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CNN’s Don Lemon: ‘White Men’ Are ‘Biggest Terror Threat,’ Faces Twitter Backlash, Here’s What Statistics Say

By Jonathan Vankin
Published on: 02:48 PST, Oct 31, 2018

CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is African-American, said on his broadcast Monday night that “white men” constitute the “biggest terror threat” in the United States, as MediaIte reported, and he faced an immediate backlash, mostly from conservatives on Twitter.

Lemon’s statement came after three separate terror incidents in the previous week, all of them carried out by white men. As a CNN report recounted, on October 24, 51-year-old Gregory Bush walked into a supermarket in Louisville, Kentucky, and shot a 69-year-old African-American man and a 67-year-old woman, also African-American, killing both; on Friday, 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc of Florida was arrested and charged with mailing explosives to more than a dozen prominent critics of Donald Trump; and on Saturday, 46-year-old Robert Bowers massacred 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue. All three alleged perpetrators of the terror acts were white men.

“We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them,” Lemon said on his Monday CNN broadcast, quoted by the Hill. “There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban on — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban.”

Watch Lemon make his remarks in the video below.

The backlash on Twitter, largely from white men, was quick. Fox News, and former ABC News, anchor Brit Hume was among the first to weigh in.

Statistics, however, indeed show that a disproportionate number of violent, terroristic incidents are committed by white men. According to the data site Statista, of 104 American mass shooting incidents from 1982 through September of 2018, 59 were committed by non-Hispanic whites. The next most frequent group initiating the shootings was black Americans, who were responsible for 17 of the incidents. Asians, which includes people of Middle Eastern descent, committed eight mass shootings in that 36-year span.

In the same time period, only three mass shootings were committed by women of any ethnicity, Statista reported.

Statistics from the United Kingdom indicate that Lemon’s statement would also hold true there, according to the Independent newspaper, which reported that in that country, “white suspects accounted for 38 percent of terror-related arrests” between June of 2017 and June of 2018, more than any other ethnic group.

According to Grant Duwe, author of the book Mass Murder in the United States: A History, white men have remained the most likely group to commit terroristic violence for more than 100 years.

“There have been at least 184 mass public shootings in the U.S. since 1900, including the (October 2017) Las Vegas attack,” Duwe told PolitiFact. “Among these mass public shooters, non-Hispanic whites make up 63 percent.”

As Inquisitr reported, the Las Vegas massacre carried out by Stephen Paddock, 64, killed more than 50 people.

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