The bad news: Some
disturbed, angry homophobe decided to destroy a bunch of strangers at a
nightclub, and he took advantage of the liberal availability of guns to do it.
The worse news: Here
in the land of the free, the home of the really brave, and the playground of
gun-happy goofballs, who are given full permission to shoot up anyone they want,
as long as they can concoct some story about how the person might have been
threatening in some way, not one person prevented or intervened in this
crime. In fact, by 2:00 AM, the night
club was advising people to leave, because mayhem was occurring, and it wasn’t
until 5:00 AM that the police SWAT team got there. Three hours for local heroes (OK, Zimmerman, NOW!) to show their
stuff, in the State that gives them every possible excuse, and not one person
came to anyone’s rescue. There was no
difference between Florida citizens having full permission to bear and use
arms, and their being prohibited from doing so at all, except that in the
latter instance, the assailant wouldn’t have had a gun, either, so the crime
would never have happened. That sounds
like a really good deal.
Some people will misuse and corrupt this tragedy to suggest
something wrong with Muslims. (We’re led
to think the assailant was Muslim.) But
he didn’t kill anyone because he was, if he was, Muslim. He killed a large number of people, because
he was an angry homophobe who was undone by witnessing two men kissing each
other. In another city, in another
county, on a different day.
There are crimes of this kind of passion: the passionate
intolerance of the private lives of other people. But in this country, those crimes are almost
always committed by adolescents or angry 20-somethings, and more often than
not, they seem proud to let the world know they’re Christian.
I usually do not like to make comments on issues like this but according to the Daily mail this was ISIS related. Read this article.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3638090/Pictured-victims-Orlando-massacre-named-city-works-contact-families-50-shot-dead.html
Secondly I doubt front door security could have prevented someone who was fully armed and ready to die from entering the club and causing this horrific event. He was finally stopped by being shot to death by swat. So in essence if someone had been there who was armed it may have gone different.
Joe,
ReplyDeleteI don't know the "Daily Mail," so I googled it. The words "conservative" and "tabloid" were in the first sentence. I offered my thoughts and reactions. Not those of "Mother Jones." I have no interest in the (pre?)conclusions of some source that dutifully files Mateen under "ISIS." Mateen was born and reared in this country, he was a US citizen, and it's not even clear if his personal religious beliefs were Muslim. They might have been, or they might not. What we know for sure is that a couple days before he decided to solve the world's problem, as he apparently saw it, with homosexual people, he encountered two men kissing each other, in Miami, and according to his father, this upset him greatly. Tragically, there are in this country many acts of prejudice and even violence against homosexual people, and most of them seem to be committed by people who cite their Christian devotion. I don't mean to speak in any way against Christians, and I think all such people, Christian, Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, or anything else, are acting in accordance with their own prejudices, not the tenets of their faiths.
Second, there was in a fact an armed person at the club. He was a security guard. But he could not act decisively and at the right time. As I understand it, he, too, was killed. My point was that whenever anyone makes an argument in favor of liberal gun rights, it is the image of this kind of eventuality that they cite. Lucky for them, they're in a State (here in Florida) where the government agrees with them. So where were they? OK, they won. They have their guns. So they can be protective vigilantes, just exactly as they tell us they are. George Zimmerman had no trouble isolating and murdering some unarmend, lone black kid on exactly the theory of community protection. Well, here it was, for real. But none of the patrons of the club was able to do anything, and none of the protective, gun-loving vigilantes came along. So what's the point, what's the value, in permitting, and encouraging people in Florida to pack heat? Trayvon Martin got murdered by one of these goofballs for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Omar Mateen did everything wrong, and no one challenged him. Until the SWAT team got there to end this. But that would have happened if no Floridian had a gun.
You say "if someone had been there who was armed, it may have gone different." Never mind that someone who was armed was there. The point of the gun advocates is that it's good that they're armed, and the rest of us will thank them for it. OK, it's Florida. We're as armed as any of us want to be. We have no reason to thank any of the gun nuts. They did nothing for us. And this occurred in central Florida, which is much more conservative than south Florida. There were all the ingredients of the saving success of liberal gun ownership, but the recipe somehow failed. It's a wrong theory.
I'm in favor of private citizens not having guns. Almost never does any good come of it, and lots of bad comes of it (as bad came of Mateen's having a gun which the laws of Florida did not prevent from happening). And the one sustaining theory of why it's a good thing for private citizens to have guns is a fantasy. If you argue that gun laws in California or Connecticut are comparatively restrictive, you couldn't make that argument about Florida or Colorado or Texas. But the result is the same. So why permit gun ownership? It's asking for trouble. I know of one person, and heard recently about another, who had sizeable collections of guns, and those guns were stolen by thieves. Now, they're out "on the street," being used for who knows what criminal behavior.
Fred