Preface to what follows: April 20, 2018 marks the nineteenth anniversary of the Columbine mass-shooting. I, like many, was horrified by what transpired then. As a high school teacher, the event resonated within me in a way that previous mass-shootings had not.
In June 2016, during the time between my third and fourth chemotherapy sessions, and on the anniversary of my mother’s birthday, the Pulse nightclub mass-shooting in Orlando, Florida happened. It occurred in the midst of the Republican and Democratic party primaries and quickly took on a “you’re either with us or against us” vibe. The shooting, the people who were targeted and killed, and the politics the shooting evoked, felt like a nightmare to me. The nightmare moved me to share my immediate concerns, confusion, feelings, and thoughts with family, friends, and colleagues. What follows is a merged version of the two emails I sent out on June 16 (to family) and June 18, (to friends and colleagues) about the Orlando mass-shooting.
In memory of the victims of the Columbine, both living and dead, and in memory of all other mass-shooting victims since and before Columbine, I offer this post, and two forthcoming posts, in tribute. They are reflections I have written on questions related to gun violence in America and gun regulation. The two posts to follow in the coming days were penned in the wake of the Parkland high school mass-shooting.
Good evening everyone:
I apologize in advance for subjecting you to what follows. Ramblings can be very boring and pompous. But the walls do not give feedback. They cannot tell me to cease and desist or point out loop-holes or provide any thoughtful comment. So, you have been forewarned, and if you do not want to subject yourself to what follows, please know I will not be offended.
The events of last weekend in Orlando and in L.A. [the weekend of June 12, 2016] have been weighing on my mind over the course of this week. I remain confused as to what the underlying motivation of the Orlando assailant really was – a psychological one or a terrorist one – or what the motives of the L.A. arrestee was. He apparently intended to target the L.A. Pride Parade for a killing rampage of his own.
What I do know is the Orlando massacre has received more media attention than the L.A. case, which is understandable given the Orlando assault resulted in the killing of 49 people and the wounding of 50 plus more, while the L.A. incident, involving a young Midwesterner, did not involve a single shot, though he was equipped to cause more death and carnage than what transpired in Orlando. Another observation that caught my eye involved how quickly the Orlando assailant’s action was characterized as an act committed by an “Islamic terrorist”; later amended to the more passive characterization of, radical Islamic “inspired” terrorist. No such comparable charge has been leveled against the L.A. arrestee. And finally, the Orlando massacre quickly became fodder for the fearmongering politics of the “war on terror”; a political narrative that has been ongoing in the USA, and around the world, since September 11, 2001. No such rhetorical noise has been directed towards the L.A. case.
I noticed Trump used the occasion of the Orlando assault to re-announce his Muslim/Islamic immigration ban in the guise of a regional immigration ban; a ban in which there ostensibly exists evidence of threats posed by organizations and individuals that, or who, have targeted the US and its citizens for attack. His speech spawned counter public pronouncements from Hillary Clinton and the President which noted that Trump’s characterization of the Orlando assailant was false. He was not an Afghanistan immigrant as Trump proclaimed. Rather, he was an American citizen born in New York. Trump’s misrepresentation is reminiscent of his charge that the judge presiding over his Trump University lawsuit was a Mexican when, in fact, he was an American citizen born in Indiana.
Aside from the fact that Trump never appears to be concerned about facts if they get in the way of the narrative he wants to propagate, which is reminiscent of the propaganda approach employed by Geobbels’ NAZI campaign to win and keep popular support for Hitler’s strongman agenda, or Mussolini’s propaganda in support of his Fascist agenda, Trump quickly determined that the Orlando assailant was an ISIS terrorist motivated by a hatred of America. On this, I believe, after almost a week of reporting and investigation, Trumps depiction may not be accurate. That is not to say that the assailant’s actions did not evoke terror and fear in the minds of many Americans. But had the L.A. arrestee fulfilled what appears to have been his intention to kill parading lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals in L.A., he too would have succeeded in evoking the same terror and fear the Orlando assailant’s actions produced.
