Sticking to their guns: violence in America

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Millions of Venezuelans have fled their country as its economy continues its slow motion collapse. Under President Nicolas Maruro, 1600 Venezuelans cross the border into Colombia every single day. We speak to the women among them who are desperate for medical care. And if you believe Saudi Arabian media, Turkey is too dangerous for Saudi tourists. The United Arab Emirates warns its citizens not to visit Lebanon. We take a look at the political spats driving this ever shifting travel advice. But first, America was shaken by two mass shootings over the weekend. On Saturday, a gunman killed at least 20 people and injured 26 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The city's authorities said they were seeking to bring hate crime charges. We are also treating this as a domestic terrorist case. The statutory definition of Domestic Terrorism, 18 USC 2331. This meets it and appears to be designed to intimidate a civilian population to stay police. Then on Sunday, another shooter killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio. The mayor, Nan Whaley, described the horror.

The suspect was wearing body armor and used an AK like gun, assault rifle,223 caliber with high capacity magazines. And he had additional magazines with him as well.

She said the attack seemed to her preventable.

You know, I just want, I just question when is enough enough?

Earlier in the week in a similar attack, a man killed three people at a festival in Gil, California. The mass murders raised once again the question of why gun control in America is so lax.

We know the most about the El Paso shooter. He seems to have posted a manifesto to 8chan, a message board site popular with the far right, shortly before that shooting.

John Fasman is our Washington correspondent and has been reporting from El Paso and.

In that he expressed support for another manifesto posted by the man who murdered 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand. Earlier this year, he also expressed support for the Great Replacement, which is a nutty right wing conspiracy theory that blames feckless Western elites for supporting high levels of immigration to replace people of European descent with non whites. And he rambles about jobs lost to automation and a Hispanic invasion of Texas, which is curious because Texas, of course, was part of Mexico for well over a century.

Well, what's curious is that there seems to be a noticeable rise in this kind of white supremacist right wing terrorism in recent years.

I don't think it's quite right to talk about a rise. Exactly. So between 2010 and 2017, America suffered 2.4 times as many right wing terror attacks as jihadist ones. And there's a recent report from the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, that said that since September 2001, far right extremists have been responsible for 73% of fatal violent extremist incidents. There are a variety of reasons for this. Online message boards make it easier for terrorists to forge operational links, but we're talking about a sort of steady drumbeat of attacks since September 2001. So it probably makes sense. You know, perhaps we can talk about a rise, but it might make more sense to say that there has been a steady stream of violent right wing attacks and that American politicians have perhaps paid too little attention to them relative to the attention paid to jihadist terrorism.

I mean, it can seem like that focus is by design rather than inattention. I guess what I'm wondering is if there's been an increase in these kinds of hate crimes since Donald Trump became president.

So the most recent year with full FBI data is 2017. And in 2017, there was a 17% increase in hate crimes since 2016. And in 2016, there was a rise in hate crimes above the previous year. Attacks rose most steeply against people based on race or ethnicity and religion. Now, these are an increase in hate crimes voluntarily reported to the FBI, not total crimes. Brian Levin, an academic who I've spoken to who studies hate crimes, compiled hate crime data from 30 large American cities. This is reported to their police departments. And he found a steep and steady rise from 2015 to 2018. Now, what's interesting is that Levin also found, going back to 1990, that hate crimes tend to spike in election years and that indeed they did spike in November 2016.

So we can't say that there's a correlation between this evident rise in right wing terrorism and the Trump presidency.

We shouldn't just leave it at that. You know. Has the president talked about immigrants invading America like the El Paso shooter has? Yes, he has. Did he laugh when an audience member at one of his rallies last May suggested shooting immigrants? He did that. And can we say that emotionally charged events like elections and an uptick in racist and nativist rhetoric from first candidate and then President Trump seem to have coincided with an uptick in reported hate crimes? We can also say that now Mick Mulvaney, the president's chief of staff, went on the Sunday talk shows and objected strongly to the idea that the president shares any blame in what has happened. And it's true that the El Paso shooter said that his views on immigration and automation predate the Trump presidency and that it would be wrong to blame the president. But it doesn't take that much imagination to hear the parallels between what the president has said and what that manifesto expressed belief in. And beyond that, you can only imagine what the reaction of the president and what policy options his administration would be discussing and what the media would be demanding if America had suffered three jihadist terror attacks that left 30 some people dead in a week.

