In wake of another mass shooting are guns, violence simply the American way?

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Jun 21, 2016 - 9:45:45 AM

(L)Ray Rivera, DJ at the Pulse nightclub, is consoled by a friend outside of the Orlando Police Department. (R) Attendees at a vigil for Orlando victims. Photos: MGN Online

WASHINGTON—When the first reports began to circulate of 49 people shot to death and 53 more wounded at Orlando, Florida’s Pulse nightclub, thousands of Muslim immigrants to this country collectively held their breath: “Please don’t let the shooter be a Muslim,” many Muslims feared.

Omar Mateen

In his one, gruesome act in the early hours of June 12, alleged shooter Omar Mateen made the nightmares of many, many people in this country come true.

It was “Latin dance night” at the club which is a popular destination for members of the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and trans-gender (LGBT) communities and LGBT leaders worried that homophobia had once again reared its head and that their members and their lifestyle would once again be the subject of scorn.

Gun “rights” advocates feared that there would be new national pressure to regulate the open access to guns—even military-styled assault weapons which are only good for killing large numbers of people in a short time.

Law enforcement authorities nationwide worried that enemies of this country may have discovered the ease with which semi-automatic guns can be legally obtained and would adopt guns for use in terror attacks inside the United States, the way IEDs—improvised explosive devices—were used so effectively against invading U.S. military forces in the Iraq war.

Orlando nightclub shooting victims

Omar Mateen, who was killed by police when SWAT teams breeched his stronghold, rescuing another 20 hostages he held in a bathroom, was a 29-year-old American citizen, a Muslim born in New York City, to parents who migrated to this country from Afghanistan.

Described by those who knew him as “always mad,” and “unhinged,” Mr. Mateen resented U.S. military action in his parents’ country and in other Muslim countries, but allegedly showed mercy to some Black people among those he held hostage.

Memorial at Phillips Center in Orlando for the Pulse nightclub shooting victims, June 13.

Patience Carter is a Black woman who was shot by him in both legs but survived. She said she heard Mr. Mateen call 911 to say he was carrying out the massacre because he wanted the United States to stop bombing “his country.”

“And after that, he even spoke to us directly in the bathroom,” Ms. Carter said in a broadcast interview. “He said, ‘Are there any Black people in here?’ I was too afraid to answer, but there was an African American male in the stall where most of my body was, majority of my body was, had answered, and he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us.’

“And the gunman responded back to him saying that, ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with Black people. This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.’ And he just—he made a statement saying that it wasn’t about Black people. This isn’t the reason why he was doing this. But through the conversation with 911, he said that the reason why he was doing this is because he wanted America to stop bombing his country,” Ms. Carter said.

Not representative of Islam

Muslim organizations quickly condemned the shootings. “Those who commit murder in the name of Islam do not represent Muslims, and in fact their actions are a betrayal of Islamic values and a violation of the tenets of Islam,” the Muslim Alliance of North America (MANA) said in a statement. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and other Islamic organizations issued similar condemnations.

“Further, they generate hatred towards Islam, provoke retaliation against Muslims, and lend credence to those who would misrepresent the Qur’an and The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as instruments or advocates of wanton violence and terror,” the statement said.

FBI Press Conference for the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando Florida.

President Barack Obama was careful to not associate the mass murders with the Islamic faith. “As far as we can tell right now, this is certainly an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been so concerned about for a very long time,” the President said in a statement. “It also appears that he was able to obtain these weapons legally because he did not have a criminal record that, in some ways, would prohibit him from purchasing these weapons.

“It appears that one of those weapons he was able to just carry out of the store—an assault rifle, a handgun—a Glock—which had a lot of clips in it. He was apparently required to wait for three days under Florida law. But it does indicate the degree to which it was not difficult for him to obtain these kinds of weapons,” Mr. Obama told reporters.

Patience Carter, a victim in the Pulse nightclub shooting from Philadelphia, is comforted by Dr. Neil Finkler after speaking during a news conference at Florida Hospital, Orlando, June 14, 2016, in Orlando, Fla.

“The one thing that we can say is that this is being treated as a terrorist investigation. It appears that the shooter was inspired by extremist information that was disseminated over the Internet,” Mr. Obama said, dismissing the likelihood there was a plot involving groups outside this country, despite the fact that Mr. Mateen reportedly pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State and to other insurgencies fighting against the U.S.

“At the end of the day, this is something that we are going to have to grapple with—making sure that even as we go after ISIL and other extremist organizations overseas, even as we hit their leadership, even as we go after their infrastructure, even as we take key personnel off the field, even as we disrupt external plots—that one of the biggest challenges we are going to have is this kind of propaganda and perversions of Islam that you see generated on the Internet, and the capacity for that to seep into the minds of troubled individuals or weak individuals, and seeing them motivated then to take actions against people here in the United States and elsewhere in the world that are tragic,” the President continued.

“And so countering this extremist ideology is increasingly going to be just as important as making sure that we are disrupting more extensive plots engineered from the outside.”

Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Orlando where the President met privately with survivors and victim’s family members.

In a Tweet, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump first patted himself on the back for proposing to ban Muslims from entering this country. Calling in a speech for suspending immigration “from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or allies.”