So, the question Trump and many Republicans do not want addressed is whether or not all acts of terror are acts of terrorism perpetrated by non-state political actors who employ terrorist tactics to promote a political or ideological agenda. Does being a Muslim who commits an act that terrorizes a community or creates fear within a community mean he or she must automatically be a radical Islamic terrorist? Does everyone who visits el Qaida, Hezbollah or ISIS/ISIL websites for some psychological or mentally conflicted reason mean they are, first and foremost, terrorists? Was the Orlando assailant’s action more a product of a psychological or mental health issue than it was due to an allegiance to some terrorist organization? Answering this question correctly is critical because it goes to how we characterize the actual motivations for such atrocities and may provide insight into how to combat them. But, of course, why subvert a perceived “good” political narrative with such troubling questions.
One thing that comes to mind when comparing the Orlando and L.A. events is that both individuals were able to acquire plenty of weapons with which to wreak havoc on anyone they wanted to target for death. Indeed, easy access to weapons by assailants has been common to all the mass-shooting incidents in America over the entire span of the Obama administration, as it was in the years prior to Obama. The efforts to place reasonable restraints on easy access to the type of assault weapons used in the Orlando, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Colorado Springs, Aurora, and Columbine mass-shootings, and which the L.A. arrestee accumulated, have been successfully thwarted by the NRA which seems to have most all Congressional Republican and a smaller group of Democratic politicians beholden to its deep pockets and lobbying rhetoric.
The NRA and its arms manufacturing backers have successfully diverted attention away from the interests that motivate their support for unrestricted gun sales to the Second Amendment and the proposition that it alone, among all the enshrined “rights’ within the American Bill of Rights, cannot be limited in any way. To do so, the argument appears to go, would be to limit every American’s right to Liberty and make Americans less safe. Indeed, they claim the best way to keep America safe from terrorism, and all criminal acts, is to arm everyone with guns and encourage the good guys to shoot down the bad guys.
But no right is absolute. All are subject to limits because all come in conflict, in some way, with other rights necessitating the need to restrict their absoluteness. Only by navigating a balance among the rights can a state of order be preserved in open, democratic societies. To exclude the Second Amendment from such a restriction is to elevate the Second Amendment to a unique status within the list of rights Americans enjoy by virtue of their inclusion within the Bill of Rights. It also denies the existence of all evidence demonstrating that restricted gun ownership makes societies safer than those with few restrictions.
A society that buys into the proposition that a gun in everyone’s hands reduces gun related violence is simply buying into a false narrative built on untruths. These reflect the arguments of the tobacco industry in the past, all of which were roundly debunked. Furthermore, the falseness of this narrative is also true of the proposition that unregulated gun ownership protects and preserves the liberty of citizens. Where there are societies with lax gun laws, the liberty of citizens is less well protected than in those societies that restrict gun ownership through regulation. In societies that do not decry gun regulation, the liberty of those whose lives might be taken as a result of gun violence is a value considered in a way not allowed in America today.
The truth is, there is evidence from across the world that clearly suggests Liberty is not best protected by the gun, or even by the people who own guns. Rather, the evidence suggests that Liberty is best protected, in a civil society, through civil discourse and the willingness to reasonably regulate gun ownership.
Until the question of gun regulation is properly addressed in the US, we will continue to witness more mass-shootings and more crimes involving gun violence. To conflate the issues of unrestricted Second Amendment rights and the oppression of individual liberty is to do a disservice to the process of enlightened civil discourse in the service of the whole of society. Rather, it only serves the interests of the NRA’s leaders, its industrial armament backers, and those who unreasonably fear the loss of their personal liberty. These latter individuals have been sold a narrative developed and promoted by the aforementioned powerful actors who stand most to benefit financially from unrestricted gun ownership.
And so say I, at least for today! I cannot be sure what tomorrow will bring.
BFG (June 2016)
Scrambled Thoughts 2.0 