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Díaz and Montini: Ignoring gunshots shows how numb we've become to political violence

Elvia Díaz and E.J. Montini
Arizona Republic
Elvia Díaz (left) and E.J. Montini

Here’s a story you might not have heard: Last week, sometime after midnight on Monday, there were gunshots fired into a Democratic Party campaign office in Tempe.

But the incident was given little attention in the press. It’s the latest example of political violence in America and our tolerance for it. And longtime Arizona Republic columnist EJ Montini says it should be a wake-up call.

Montini joined The Show along with editorial page editor Elvia Díaz to talk more about it.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Ed, I want to start with you here and your kind of outrage at this incident, or at least what you think we should be outraged by, right? Tell us exactly what happened first. Like, this wasn’t actually even the first time the shots were fired into that office. It’s just that the first time, it was by a BB gun, right?

MONTINI: Yeah. The first time it was reported, I guess, a reporter from the Republic found out that the week before the gunshots were fired into the office, a BB gun was fired into the office. And one of the things about that that makes it kind of creepy and germane and recognized that this was a targeted event, not like a random shooting is that it’s a very nondescript office.

There’s not signage or anything on it. You have to know that that’s who’s working in that office. If you’re going to fire a weapon into that office. And because it happened late at night, because no one was physically injured, it was astonishing how quickly we just passed that on. As if it’s nothing.

GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. Talk a little bit about your reaction to the lack of a reaction to this.

MONTINI: In some ways, the most shocking thing about something like this is how we don’t find it shocking at all anymore, on any level. I mean, it’s like no one is really all that worked up about something like this. Because when you think about it, the the number of shootings that we have in the United States that get attention of one kind or another — even the most awful, disastrous ones, where there are multiple casualties — they pass in and out of our attention span so quickly nowadays because we’ve literally just grown so accustomed to them, and we take them for granted.

GILGER: Yeah. You called it “proof of the obscene level of tolerance we now have for gun violence.” Elvia, let me ask you, do you think this is about more than just gun violence, but about our tolerance for, expectation of almost — as Ed’s pointing out there — of political violence?

ELVIA DÍAZ: And that just it. It begins with something like this. And it can quickly escalate. And we already have seen it. And that’s what we don’t want to happen. Ed and I were talking about it before he wrote the column, and it just the fact that it was absolutely nothing anywhere. And that prompted a discussion that this is incredibly targeted with a purpose of intimidation. Thank goodness no one was there. It was in the middle of the night.

But that clearly sends a message to the workers, to the volunteers of campaign offices. And they were targeting the Democratic Party campaign office here, but it could be any political office, right? And we should be denouncing that against anyone, against any political candidate, against any political party.

MONTINI: Yeah. That’s another thing, too. Elvia brings up a good point. If you noticed, even though the media didn’t pay a whole hell of a lot of attention to this, other than the chairman of the Democratic Party in Arizona saying this is a horrible thing and this should never happen, I didn’t hear any politician saying this is a horrible thing and it never should have happened. There was crickets. There was nothing.

GILGER: I want to ask you, Ed, about about that level of political violence and just the way it’s changed. It seems to me that it’s changed rather quickly, too. and a lot here in Arizona. We’ve seen poll workers threatened, election officials who have PTSD, people leaving office because they don’t want to deal with it.

We’ve seen several assassination attempts now of one of the major presidential candidates. Do you think all of these things just sort of add up, and we don’t even process them in the same way anymore?

MONTINI: I think that we can become tolerant to anything. And I think that’s a danger here. We should not allow ourselves to become tolerant of this kind of behavior. If you get accustomed to it, if you say, “Oh, well, in this country, that kind of stuff just happens regularly,” then you’re pretty much giving permission for that kind of stuff to happen regularly.

And I think that it's a real danger for that to be the case. And starting with the Jan. 6 stuff, things have ratcheted up in a way that’s really unhealthy and potentially dangerous. And I hope we can stave that off before we have any other issues the next election. It’s not the kind of thing that we should allow to occur, and we certainly should not just passively accept it when it does occur.

DÍAZ: That’s the main problem because it is done for intimidation. And you mentioned the election workers, right? We’ve seen it before. Who will want to work as an election worker or volunteer when they are facing threats like this? Real ones? So that is that is a danger to democracy, right? And people don’t like it when we mention something like that because they think we’re exaggerating.

But when you don’t have anyone working at the polling places or at offices or counting ballots, and then we have to be looking over their shoulder when they’re going home, that’s that’s a real danger to our democratic society.

MONTINI: I received an email from one of the volunteers in that very office after this came out, who felt the same way in some ways about this happening. And I sensed in in what she wrote just about how that impacted people. And it just can’t be what we want. It’s just that. It’s very dangerous to the process for sure.

GILGER: Do either of you think there’s any going back? Like, are we able to return — as a country, do you think — to a more normal level of tolerance for this kind of stuff or a more normal level of political violence itself?

DÍAZ: We have to be mindful, and we have to be calling out the political candidates who are inciting that kind of violence with their rhetoric and normalizing it. And that’s what worries me the most, especially leading up to that November vote. We just can’t become that numb. We have to call it out every time that we see it.

MONTINI: You have to reinforce the notion, particularly among politicians, that they have opponents but not enemies. If you have politicians who keep talking about the opposition as enemies, you’re raising the threat level. You’re raising the opportunity for this kind of violence to occur. That’s something that should be unacceptable. And it has become passé with a lot of people these days, the way they talk about people with whom they disagree philosophically and politically in a way that you should never be talking about people that way because it just leads to the potential — particularly when you have a lot of unstable people who exist in this world, and you have such an easy availability of firearms and things can escalate so quickly and so dangerously.

It is incumbent upon people who want to be leaders to actually do that, to actually lead. And, we’re not seeing enough of that right now. We have some, but we don’t have enough.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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