Shootings in Sikh temple and Arizona: Which crime is worse?

The same idea underscored federal hate-crime measures, which grew steadily after the 1998 murders of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard. Byrd was an African-American dragged to his death by whites who had ties to the Ku Klux Klan; Shepard was gay, lured out of a bar and beaten to death.

“Hate crimes are a form of terrorism,” the late Sen. Edward Kennedy told Congress in 1998. “They have a psychological and emotional impact which extends far beyond the victim.”

He was right, of course. Consider the Wisconsin murders and the toll they have taken on America’s Sikh community, which was already reeling from a long series of racist episodes. Four days after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, a turban-wearing Sikh was killed at his gas station by an assailant who apparently mistook him for a Muslim. Since then, the Washington-based Sikh Coalition has documented more than 700 incidents of anti-Sikh violence and intimidation.

But do these kinds of acts do greater harm to their targets than attacks that are not overtly motivated by prejudice? I doubt it. If anything, so-called random shootings terrorize a wider swath of people.

Indeed, these shootings remind us that anybody in America can be a target. Regardless of race or ethnicity – or sexual orientation – any one of us can be shot to death by a Jared Loughner or a James Holmes. They do not discriminate. And that is every bit as destructive to “public safety and happiness” – to quote Blackstone – as any racist attack.

So it’s time to get rid of hate-crime laws, which assume that an attack motivated by bigotry is somehow worse than one impelled by anger, greed, or anything else. Tell that to the parents, spouses, and children of the people who died in Arizona and Colorado.

Ostensibly, hate-crime measures aim to safeguard minorities. But they thereby blind us to lone and anonymous shooters, who don’t advertise their anger or humiliations on racist websites or anywhere else. That’s the biggest danger right now, to all of us. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).

Editor's note: An earlier version listed a state incorrectly in the headline.

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