The Orlando attack

Shooting_at_Pulse_Nightclub.jpg
Public domain photo from the State of Florida

Three days ago, 29-year-old Omar Mateen walked into a gay night club in Orlando with a SIG Sauer-manufactured semi-aumatica rifle and a Glock 17 handgun and opened fire. He killed 49 people and wounded over 50 more before being killed in a shootout with police. This is widely being labeled as the worst mass killing in United States history. (Note: Some have been countering that Wounded Knee and other massacres of American Indians have seen more deaths; I won’t for a second try to minimize those tragedies, but it all depends on what criteria you’re using.)

I suppose a good blogger would have been on top of this sooner. Many, many have. I find it difficult to find the words to write something measured and coherent in the wake of such an atrocity. Partly because I’m not sure I have anything to say that will approach adequacy; partly because I fear that once I get started, I won’t be able to stop, and I still won’t have said everything I want to say. But here I go…

First, I want to recognize all of the acts of heroism, big and small, that occurred that night and since. The fact that it isn’t even news that dozens of first responders willingly ran towards gunfire, knowing this might be their last call, speaks volumes. Patrons of the club rushed to treat the injured and get each other out. Lines to donate blood in Orlando reached eight hours long. This doesn’t even begin to touch how people have rallied.

In perusing the news, blogs, and social media posts, I’ve noted three major themes people’s comments are falling into: Islamic terrorist connections, LGBT rights/safety, and gun control. I’m just going to offer some thoughts on each of those themes as they relate to this massacre.

Islamic terrorism

Omar Mateen was a Muslim born of Afghan immigrants. And he looks like it. That alone means this becomes a big part of the conversation. But it goes a little further than that: Mateen expressed sympathy with the Boston Marathon bombers and ISIS, and ISIS has called Mateen a “soldier of the caliphate” (this is what people are talking about when they say ISIS “claimed responsibility”). Thus far there is no indication the attack was in any way directed by a terrorist group.

Some conservative pundits have criticized President Obama for not using the phrases “radical Islam” or “radical Islamic terrorism” in his speech after the attack. And every time I hear this criticism, I think… when Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic last year, nobody got all bent out of shape anytime someone failed to use the phrase “Christian terrorism.” And if you’re thinking, “Well, that’s ridiculous,” you now understand the absurdity of this critique. Mateen is to Islam as Dear is to Christianity.

In fact, labeling this as “Islamic terrorism” probably covers up some important differentiation. There are Islamist nationalist and Islamic jihad groups that are primarily inspired by a warped, radical, hateful cult that happens to share a name with a world religion. Mateen appears to have been a sick homophobe who latched on to radical Islamic language. I don’t know that he was inspired by it. Some accounts are that Mateen wasn’t even particularly religious. (Point of interest: Before claiming allegiance to ISIS he claimed allegiance to Hezbollah. They are enemies.)

Final thought: We shouldn’t try to somehow pretend there was no religious element to any of this. But if we think that’s what this is fundamentally about, we’re probably doing ourselves the disservice of failing to understand our own troubles. And we should question what it means to insist that the word “Islamic” be used. It’s probably more motivated by Islamophobia than people want to admit. Plus, this line of conversation elevates him. It makes him an enemy soldier, when he’s really just a murderer.

LGBT rights/safety

If the Islamic connections are being over-emphasized by some news outlets, the LGBT connections are (in some places) being under-emphasized. There’s a sickening irony to the fact that this massacre is following up weeks of national debate in which trans people have been made out to be a threat to public safety.

I think Mateen’s choice of target further disconnects this attack from traditional international terrorism. Terrorists want to put us all in fear. They target places that anyone might be. This is a crime motivated by hate. There’s been some suggestion that Mateen himself may have been gay, and his father mentioned him being outraged at seeing two men kissing not long before the attack.

There’s no use trying to assign blame here. If North Carolina hadn’t passed the bathroom law, or some particular church denomination had affirmed same-sex marriage, or Kim Davis had personally signed marriage licenses and thrown in congratulatory hugs, Omar Mateen would still have hated. But this serves as a reminder of the insidious othering–sometimes subtle, sometimes overt–that can be found in our society, which can too easily and too often turn violent. It reminds us that however evolved we think we are, LGBT folks still might be murdered just for being who they are.