The Washington Post, which Mr. Trump subsequently added to his sizable media blacklist, said that Mr. Trump’s speech was “laden with falsehoods and exaggeration.” In separate remarks later, Mr. Trump called on President Obama to resign and suggested that Mr. Obama sympathized with Mr. Mateen and was somehow himself abetting acts of terrorism.

Mr. Trump even suggested that had others in the nightclub that night been armed and returned the shooter’s fire—old fashioned shoot-out style—there would have been fewer casualties.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton echoed the Democratic call for restricting unlimited access to weapons, even to those on the Department of Homeland Security “no-fly” terrorist watch list.

Easy access to guns

Even as the gun lobby digs in its heels once again, in the face of renewed calls to restrict the access to military weapons, there is evidence that in 2016, “every terrorist attack in the U.S. in which someone other than the perpetrator was killed involved guns,” according to a preliminary list provided to the Daily KOS by Erin Miller, who manages the Global Terrorism Database. “The reason is pretty clear and simple—it’s a lot easier to get an assault rifle than it is to acquire bomb-making materials.”

Racks of firearms in a gun shop. Photos: MGN Online

Arie Perliger, director of terrorism studies at the U.S. Military Academy, said that U.S. terrorists are turning to guns because since Sept. 11, the federal government has monitored the use of explosives and the trade of materials that can be turned into explosives, according to Daily KOS. People on the terrorism watch list aren’t barred from buying guns, by contrast, although such a ban probably wouldn’t have stopped the Charleston, S.C. or San Bernardino, Calif. shootings, or the Orlando shooting, because the suspects weren’t on the watch list.

“It’s much easier to purchase and learn how to shoot a gun than it is to learn how to make a bomb,” said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University professor who studies mass killings.

Indeed, the danger is likely to get worse before it gets better, experts predict. Nothing has been done to make guns harder for would-be terrorists to get. And not only are they easier to get, they “are less likely to result in a terrorist operation being compromised,” according to Jeffrey Simon, a visiting lecturer in the department of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles who is the author of “Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat.”

Meanwhile, the agency which should have the power to combat the proliferation of guns—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—has been hamstrung. The agency is actually prohibited from creating a simple gun registry that would allow it to quickly track weapons used in crimes. It has to do those searches using the phone and combing through hard copies on reams of paper. All of which makes guns the would-be terrorist’s weapon of choice for causing mass destruction.

Mass shootings and gun violence has continued to wreak havoc in America’s cities and towns from the Columbine School shooting in 1999 that killed 13 and wounded 20; the Aurora, Colo. theater shooting in 2012 resulting in 12 fatalities; the shooting in Newtown, Conn. also in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary where 26 people were killed, 20 of which were children; the nine parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina that were shot to death in 2015 and countless others including urban areas like Chicago which recorded its 300th homicide, 13 of which occurred over Father’s Day weekend when 55 people were shot.

So far this year, about 1,800 people have been shot across the city and more than 200 of those wounded have died of their wounds reported the Chicago Tribune.

“More Americans have died in the United States from guns since 1968 than on battlefields in all the wars in American history,” wrote New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristoff.

“The lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition (that would raise constitutional issues and be impossible politically), but that we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys?”

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence issued a statement that said in part, “This weekend in Orlando illustrates the high price that Americans continue to pay for their leader’s failure to pass stronger gun laws.”

However, recent history shows that passage of any new legislation will be tough. Votes held after the San Bernadino shootings last December and after the Sandy Hook shootings failed to garner the necessary votes to pass in the Senate. At Final Call press time another vote was slated for June 20.

U.S. love affair with guns, violence?

Violence has become as American as apple pie and baseball. From video games that glorify guns and killing to movies where death and destruction are blockbusters, violence threads throughout the fabric of American society. And that’s just the violence that entertains people.

What about gun violence that kills people every day? According to the Centers for Disease Control on an average day in America, 91 people are killed by guns. There are 12,000 gun murders every year, America’s gun murder rate is more than 25 times the average of other developed countries and 64 percent of firearm deaths are suicide. Seven children and teens (age 19 or under) are killed with guns in the U.S. on an average day. And that’s just the deaths from criminal violence.

What about the violence of war? Europeans who colonized the new world did so with murder and mayhem but analyzing recent history its estimated that 1.5 million Iraqis were killed in the U.S. invasion, 320,000 U.S. vets came home with brain injuries, 4,502 Americans died in Iraq since the invasion and 2,381 died in Afghanistan according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. And that’s just from the two recent wars.

The National Institute of Mental Health noted that effects of children seeing violence on television include: children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others; they may be more fearful of the world around them and may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others.

According to the American Psychological Association, research by psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann, Leonard Eron and others starting in the 1980s found that children who watched many hours of violence on television when they were in elementary school tended to show higher levels of aggressive behavior when they became teenagers.

By observing these participants into adulthood, Huesmann and Eron found that the ones who’d watched a lot of TV violence when they were eight years old were more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for criminal acts as adults.

(Nisa Islam Muhammad and Final Call staff contributed to this report.)

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