Aug 07 2012
How South Asian Americans Are Responding to Sunday’s Shooting in Wisconsin
Two weeks after the shooting of twelve people in a movie theater in Colorado, 40 year old army veteran Wade Michael Page walked into a Sikh Temple, called a Gurdwara, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin this past Sunday morning and opened fire. Using a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, Page killed five men and one woman and left three others in critical condition. Police officers who arrived at the Gurdwara, which is located in a suburb of Milwaukee, shot and killed Page during a shootout.
According to US Government records, Page was in the military for six years from 1992 to 1998 serving part of that time as an Army psychological operations specialist. The Southern Poverty Law Center had been tracking him for over ten years because of his involvement in the White Supremacist music scene. Page played in some of the most well known racist bands, and officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center called him a “frustrated Neo-Nazi.”
The Sikh Coalition has reported that there have been over 700 incidents of hate crimes against Sikhs following the 9/11 attacks where members of the Sikh religion have been mistaken for Muslims. The FBI has called the shooting an act of “domestic terrorism.” Manjit Singh, a member of the Sikh community in Wisconsin said, “Everyone here is thinking this is a hate crime for sure. People think we are Muslims.”
Jagjit Singh Kaleka the brother of the slain Gurdwara president said, “[W]e know the more assault weapons we distribute the more situations like this we will have.” Wisconsin has some of the weakest gun laws in the nation and in 2011 the state passed a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons. Remarking yesterday on the shooting, President Obama said the incident should prompt some soul searching among Americans given the increasing regularity of shooting incidents, but stopped short of calling for greater gun control.
GUESTS: Deepa Iyer, Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)
Visit www.saalt.org for more information.
2 Responses to “How South Asian Americans Are Responding to Sunday’s Shooting in Wisconsin”
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