And in the aftermath of these tragedies, there's always this parallel effort. On one hand, calls for more gun controls from politicians from the affected communities, and always some effort from the National Rifle association, the nra, that boils down to their old line that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Why do we keep seeing this stalemate?

Well, one reason is that the NRA is an extremely effective pressure group. They spend a great deal on lobbying, and they're very savvy. But I think there's also an asymmetry between gun control supporters and gun rights advocates. Now, partly that is reflected in spending, but that seems to me really a symptom of a deep race symmetry, which is that there are more people deeply committed to gun rights, committed to voting on it and spending money on it than there are to gun control. Gun control, the support for gun control tends to be a somewhat softer position than support for gun rights, and that's why you have that asymmetry in the first place.

You can imagine that dynamic in other countries, though, between the pro and the anti gun lobbies. But this kind of political standoff has always been a particularly American one. Why is that?

Well, it's an American problem for a couple of reasons. First, the Second Amendment does permit individual gun ownership, and the Constitution is the backstop for any American lawmaking. Now, in the past few decades, jurisprudence on the Second Amendment has changed a bit. Now, the amendment itself states A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Now, courts used to wait a first clause about a well regulated militia far more heavily. Now courts seem to think it's just throat clearing. And this is pretty maddening for gun control advocates. Though I should note that since the court has decided, since the Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment allows individual gun ownership, it has also held that the right to bear arms is not unlimited and that states can regulate or set limits on gun ownership. And that as far as I know, I don't think the court has agreed to hear any case brought by gun rights advocates against any state or local level restriction. But beyond the sort of legal reasons, gun ownership is really deeply woven into American culture. And the NRA has been really, really good at casting efforts to pass common sense gun control measures as elitist attacks on ordinary Americans.

So how do other countries deal with it?

Well, in other countries there are fewer guns. And when citizens can own guns, like in Switzerland, they're much more tightly regulated. And this position that all regulation must be rejected leads to some really ridiculous positions taken now on FOX News. On Sunday morning, Kevin McCarthy, the House leader, appeared and blamed video games. And of course, there are plenty of video games in Japan and South Korea, but there are no mass shootings. And that's because what Japan and South Korea don't have is easy access to guns. Donald Trump is reportedly going to make a statement today discussing mass shootings and mental health. But of course, other countries have people with mental health problems, but they don't let citizens buy semiautomatic rifles. America has a homicide rate that's seven times that of most other rich countries and a gun homicide rate that's more than 25 times higher. The other thing that happens in other countries is that after mass shootings, countries respond with legislation. After a gunman killed 35 people in Australia in 1996, the government imposed strict licensing requirements. Earlier this year, after the mosque shootings in New Zealand, their government banned semi automatic weapons and is going to impose strict licensing and registration requirements after mass shootings. Here, unfortunately, Americans seem to wring their hands and just go about business as usual.

John, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Refugees are pouring out of Venezuela. More than 4 million have fled hunger and state failure as the country's economy and infrastructure crumble. Neighboring Colombia is bearing the brunt of the burden with well over a million Venezuelans seeking refuge there. One especially strained Resource is hospitals. Many Venezuelans decide to leave only when they need the medical help they can't get at home.

I visited this clinic in what was once an abandoned hospital. And at any given time during the day you can see pregnant women lining up outside.

Mariana Palau reports for the Economist from Colombia. She's been traveling in the state of La Guajira to the border town of Maikao.

The patients at this clinic are mainly pregnant Venezuelan migrant women who haven't been able to get sexual and reproductive health care back home. About 1600 Venezuelans cross the border into Colombia every single day and, and an increasing number of them are these kinds of women. One of the first people I spoke to when I was at the clinic, she was a patient, 22 years old. And I am going to call her Carla. I don't want to use her real name because she spoke to me about very sensitive things. Carla told me that she fled Venezuela around April. When she was about six months pregnant, because she didn't want to give birth there. You can't get anything in Venezuela. Hospitals don't have any power. They've run out of medicines and even surgical gloves. So she didn't want to go through the risk of giving birth in one of these hospitals. She couldn't even get tests that pregnant women usually are meant to get. She didn't even have the monthly checkups and the vitamins that pregnant women are supposed to be. She couldn't afford them.

