Editorial: Baseball shooter's actions were perversion of views he espoused

Let's start by recognizing that the Belleville man who shot five people at a Virginia baseball practice may have been a supporter of former presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders but he did not represent Sanders' views.

Nor did he remotely represent the values of any reasonable American, regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy. His actions, in fact, were an affront to the fundamental values of freedom that the American political system upholds. He shot five people simply for their political beliefs, and but for the brave and rapid response of the Capitol Police, he might have killed many more.

That is not the act of an American patriot. It is not the behavior a person who understands or cares about the fundamental underpinnings of American political philosophy.

Nor, it is important to add, were the actions born of patriotism or representative of the values of President Donald Trump when a man walked into an Olathe, Kansas, bar last February and shot two Indian immigrants after shouting "get out of my country."

Nor were the actions of a Ravenna, Washington, couple representative of conservative former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos when they stormed through a crowd at a Yiannopoulos speech last January looking for trouble, pepper spraying and shooting an anti-Yiannopoulos demonstrator.

Indeed, in all these cases and, oh, too many more, it is far easier to identify what the perpetrators don't represent than what they do. For those of us whose overriding concern is the health of our society and the protection of innocents, understanding this truth is the first step toward a constructive reaction to these horrifying misdeeds. When we remove the deviants from the philosophy they claim to espouse, and only then, we can begin the relevant search for answers to the anguish they unleash.

In his response to the Virginia shootings, President Trump was as clear as anyone in addressing this point.

"We may have our differences, but we do well in times like these to remember that everyone who serves in our nation's capital is here because, above all, they love our country," he said. "We can all agree that we are blessed to be Americans, that our children deserve to grow up in a nation of safety and peace, and that we are stronger when we are unified, and when we work together for the common good."

Practically everywhere we go from there is up for debate. We can argue over the value of or need for gun control. We can dispute our society's approach to mental health care. We can discuss the limits of free speech

and dangers of incivility online. All of those are important and relevant topics.

But we get nowhere on any of them if we associate the emotion-fueled misbehaviors of a perverse actor from "the other side" with the legitimate and diverse intellectual arguments that make up any productive debate. In the aftermath of each new outrage, it is natural to cast about for overarching, all-encompassing solutions. They likely do not exist. But to the extent that we can strive for some ideal solution, we begin best by refusing to attribute to the group of our adversaries the irrational behaviors that a random aberrant acts out in their name.