Crime and Punishment

On the Orlando Ramadan massacre –

I know everybody’s trying to spin this thing to support their favorite political hobbyhorse, be it gun control or anti-immigration, but it you take a deep breath and step back and look and the evidence in the cold light of day without political spin, this guy seems to fall into the profile of the typical mass shooter:

He was a person with psychological problems. Clearly he was socially awkward, not well-acculturated, had gay desires that he couldn’t reconcile with his religious upbringing and lashed out in an attempt to resolve his personal demons and maybe give his sorry life some meaning.

He had an ideology, but I think that ideology should be seen as a seed. If it didn’t fall on the fertile ground of a guy with profound psychological issues, it probably wouldn’t have sprouted.

At the end of the day, though, that’s all psychobabble. What matters is how do we protect ourselves from guys like this without destroying our freedoms. Don’t expect to find an easy answer to that one, but here are a few suggestions:

1. Stop all the nonsense about “assault weapons” and gun control. We’ve had that debate for 50 years and the American people have consistently rejected draconian gun control. Ain’t gonna happen. People aren’t going to disarm themselves when the government is incapable of protecting them.

2. My question for Hillary Clinton (which I am sure she won’t want to answer) is “Is it ok to fire an armed security guard who publicly espouses support for jihad even if he hasn’t broken any laws?” If we don’t have the same answer to that question as we would if we substituted Ku Klux Klan for jihad, we aren’t in the right place. And if the answer to both questions isn’t yes, what exactly is the point of licensing security guards?

3. We need to do a better job of acculturating foreigners and getting them to become Americans. We used to be really good at that back when we believed in America as an idea, but we’ve gotten so mired in multiculturalism that we’re afraid to insist that people embrace American values, even people to whom we grant birthright citizenship. That’s a problem. Of course, that will require us to come to some agreement on what “American values” are. And if you think the answer to that question is just going to be White Evangelical Protestant Values, you need to take a look around you and count heads. If we can’t come up with a definition of “American values” that has a place for gay people and people whose parents don’t speak English and atheists and Muslims who don’t support violent jihad, then we’re screwed. We will just balkanize ourselves into armed camps and become Lebanon.

4. We need to stop the war on men. It’s creating a lot of disaffected, alienated young men with no real purpose to their lives who become fertile ground for radical ideologies. Omar Mateen and Dylan Root are both fruit of the same tree.

I’m not sure any of this would have prevented this particular incident. But I am sure that we’re going to have more of this stuff if we don’t get the above items right.

From commentor JLPandin, on this thread at Instapundit.