And so that's a situation that's changed for women like Carla. A few years ago, presumably she could have been able to get the care and the medicine that she needed.

Yes, most definitely. And in fact she can compare because she has a six year old daughter. And she was telling me that when she, she got pregnant with her first child, she had her follow ups, she could buy her vitamins, she had her tests. But this again was six years ago. And the crisis in Venezuela got really bad about two years ago. That's when things started to deteriorate sharply. Since then she couldn't even afford to eat three meals a day. She ate two meals a day and a lot of times one. At least one of those meals was just plain rice. So Carla, just like many other pregnant Venezuelan women crossing the border into Colombia, was malnourished and she was anemic. And because of that, her pregnancy is a high risk pregnancy.

So how did she actually come to be in Colombia? How did she cross the border?

She crossed the border through what are called trochas. So she crossed the trocha and the trocha is a dirt path that just basically you take to cross the border. But they are illegal crossings. And unfortunately, she's an undocumented immigrant here in Colombia.

And how are women like Carla, undocumented immigrants with medical needs treated when they get to Colombia?

Well, they're definitely better off than in Venezuela, but it's still hard for them. They don't qualify for medical care during pregnancy. And that is because, according to Colombian law, undocumented migrants are only entitled to emergency health care. So follow ups, for example, during pregnancy, they are not emergency health care. Maikao, the city where the clinic is, is absolutely overwhelmed. Its health system is struggling to cope. It's already poor and small. So last year, for example, in the entire year, 11 Venezuelans died while they were waiting for ICU beds in the Maikao public hospitals. Besides this, doctors are really seeing illnesses that they weren't used to seeing before.

What kind of illnesses do you mean? That they haven't seen before?

So syphilis is one of those diseases that they've seen increase in rates that they'd never dealt with before. Condoms in Venezuela have become unaffordable, so that has led to a lot of pregnancies and a spike in STDs. Babies who are born with syphilis need special care. But since hospitals in Guajita don't have intensive care units, they need to outsource those to private hospitals or clinic. And that is just putting a huge strain on the healthcare system.

And if the letter of the law stipulates that these women don't get the sort of regular care during pregnancy because it's not emergency care, how are they getting any care at all?

So last year, some NGOs started to arrive in Maikao. The public hospitals asked for their help specifically. The clinic I was in is run by Save the Children, an NGO, and it has treated nearly 800 women since it was open in April. There are things that they can do. They can treat syphilis before a baby is born, and therefore they can save the healthcare system in La Guajira a bunch of money, because then you won't have a baby needing an ICU bed somewhere in a private hospital that is going to spike up the bills. But there are things that they cannot do, though. And I'm going to go back to Carla's story just to give you an example. Carla found out that she was HIV positive when she got to Colombia, and she can't afford that treatment. Actually, retroviral treatment is so expensive that Basically, none of the states that are found along the border with Venezuela can afford to give them. So in essence, she has to go to Cucuta, a city in Norde Santander that's towards the south. But she can't do that until she's declared a refugee. And that process can take up to two years. It might never happen at all.

So what about the medical community in Colombia? How are they kind of receiving patients like Carla and dealing with this grand influx?

So the medical community, especially in Macau, they're very keen to treat Venezuelan migrants whether they're undocumented or if they have documents. It doesn't really seem to make a difference to them. But they also express a lot of stress because they're overwhelmed. The system in La Guajira is overwhelmed. And when they can't find ICU beds for babies or children that need them, they get really frustrated and angry.

And I suppose that that places a strain on the sort of the broader health system as well as on the people who work for it.

Yes, and that's a lot of it has to do because the bills are piling up. This year the state has spent twice as much on Venezuelan migrants, on caring for them than it has on people from La Guajira itself.

