Yet Another Mass Killing

by Glenn N.  Holliman

Comments have been tumbling in this morning reflecting on the horrid killings by one person in Orlando, Florida.  Fifty are dead and over fifty wounded by an assult rifle and pistol.  The victims were gay and lesbian, and shooter an Islamic American, born in New York and living in Florida.  Below is a serious, thought proking piece from David, an Englishman in the Midlands of his gentler country. - GNH


"Dear Glenn: 

Your gunophilic nation has been and gone and done it again!

I've just listened to a bizarre, but only too predictable interview on BBC Radio 4, in which one of your politicians said that the Florida mass shooting was 'not about guns', but terrorism. 

She went on to say that, not only because of your 'Constitution', but because of his job, Omar Mateen was entitled to carry guns. His job, to which she refers, was that of a private security guard: the principal weapon which he used was a 'AR 15' semi-automatic assault rifle, and there are, it seems, 3.3 million such weapons owned, legitimately in your country. 

Here, in the UK, deemed by your government, to be unsafe for visits by US citizens, because of the threat of terrorism in Europe, we cannot imagine why a 'private security guard' (not normally regarded as highly trained in or skilled at anything) should be licensed to carry any sort of firearm, much less a semi-automatic assault rifle. 

We are even reluctant to allow our police officers to bear arms, and when we do so, it is only members of highly-trained specialist firearms units who are so licensed. 

By all means arm the military, in time of war, but to arm the whole population all the time, is simple madness.

So, Omar Mateen was motivated by his distorted view of his God and his religion, (to get evil men to do good is fairly easy: to get good men to do evil needs religion) but what about the 372 perpetrators of last year's mass shootings, in which 475 people were killed and 1,870 wounded? 

Terrorism? - I should say so, but only in the literal sense of the word - it's the very fact that the man walking toward you in any street in the United States, may be carrying a firearm, which should inspire terror in anyone endowed with common sense. Whatever one's motivation for a violent act, if one does not own, and would find it really hard to obtain, a firearm, through, say, the criminal black-market, the worst that one could do spontaneously, would be to stab, slash, or beat. Unrestricted access to assault rifles raises to a whole new level, the opportunity for serious mass violence.

The motivation is irrelevant. It may be simple hatred (of gay people, of surgeons practising abortions, of fellow-students, of people of other, or no religious belief, of immigrants, of .....  you name it); or having had a 'poor home background'; or belonging to a neglected minority group; or being mentally ill; or having a 'bad hair day'. 

However, if you don't have an assault rifle and haven't thought far enough ahead to build a bomb, you're not going to kill or maim 100 or more people. Obvious, no?

Yours in despair
David"

From a librarian in a southern USA state comes the following:

"Hey, it's another great day for the 2nd Amendment!!  So glad that the Republican Party will do whatever it takes to defend my right to buy and carry military grade weapons in public areas!   Let's not focus on the fact that toddlers who stumble upon handguns kill more Americans a year than terrorists.  (While we spend how many billions fighting terrorism?!).   So great that people can bring loaded guns into a public Library, but I have to ask them to leave if they talk on their cell phones!  Thanks NRA!!"


Terry Field also has written from strike torn France.  He emoted about the coming British vote, probably to leave the European Union, and then closed with the following:

"The horror in Orlando is ISIS inspired, albeit by a psychologically damaged person. That - I imagine - will not matter. It will almost certainly propel Mr Trump into the White Cottage.  What do you think Glenn? These are dark times, are they not?"

And so, stepping outside of my role as a recorder, I venture an opinion, not all my feelings certainly, but a response to Terry's 'dark days'.

"Dark times?  In an era of instant communication, something dark is brought to our attention that happens every day on this globe of 7 billion souls, a percentage of them tortured and willing to cut short the lives of fellow humans.  We are a spinning bit of sand in the solar system in a massive galaxy in a 13.7 billion year old universe.

Something Shakespearean grabs me from time to time, about strutting on stage and then like a candle, winking out and leaving scarce a footprint behind.

Sigh...and now the right wing in America will grab a new dose of fear and run with it.  Never mind the madness since the 2nd Bush administration of allowing these awful weapons to be sold to civilians.  Let  people have their guns for shooting ranges, a hobby I understand, but leave them locked up there.  As our laws are now written, we cannot keep them out of the hands of insane killers, just impossible.

Well, as to Britain, it looks like a close vote...many of the same forces of migration and increased integration of laws of commerce and justice seemingly 'threaten' the nations of Western Civilization.  Certainly that fear of a 'federal' government in some far away place is an issue in Yorkshire as well as York, Pennsylvania.  Part of this is a human's desire for freedom; part of fear of the 'other' that seeks to control elements of one's being.

