Neither grievance nor illness behind NY killings can justify murder | Opinion
MELINDA: In the America that lobbyists built, the seriously ill resort to the digital tin cup, GoFundMe. The aggrieved, meanwhile, grab their guns and drive to the NFL offices in New York, or the home of state lawmakers in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, or the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., and write their messages in blood.
Then, the prayer we say over the bodies is that this isn’t the time for politics. Yet these are all political killings.
During the Monday evening rush hour, a 27-year-old man who’d driven all the way from Las Vegas ran into the Midtown Manhattan building where the NFL has its offices, killed three people and then himself. The long note he left behind reportedly says he suffered from the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, from playing football. He played in high school in Southern California, and police said the note accused the league of hiding the risks involved. “Study my brain please,” the note said.
The league has underplayed the risks, though whether that had anything to do with what went so wrong for this man we have no way of knowing right now. We in the public have been complicit, too, in any case; of course playing football is bad for your brain, and please pass the bean dip.
But like other shooters I won’t name because I won’t give them that — those who killed the United Healthcare CEO, and a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, and a young couple coming out of a planning meeting on getting more aid into Gaza — whether his cause was just or his motivation right or wrong ceased to matter the minute he pulled the trigger. Whatever righteousness these killers thought they were acting on died with their victims. If an illness of any kind drove this man who worked in a Las Vegas casino to violence in New York on Monday, that certainly compounds the tragedy. But he’ll still be remembered more for the damage he inflicted than for any damage he suffered.
DAVID: New York, Nevada, D.C. and Minnesota all have A’s and B’s for their gun control laws according to the Giffords Law Center. Forgive me, but when you facetiously lament people asking for a pause on the politics you’re backing the gun control groups who leap to the barricades saying they know the solution. It is not so easy. Gun laws quite often don’t stop criminals and the mentally ill from obtaining guns and wreaking havoc.
MELINDA: I don’t know anyone who thinks that addressing the fact that there are more guns than people in our country would be easy. But the idea that there’s never a good time to talk about gun violence, because it has always just claimed fresh victims somewhere, does guarantee that nothing ever changes.
The first to die on Monday evening was an NYPD officer working security for extra cash. He was Didarul Islam, a 36-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh stationed at the 47th Precinct in the Bronx, where he lived with his wife and their two children while expecting their third next month. “He was saving lives. He was protecting New Yorkers,” said Mayor Eric Adams. “He embodies what this city is all about. He’s a true blue New Yorker, not only in a uniform he wore.”
Yes, immigrants working more than one job are what that city and this country is all about, or used to be. I mourn the loss of Officer Islam, and of the time when more of us knew that.
DAVID: Islam deserves better than the tainted praise of a former Democrat, almost felon, turned Trump acolyte.
You are right that people like him are what America’s great cities are built on. My immigrant family came through New York City and some still work for the police department. I can’t say how brave they are to stand up to the worst the world can throw at them.
But you should remember that immigrants come here to breathe free and participate in the prosperity that freedom brings. They know, probably better than most, that freedom comes with costs.
Islam chose to leave a violent and corrupt country with limited economic freedom for America. If he wanted to stay in a country where legal firearms were kept out of private hands, he could have stayed home where gun ownership is a fraction of 1% of that in America.
MELINDA: Will immigrants still come here to breathe free? Isn’t the whole point of the Trump exercise to vilify them and spend tens of billions of our tax dollars on rounding them up and throwing them out on the thinnest of pretexts? From what I can tell it’s all for purely political reasons, too, since both morally and economically, what’s happening is indefensible.
DAVID: You are getting a little far afield here. Suffice to say, I wish Trump were going after undocumented immigrants with a little more care, but he doesn’t do nuance.
MELINDA: It’s not far afield.
Can you really not imagine Officer Islam having been thrown to the ground by some masked agents on his way home one night? Unfortunately, I can.
I’m sure you saw the story about the Little League team practicing in Riverside Park whose coach said he had to run off ICE agents armed with guns and tasers who were asking his young players where they and their parents were from. (Answer: New York.) When our government is casing Little League games and still we nod along smiling, I don’t even know what to say anymore. They are scooping up Los Angeles day laborers and small town Missouri waitresses because there just aren’t enough criminals to deport, and there were never going to be.
You say that Eric Adams is a Trump shill, and that’s true, but maybe as a former cop, he still had enough of a pulse to say what needed to be said about Islam being as American as anybody, at a time when that’s not as obvious as it once was and I hope one day will be again.
DAVID: Let’s talk NFL. First off, the perpetrator of this horrible attack simply can’t know if he had CTE — it can only be officially diagnosed with an autopsy. It sounds like he was known to be mentally ill, so his writings are not exactly a reliable source. Second, to sneer at Americans who love football despite the risks is just another holier than thou liberal pose.
Yeah, we like violent dangerous sports here, just like we like our guns. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. A life with all the sharp corners shaved off and filled with the progressive padding of an insane asylum isolation cell doesn’t sound to me like one worth living. I’ll take a bumptious, flawed freedom over the totalitarian alternative that would be required to make life perfectly safe, thanks.
This story was originally published July 29, 2025 at 2:18 PM.