And for the people coming across the border from Venezuela, people like Carla, what sort of future do they face? What are their prospects?

I was really surprised when I interviewed Carla. Sure, she was worried mostly because she was going to be kicked out of the shelter she was living in about 10 days, 15 days, and by then she would have already had her baby. So she was worried about that. But overall she was just really happy that she was able to leave Venezuela. I mean, even with the bad news that she was HIV positive, it seemed like nothing could be worse than living in Venezuela.

Thanks very much for joining us, Narayana.

Thank you, Jason.

Holiday problems can go well beyond lost luggage, canceled flights and exchange rate scams for travelers from Gulf countries. There are extra issues, like your home country keeps banning where you can go.

Turkey has long been a very popular destination for Saudi tourists. They come for cosmopolitan Istanbul or for the Mediterranean beaches.

Greg Karlstrom is the Economist's Middle east correspondent based in Cairo.

But if you judge by the Saudi media lately, Turkey is bordering on a hellscape. We've seen warnings in Saudi newspapers about rising gun violence in Turkey. The embassy in Ankara has put out a warning about rising petty crime in Turkey. There's a concerted effort by the Saudi government to encourage its citizens not to visit Turkey this year.

Why Is that why do Saudi officials care how many people go to Turkey?

Much of it goes back to the murder last October of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was murdered and dismembered inside the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul. He'd been critical of the Saudi government of the Crown Prince, and so there was a Saudi death squad that was dispatched to Istanbul to kill him there. After that, relations between the two countries, which were tense to begin with, have really fallen out. The Turkish president has been quite critical of the Saudis over the murder, over their refusal to punish anyone for it. And so, as relations have deteriorated, one of the ways in which the Saudis are trying to hit back at Turkey is by discouraging their citizens from visiting and therefore from spending money in Turkey.

And trying to hit at the sort of the tourist trade. Is that unique to Saudi Arabia?

It's not unique to Saudi Arabia. It's something all of the Gulf countries have done to various other countries over the years. The United Arab Emirates, since 2012, has banned its citizens from traveling to Lebanon, supposedly over fears of kidnapping there. But of course, there are political disagreements between the Emiratis and various pro Iranian factions in the Lebanese government. Egypt, another example. It's a popular tourist destination for many citizens of the Gulf, but citizens of Qatar have had to avoid Egypt for the past couple of years. Egypt was one of four countries that imposed an embargo on Qatar in 2017. And because the Qatari government is sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt portrays it as being almost the enemy state. Citizens of many Arab countries find their holidays get ruined by politics, and these.

Are out and out bans, or these are gentle discouragements. How do these things play out?

In some cases, it's an outright ban. The United Arab Emirates, totally free, forbids its citizens to go to Lebanon. You can still go via a third country, and the government tends not to punish you for doing it. But it is a legal ban, whereas in the case of Saudi Arabia, this is a PR campaign. But there is certainly no formal ban on Saudis going to Turkey. Egypt is a special case. There are more than a dozen countries that you need state security permission to visit. One of them is Turkey. It was a ban that was imposed in 2014 to stop Egyptian citizens from crossing the border into Syria and joining Islamic states, obviously no longer a concern. The caliphate has crumbled, but that ban remains in place. Also on the list, though, Georgia and South Korea, neither of them really known as hotbeds of Islamic extremism.

This sounds like purely politically driven and like these situations could change depending on who's aligned with whom at any one time.

It certainly could change. But what's different in the case of Saudi Arabia and Turkey is there's also an economic piece to it. The Saudi government has this Vision 2030 economic reform plan. Part of it is they're quite eager for their own citizens to holiday at home and spend money at home instead of going abroad for entertainment. And so by discouraging citizens traveling to Turkey, they're also hoping they will stay in Saudi Arabia and spend their money there. This summer, we've seen King Salman trying to set an example here. Instead of going to his palace in Morocco, as he often does the past two summers, he's taken a staycation at Neom, which is this planned futuristic city in northwestern Saudi Arabia that's currently under construction. He has a palace there. There's almost nothing else actually built there, yet no one lives there right now. So a bit of a bleak place, maybe to spend a vacation, but also no crowds on the beach.

Greg, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.