As many readers will already be aware, at least fifty people were murdered in a massacre at The Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, Florida. The murderer, Omar Mateen, was apparently carrying an AR-15, the same gun used in the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut.
Already, the media are rife with speculation about the killer’s motives. On CBS News, one analyst noted that possibilities included terroristic (I. e. Islamic fundamentalist), homophobic motives, or just plain madness. (How homophobic motives did not count as “terrorism,” he did not explain.) More recent reports suggest that Mateen called 911 to pledge allegiance to IS shortly before the attack.
On Reddit, moderators on r/news have had to all but lock a megathread on the shootings because it was crawling with Islamophobic and racist rants. One can almost hear Donald Trump salivating over the boost this atrocity could bring to his campaign.
My Gut Reaction: I wonder if Republicans hoping this will help their electoral prospects will stop to consider the fact that their beliefs in some respect match those of the killer, while their policies in regard to guns arguably assisted him.
Analysis below the fold…
Regardless of whether Omar Mateen sympathized with ISIS or was driven by simple homophobia, his views overlap with those of the Republican Party as a whole. Clearly Mateen harbored hatred towards homosexuals. By his father’s account, he was disgusted by homosexuals engaging in public displays of affection. In this respect, he differed from Republicans only in the degree of his hatred and the willingness to take violent action based on his beliefs.
The Republicans have effectively made homophobia a plank of their party platform through their opposition to gay marriage and their promotion of religious freedom laws that would allow businesses to deny services to homosexuals. Although most Republicans would never advocate violence against LGBT people, their party’s stance effectively legitimates the hatred that drove Mateen.
Even more damningly, Republican policies on firearms made it easy for this psychopath to arm himself with heavy weaponry and massacre fifty people. They have kept weapons like the AR-15 on the market. They oppose common sense measures such as background checks based on a flawed interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Groups such as the NRA claim that such measures are a prelude to the government seizing all firearms. This is bullshit. As a recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Alan Berlow noted, the National Firearms Act, passed in the 1930s, imposed similar background check and registration requirements on purchasers of machine guns, hand grenades, and other heavy weaponry. Nevertheless, four million weapons of the types covered by the Act are owned in the United States. Opposing these measures doesn’t protect gun rights; it just lets those rights be abused by the most dangerous elements of society.
As long as they maintain their extremist positions, the Republican Party will share indirect responsibility for these atrocities, whoever carries them out.