So I mow my lawn, sweep debris from my cluttered barn and some days try not to study the news too closely.  This too shall recede into the fog of time.  But in the meantime families mourn, and an increase of fear and unease is the substance of our days."- GNH

From Down Under....

Dear Glenn

I have a new and radical idea to reduce global emissions which are threatening mankind’s future because we are such clever little bunnies at reproducing and have massively overpopulated our poor little globe.

We arm every man, woman, and most importantly every child with an automatic weapon.

Simple.

Cynical Steph

From a thoughtful cousin, retired United Methodist Minister in Alabama who states even Alabama does not allow guns in libraries as does Virginia. This piece was emailed to Charles by another pastor.

Brian is the Senior Minister at the Trinity United Methodist Church which is
just down the street from where we live. He is a young man, 43,
extremely bright and a gifted preacher. I think you will appreciate his
message. Charles F.  (I agree Charles, well worth reading. GNH)


"Spent the day after church yesterday in the car with the family, driving
south through Florida, listening to coverage of the Orlando shooting.  I am
probably too quick to post thoughts on here, so it may have been a blessing
to all that I couldn't juggle Facebook and the steering wheel at the same
time.

I am ever so grateful for the diversity of my friends on Facebook, as
frustrating as it can be during an election cycle.  Whenever something
polarizing occurs (we seem to be on a 20 minute cycle these days), my feed
becomes a very big tent, with one stake just to the right of the right-hand
side of the folks who feel Fox News is too liberal, and the other side
touches down in the Noam Chomsky Vegans for a Better Bernie Book Club (the
venerable NCVBBBC).  As a pastor, I've found that just about everybody
assumes that I agree with them.

These divisions are important, of course, but as others have said much
better than I can, in the forward-before-you-think world of social media,
our energies fuel our opposition to one another, rather than meaningfuldialogue.  We have more words, and more access to each other, yet we've used
these tools to effectively shut each other out.  I'm more convinced than
ever that the problem is not just that these point-and-shoot binary
conflicts don't capture the complexity of the issues, but that years of
engaging one another like this has made us dumber.  This is how we think
now.

There are so many levels to what happened in the wee hours of the morning in
Orlando.  There is the troubling connection to religion, both to the
misguided faith of the shooter, as well as the religiously motivated
discrimination against LGBTQ children of God by Christians.  Christians are
never given the luxury of thinking one life is less valuable than another.

There is the pain carried by the Latino community, not just for this
unfathomable tragedy, but that the country built by immigrants does not know
how to talk about immigration without descending into fear of the other.
There is the gun debate that goes nowhere, with well-intentioned folks on
both sides of the aisle, quibbling with one another, while the bad guys
continue to buy AR-15s easier than they could renew their driver's licenses.

There is the terror spread by a handful of evil people, whose best victory
is not measured by lives taken or bombs detonated, but by the suspicion
they've sown in us, the growing mistrust we have of the world and each
other, even though you are still more likely to be killed by an asteroid or
a ladder than a terrorist.

But underneath all these layers, there are 50 people--49 victims and a
shooter--whose lives have been cut short.  There are families with aching
holes that cannot be filled by prayer or sympathy or news coverage or even
time.  

For my part in this big tent of disagreement, I think the very least
we can do to honor them is to decide how we will understand their unwilling
sacrifice.  If they have died only to feed our fear, our mistrust, our
systematic ignorance of one another, then let us go ahead and hand the keysof the world to the bad guys.  But I've got to think that people in this day
and age with the courage to be openly gay, and to gather with friends to
dance and sing and enjoy one another's company, would not want their lives
to feed that kind of fire.

Evil will not be defeated by a quiet news day, because the truth is, even
when it does not rise to the level of our awareness, senseless violence is a
constant in this broken world.  If we want the world to be better, we must
rise up in these moments and decide Who we serve.

Whenever we stand for one another, because we realize that these arbitrary
differences are not what finally define us, evil loses.  Whenever we choose
to engage those on the other side rather than lobbing another Facebook
grenade, evil loses.  Whenever we decide that this hour is ours, that no one
better is coming to fix the world, evil loses.

According to my own narrow worldview (that has its own minefield of
limitations), the last word will be "Amen."  Until then, there will be
suffering and senselessness and sacrifice, but that is no excuse to step
aside and let the darkness have its way.  We live now, we speak now, we act
now, because we know what the last page of the story looks like.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all the saints.  And let the
saints on this side of that veil unite our fragile voices to tell evil that,no matter how hard it tries, it will lose.  And we are taking back the hour
we've been given.

Amen, and amen.