Another Perfect Storm

In my gym’s locker room a fellow, I’d say in his 40s, was spouting off about radical Muslims being a universal scourge as he related it to the killings in Orlando. He didn’t use the term radical  but I’m “sure” he meant it.  Given his further pronouncement that if the other patrons in that nightclub had been armed the tragedy wouldn’t have happened I could guess he wasn’t a Hillary supporter.

It was an interesting and perhaps predictable encounter given that I had watched Morning Joe (MSNBC) earlier, while on the treadmill, seeing the blanket coverage on the shooting was almost entirely on Isis, based only that the killer had apparently made verbal reference to the “Islamic State”.  The topic was enhanced, of course, by inane rhetoric from Donald Trump.

It is entirely disturbing to me that politicians, the news media, and nut jobs like the nice fellow in the locker room can so blithely focus on a single issue when the horrific event that precipitated the news is so obviously more complex.  However, even within its complexity it can be dissected, primarily because of the similarities that have occurred in so many other like events.

There are (at least) four factors that create the perfect storm for man-made, violent tragedy on any scale, not just a large massacre as what occurred Sunday morning.  It’s too bad we seem to only pay attention to the big catastrophes.  Perhaps though, as in this most recent heartbreak, it can be more easily illustrated:

First. In any society there is a lunatic fringe, and in a society of 330 million that number is not small.  This is irrefutable and unchangeable.  Mitigating this reality is an issue of health care. To the extent a free society does nothing to make health care readily available and accessible to the society as a whole then we do little to nothing in addressing the malady. 

Mentally ill individuals will often attach their twisted thoughts and actions to external events to carry out anti-social behavior.  To attack the external circumstance as a way to curb mental behavior is misguided and unproductive.  Perhaps Trump would have us ban marriage and cohabitation in order to curb domestic violence.

Second. The hate that has its origins in the fear individuals have of people not like themselves is too often buried under simplistic rhetoric.  This hate and fear is quite different from the natural tendency that all humans share in their desire to gravitate toward other individuals who they feel are like themselves.  It is a fear of loss of identity which they are taught, at a young age, is being perpetrated by people who are different.

There is now coming out some evidence that this Orlando killer was himself a latent homosexual.  True or not, it would make sense that the pervasive hate that Conservative, often religious, homophobes broadcast (remember, Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on gays) is consuming for some, and in the lunatic fringe dangerous. Add to that the conflict of one such individual unable to reconcile his own homosexuality in that toxic atmosphere and it becomes explosive.

That kind of hate pervades Conservative America and it takes generations to purge.

Third. What is the simplest way to make a mentally ill, dangerously hateful individual into a catastrophic living time bomb?  Well…how about giving him a semi-automatic assault rifle with, say, several 30 round magazines?  Yeah, I think that’ll do it.

Even the conservative nut cases that think (as per Trump) that Hillary Clinton is single handedly going to erase the second amendment to the Constitution and collect the 350 million guns that are awash in America know, at some level, the folly of their concern.  Further, the liberals who believe they can somehow legislate instant retraction of gun violence know, at some level, they are blowing sweet nothings across desert air.

Those foolish yet seemingly intractable positions need a champion to address the real problem; that the United States needs to change its collective attitude toward guns. It needs to change, not to eliminate what we’re currently experiencing in both mass and minor gun violence, but for the next generation, or possibly the one after that.  The die of what we experience now was cast at least two generations ago.

We do need legislation (sorry Trumpsters), but even as we begin to make changes that everyone hates (for Conservatives too much, Liberals to little) we start to alter the national perception of what gun ownership means.  Perhaps my grandchildren will become adults who will find it queer that any civilian should want to own a high capacity assault rifle, and within that generation there will be mentally ill adults who will, not surprisingly, feel the same.

Fourth, and lastly. The least important, yet the most media grabbing is the evolving reality of Terrorism.  The major problem with Terrorism is the collective inability to understand and disseminate the definition of it.

Terrorism is the manufacture of either a threatened or actual act of violence which creates a reaction disproportionate to its actual threat.  Unfortunately, the only combating of and victory over terrorism is not to be terrorized.   That statement should not be viewed as silliness or stupidity.  No act of Terrorism in the US to date, including 9/11, has directly affected government or business in any significant way, nor posed a threat to any one given American greater than swimming pools or ladders.

In 2004 John Kerry made the statement during his Presidential bid that this Country had to reduce terrorism down to an acceptable level.  He was viciously lambasted by a wide swath of voters, including Democrats.  Acceptable?  Yes, he was correct.  The more we view terrorism, domestic or international as a problem to be solved (not a war to be won), like car safety or infant mortality or drug overdose or whatever, the more we neuter the perpetrators. 

The Donald Trumpsters in this Country feed Terrorism. It’s like we all lived in some kind of Terrorist Jurassic Park, knowing some of the beasts are going to escape (because we’re shown the trailers).  They ignore their illnesses, they supply them with weapons, and they perpetuate their hateful objectives.  As a result they keep multiplying, the carnage doesn’t end, and the anxiety has no limits.