high body counts can stand out from other shootings. 

The victims of violence can also go ignored due to suspicion by the general public.

“There’s this constant assumption that if you are a victim of violence, you did something, or something is wrong with you,” said Treasure Mackley, the political and organizing director for Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest. “It perpetuates this notion that how we exist in this world is somehow wrong, whether it’s the color of our skin, the identity of our gender, or what we do.”

Mackley pointed to the November 2015 shooting of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which came at the end of a year that saw an extensive effort to defund the reproductive health organization. 

Distaste for the organization is largely driven by the assumption that its primary role is to provide abortions, even though abortions only make up a small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s services, Mackley said. But even pointing that fact out plays into the agenda of those who would demonize abortion providers and patients, she said.

“It’s like there’s this other-ness, this idea that there’s only a few people coming in for an abortion and it’s OK for violence to be committed against them,” Mackley said. “It’s not OK.”

The idea of marginalized groups being mistrusted or ignored by society at large was a common refrain among panelists. 

Sonja Basha said she attempts to combat the worn stereotype of Muslims as terrorists and fanatics by putting herself in the public eye as a “queer Muslim artist.”

The Rev. Carey Anderson of First African Methodist Episcopal Church recounted being pulled over by a police car on an isolated country road and being immediately asked how much he had drank (Anderson does not drink, he said). 

People can even become invisible within one or more of their own minority groups, Equal Rights Washington chair Monisha Harrell said, noting that people of color make up an often-ignored 30 percent of the LGBT community.

While hate-motivated violence has become more visible than ever thanks to social media and its potential for live reporting, panelists agreed only a sustained effort could actually abate violence. They also agreed that Seattleites’ self-image as citizens in a progressive city could amount to little more than resting on laurels.

“We have this narrative that progressive movements move forward no matter what and, actually, if you look back, history swings back and forth,” Askini said.