Dallas Mayor ‘More Fearful’ About White Shooters Than Syrian Refugees

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over the weekend said he would attempt to refuse Syrian refugees from coming into the state, but one city’s mayor is sending a message defying that order.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, a Democrat, told MSNBC that he is more fearful of white shooters in Texas than he is of the threat of violent refugees.

“I am more fearful of large gatherings of white men that come into schools, theaters and shoot people up, but we don’t isolate young white men on this issue,” said Rawlings.

The Mayor warned that by refusing refugees, we “fall into the trap [set by ISIS] if we become xenophobic and paranoid about people in the Middle East,” the Dallas Morning News reported.

The idea of the “trap” is widely considered one of ISIS’s main objectives in its terrorist attacks, as the Washington Post‘s counterterrorism analyst Harleen Gambhir reported:

“The strategy is explicit. The Islamic State explained after the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine that such attacks ‘compel the Crusaders to actively destroy the grayzone themselves. . . . Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one of two choices, they either apostatize . . . or they [emigrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the Crusader governments and citizens.’ The group calculates that a small number of attackers can profoundly shift the way that European society views its 44 million Muslim members and, as a result, the way European Muslims view themselves. Through this provocation, it seeks to set conditions for an apocalyptic war with the West.”

Rawlings, for his part, seems to draw his argument from statistics on U.S. gun violence where an estimated 30,000 people are killed with guns every year – far more than have been killed in terrorist attacks.

On the issue of race, since 1982, 64% of mass shootings (four or more victims) have been carried out by white men, according to data compiled by Mother Jones. Black people committed just 16% of mass shootings, Asians just 9%, and all other races, the remaining 11%.

The idea of refusing Syrian refugees on the basis of the Paris attacks should not be a controversial one, as none of the eight attackers have been identified as a refugee, nor have any of them by identified as Syrian. According to investigators, they were all European citizens.