The Mass-Shooter Was One Of Us
As the body count of the Orlando terrorist attack on a night club continues to rise, so does the temperature of the rhetoric spewing out from all sides. We are desperate to find the enemy, the underlying threat, the lair from which this monster arose.
American born and bred, as it turns out. New York, to be exact. This monster is one of us. His religion may be Islam, but his hate and the execution of that hate was our brand, our playbook. The land of the free and home of the mass shooter. Grab your gun and enact justice on the unjust world. It is in our movies, it is in our legend, it is America.
Immigration is irrelevant in this issue, yet it will be brought up. There will also be noise on gun rights, background checks, and other issues, but those are distractions from the core issue.
We feed on anger and alienation. From that foul stew, we produce killers. Throughout the day, across all social media platforms, voices will proclaim Islam as guilty. But it is not Islam or Isis that is truly to blame. It is our culture of intolerance. Homophobia is this particular flavor of intolerance and radical Islam was the prism by which that intolerance was focused to a deadly point. But mass shooters do not need Islam, nor Christianity, or any other ideology to kill. Religion only provides the excuse for the moral outrage to justify the act in their confused minds.
Ultimately, this is a man who felt impotent to control his world. So he bought guns and ammunition. He used them as tools to exert control on the world he chose not to understand. It was not Islam that warped his mind. It was the hate and intolerance that is intensified by our fractured, digital age that turned a family man into a monster. We did this to him. In every online encounter where we choose to dismiss countering ideas and cultures rather than embracing diversity of ideas and customs, we are feeding the hate machine that will continue to breed violence on soft targets.
So, what are the answers? Outreach to the groups we fear. Not to change them, but to understand them. This man feared the gay community. Now many in the gay community within Orlando will fear the Muslim community. If those groups worked to come together and break down the stereotypes that hold them apart, more will be done to prevent shootings in the future. There are ideological divides that can’t be solved by coffee and doughnuts, of course, but we should all work to be better neighbors. These shootings happen because disturbed individuals with high moral codes want to be heard and understood. Fear and derision is better than living without a voice. So, how do we help them find a peaceful voice? And by finding that peaceful voice, how to we maintain a dialogue where understanding and acceptance comes from both sides? I’m not sure, but that is a more helpful question to ask than many of those that will be posed by the media, politicians, and other benefactors of America’s obsession with vigilante justice.
