I got up Sunday morning and checked my phone and the first thing I saw on Facebook was “X and Y friend were marked safe during The Shooting in Orlando, Florida.” And I went, “Oh, fuck.”
There has already been a lot of bloviating on this matter, and I’m not sure what difference this post is going to make, but here goes. I am going to make a wild-ass prediction here:
THERE WILL BE NO ANTI-GUN LEGISLATION PASSED DUE TO THIS MASS SHOOTING.
If it wasn’t going to be passed after Sandy Hook, it will NOT be passed. Obstructionism has gotten WORSE since then. We can’t even fill a Supreme Court vacancy. This government is of such a nature that we probably couldn’t pass such legislation even if the Democrats regained a majority in Congress.
But if banning AR-15s arguably violates the Second Amendment, banning Muslims (as Donald Trump wants to do) definitely violates the First Amendment. And half the conservatives who accuse liberals of “playing politics with this tragedy” are at the same time pointing out that the shooter was an ISIS-affiliated Muslim.
And if we can’t pretend that access to semi-automatic firearms doesn’t allow for mass shooting, we also can’t pretend that religion isn’t a motive. If we are willing to say that Eric Rudolph attacked the Atlanta Olympics because his religious bent made him think he had to attack abortion and the “homosexual agenda”, we ought to be able to say so in this case. Omar Mateen‘s father said that religion wasn’t a factor in the case, but did say that his son was angry at seeing two men kissing in Miami recently and that that could have been “a factor.”
How many atheists would get that worked up over two men kissing, and how many of those would feel the need to get illicit arms to strike a blow for Objectivism or dialectical materialism?
One has to feel for the family members in such a situation, as with the case of the Stanford rapist, who feel the need to point out that they didn’t raise their kids to be monsters. No one is blaming them. They’re not at fault unless they DID raise their kids in cages and train them like combat pit bulls. That not being the case, one has to assume that an adult is responsible for his actions. Religion in itself did not make Mateen kill gays. But he did make the choice to follow a viewpoint that justified hatred.
Years ago, I was at a party and somebody brought up the topic, “what causes more wars, religion or greed?” My friend Don said, “greed causes more wars than religion.” My friend Tony said, “No, religion causes more wars than greed.” I stepped in and said, “I agree with Tony. Religion causes more wars than greed, because on issues of greed, people are willing to negotiate.”
This is yet another reason why the “punching down” argument – that prejudice or violence from a minority is not just understandable, but justifiable, based on power imbalance – is garbage, because it avoids addressing the issue, and it doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t matter whether the homophobe who kills you is a Christian or Muslim, you’re still dead. In the same way, banning guns wouldn’t stop a terrorist from building pipe bombs (like Rudolph did and the Tsarnaev brothers did) and those have always been illegal for civilians.
I just see everybody using the issue to score political points, and I’m fucking sick of it, because it’s not going to do any good. It might be better to examine the circumstances of a case to see exactly what the contributing factors are so law enforcement has a better chance of forestalling such violence with the tools they have, rather than us