The identity of victims matters. We have a long way to go in recognizing the humanity of our LGBT brothers and sisters, and we’re not going to do it overnight. Maybe the first step here is asking, “What can I do?”

Gun control

This could easily be a post on its own. Or a multi-part series. I’ll try to keep it short…

Every mass shooting rekindles the gun control debate. President Obama brought it up in his speech, and it’s been dominating my Facebook feed. Anti-gunners have proposed banning assault rifles (a White House petition to ban the AR-15 reached it’s 100,000 threshold for a response pretty much immediately). And pro-gunners have responded with memes. Lots of memes.

I said gun control debate, but the reality is it’s more of a shouting match. Nobody seems interested in sitting down and looking for solutions. Or considering whether we can agree on a problem.

I consider myself a moderate on guns. I own several, and I enjoy them. And I have often thought there’s little point in trying to regulate them with so many already floating around out there. But I’m not going to freak out over the slightest suggestion that we should talk about this stuff, either. And I think this latest massacre has pushed me to the left a little bit, which I will show in the following paragraph.

The SIG MCX, it’s cousin the AR-15, and similar weapons, are designed to kill effectively. Even staunch gun rights supporters need to acknowledge this; trying to come up with counter-arguments to that particular point just comes across sounding stupid. It’s overpowered for hunting and a shotgun is adequate for home defense. I’m not saying it can’t do these things, and perhaps better, or more easily, or more conveniently than other options; but I’m kind of done thinking it’s worth it. Yes, Omar Mateen could have committed this attack with a handgun, or a knife, or a rock. But it would have been pretty hard for him to kill so many people. This massacre has pushed me to think that, while I highly value the AR-15 for law enforcement use, maybe that type of weapon shouldn’t be so easy for civilians to get.

That’s it. That’s my anti-gun paragraph. You may think the next one is, too, but it’s really not.

You see, while I’m not rabidly opinionated on guns (if you disagree with my earlier comments, that’s fine by me), I hate stupid arguments. And the pro-gunners have been making some stupid arguments. Like, we shouldn’t have gun laws because criminals will ignore them. That could be an argument against literally all laws. Or, Cain killed Abel with a rock. We can’t regulate away murder, but we can make mass murder harder. Or, the 9/11 hijackers used box cutters. Yes, and now you can’t take those on a plane, and the cockpit is secure, and we all have to take our shoes off at airport security. We respond to these tragedies with laws and regulations, except when guns are involved.

But if the pro-gunners have a logic problem, the anti-gunners have an information problem. Your demands lack credibility when you come across like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Automatic weapons and machine guns are illegal (for the most part, and I don’t know of any mass killings using them). These are semi-automatic rifles. They use magazines, not clips. That silhouette in the pictures you’re posting appears to be an M4, which is also generally illegal for civilians to own due to its fire selector and barrel length. And you should probably stop saying “assault rifle.” No, there’s nothing factually wrong with it, but you’ll start pro-gunners off on a tangent.

Reasonable limits have always been imposed on elements of the Constitution. We have free speech, except you can’t incite violence or yell “fire” in a theater. We are free from warrantless searches, but there are any number of exceptions. And our right to bear arms shall not be infringed, except there are restrictions on short-barreled rifles, automatic weapons, where you can carry what… and you definitely can’t walk down the street strapped with a grenade launcher. I’ve expressed above that I’m not so sure civilians should be able to get semi-automatic rifles with high capacity magazines. You may disagree. But can we at least say this is something we’re willing to talk about?

I haven’t addressed the connection, or lack thereof, between gun regulations and crime rates. If either side tries to tell you causality has been proven or disproven, they’re wrong. Generally increased gun control decreases gun violence (on the one hand, duh… on the other hand, it goes in the face of the “criminals will still have guns” argument). But it doesn’t seem to decrease violence; this chart by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows no statistically significant relationship between gun ownership and homicide rates either way. Other than that, I don’t have links for you. I’ll tackle this one at a later date.

There you have it, my rambling and disjointed thoughts on the Orlando massacre through what seem to be the major lenses. If you see something in there worth latching on to, sound off in the comments.

Corrections: I originally misidentified the rifle Omar Mateen used as an AR-15 pattern rifle. It was a SIG Sauer MCX, which bears some similarities to the AR-15 but is not the same weapon. I also named the phrase pundits were pushing to use as “Islamic terrorism,” while the actual phrases used were “radical Islam” and “radical Islamic terrorism.”