The Orlando horror proved a bloody battleground of American political and cultural warfare.
It offered abundant opportunities for political exploitation. Lacking discretion, both sides availed themselves instantly and fully.
People on the right could and did say this was a terrorist act by a radical Muslim with allegiance to ISIS. They could and did say that it’s President Barack Obama’s fault because, among other lily-livered failings, he won’t even say “radical Islamic terrorism.”
People on the left could and did say this was the act of a lone wolf and homegrown right-wing extremist who hated and targeted innocent people who do their sexuality and romance in a minority fashion and are routinely persecuted to varying degrees by American conservativism.
People on the right could and did say the problem wasn’t the gun but the user.
People on the left could and did say that this latest tragic madness was made worse by the type of gun, which was semiautomatic and military-derived, and the ease by which this particular user could get it even after he’d spent time on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.
Amid the utter predictability of all that, there has been one other widespread and more civilized form of response. It’s one of unspeaking despair, which doesn’t know what to say.
So crazies just keep shooting. And innocents just keep dying. And political point-scorers just keep blaming the other side. And the thoughtful just keep retreating into shells of despair.
So here’s an idea: The thoughtful need to burst from those shells and do their non-despairing duty to restore and impose reason and sanity.
The first thing they can do is recognize, defend and advance a few facts:
1.The phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” is applicable enough to what we face, but President Obama chooses to eschew it for reasons that are strategic and tactical, not yellow-bellied or anti-American. For a man who supposedly is soft on terrorists, Obama surely approves a lot of drone missions to kill them. The phrase at issue could be interpreted as invoking a global religious war that might divide the world further and needlessly. Obama does say that ISIS represents a “perversion” of the true Islamic faith. Thus he hits the bad guys without smearing the world’s second-largest religion, one for which he properly has respect, as all of us should. Still, Hillary Clinton says she has no problem saying “radical Islamic terrorism,” not that she ever does. Either way, there are more important things than nomenclature to worry about.
2.The Second Amendment guarantees Americans a right to bear arms, and a court ruling defines that right as extending to individual ownership. But that does not mean that any type of weapon is by necessity permitted. The country could presume to ban personal nuclear weapons, shoulder-fired missile launchers, bazookas, flame-throwers — and assault weapons of the type bought and used by this monster in Orlando. Banning the manufacture, sale or importation of that kind of mass-murderers’ weapon of choice would be constitutional, by existing case law, and a perfectly legitimate public policy.
For the record: Bill Clinton signed a 10-year assault weapon ban in 1994 and the courts upheld it, but the Bush administration let the ban lapse in 2004. Gun violence didn’t decline during those 10 years, in part because the ban grandfathered over a million assault weapons already in circulation. The best we can hope is to stop the proliferation of such built-for-war weapons, thus to slow the madness and eventually reverse it. But the AR-15 rifle is the most popular gun on the market right now. More than 5 million are in private hands. And a gun enthusiast was telling me the other day that he thought he used his shotgun well enough that he could give a fair fight to a shooter using an AR-15, meaning, apparently, that any gun will kill and the issue is merely the user, not the nature of the weapon. The great advantage of the AR-15, beyond the rapid semiautomatic fire, is the size of the magazine. In other words: A public policy to limit the mass murderers’ weapon of choice will be an imperfect solution, as most solutions are.
“I just want to know where you want to stop,” Bud Cummins, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman in Arkansas, said to me in a short social media discussion of gun restriction Monday evening. “I just want to know if you’re even willing to start,” I replied. That’s the debate right there.
3.We must honor and treasure, no matter how hard it gets, the concepts of freedom, of innocence until the proving of guilt and of avoiding racial, ethnic or religious stereotype. That this Muslim man in Orlando was once on a terrorist watch list — a mere suspect — was no reason to deny him rights. Just as the National Rifle Association is wrong to say essentially that the Second Amendment may consider no proportionality in the nature of a firearm, Hillary Clinton also is wrong when she seems to say the man in Orlando should have been denied the right to purchase guns even after the FBI looked into him and said he seemed all right.
4.But if the man beat his wife, and if his fellow security guards said he often talked frightfully about killing many people — if, that is, evidence suggested the FBI might have blown it — then there ought to be a method that smart people could design that would alert authorities and put the man’s gun purchases on hold pending his appeal. The same goes for sufferers of mental illness. It’s not an easy policy to design, which is why time is wasting.
5.Surely we can get wide if not unanimous agreement that, Holy Scripture notwithstanding, gay people don’t deserve to be murdered — or, by logical extension, mistreated under the law.
Here, then, are some recommended public policy actions and goals:
• We assure the availability of firearms generally, as we constitutionally must, but limit the mass murderers’ favorites. The purpose would be to erode the availability of those that most readily facilitate widespread mass murder. Whenever this issue arises, gun enthusiasts complain that critics of automatic, semiautomatic and so-called assault weapons don’t know one from the other. But that’s no reason to protect the guns, whichever they are, that tend to do the most killing the fastest. Most of the recent mass shooters have used the AR-15. So we should start there, and perhaps end there unless even more rapidly killing products get developed, as surely they will. The NRA opposition is purely mercenary: These AR-15s are the gun industry's cash cows at present.
• Our policymakers realize and accept, at risk to their own mostly pointless re-elections, that the NRA before which they bow is cynically protecting an industry’s pocketbook, not standing tall for a constitutional principle. Members of Congress are a dime a dozen. Slain elementary-school students can’t be replaced.
• We do a better job defining people for placement on lists imposing roadblocks when they seek to obtain their weapons of mass destruction.
• We give basic rights of life to people we don’t want to see lying innocently dead.
The question is whether the thoughtfully despairing can rise up sufficiently, by number and vigor, to give hope for sanity and reason.
The center — that wide space between the political exploiters — must hold, not despair, not cower and not retreat.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.