thegreekdog wrote:
Please pick your best option (or options) and let me know why (so I can ridicule you):
Oh, this sounds just delightful! Oh well, I suppose I can always do with some more abuse.
None of these solutions will work.
Starting from most doomed:
#3. As noted, the Orlando shooter was born in the U.S.A. Most of the attackers in the Paris attacks were born in Europe, also. Blocking immigration would do nothing about these.
Furthermore, after Paris the media made much of the fact that the attackers came from ghettoes and were alienated from mainstream society. There was a lot of talk about how we need to reduce the unemployment in the ghettoes to prevent radicalization, blah, blah, blah. The Orlando shooter, however, while perhaps alienated in some ways, was educated, employed, and generally successful in society.
#4 is foolish. As a basic matter of doctrine, having a massive increase in the invasions of privacy by the government is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you abandon freedom to save freedom, it's a fail.
But even more than doctrine, #4 has enormous practical problems. We have enormous amounts of surveillance now, and they don't seem to be very effective at stopping terror. Data collection (of any kind) runs up against problems of diminishing returns. Given that fairly extensive surveillance is failing to accomplish much, will increased surveillance accomplish much more?
#2 I'm not entirely certain what you mean. Do you mean identifying a "terrorist type" and prohibiting those persons from owning weapons? That runs up against all the problems of #4, in addition to, as you say, being a violation of the Second Amendment. Or do you mean that everyone is a potential terrorist in some ways, and everyone should be banned from having weapons? That completely abrogates not just the letter but the spirit of the Second, and really would mean a radical transformation of America, maybe for the better but probably not.
#1 comes close to making some sense. It's hard to disagree that America would benefit by scaling back the proliferation of automatic weapons. At least some killings would be stopped that way. Maybe a complete ban on assault weapons is not necessary, but some intelligent restrictions on them would be a good idea.
Still, Orlando is a poor example to choose. Perhaps the killing of children on a wide-open school playground might be stopped if the assault rifle is taken out of the equation. In a crowded disco, however, there's just too many easy ways to kill people. A bomb would be just as effective as a machine gun, probably more so. Or you could just steal a truck and drive it through the front window and probably kill just as many. Or just chain up the entrances and throw a match inside. Or just pull the fire alarm, they might stomp each other to death running for the exits. There's just too many easy ways to kill people in crowded quarters like that for banning one method to have much effect.
Furthermore, the shooter worked for an agency that provides armed guards, did he not? Almost certainly any weapons ban would have exemptions for police and security agency. Another reason why the Orlando shooter makes a poor poster boy for gun control.
patches70 wrote:How about option #5, acknowledge that blowback is a fact related directly to current and past US foreign policy and alter foreign policy to alleviate said blowback? As in the US isn't the police force for the world. We don't have the moral high ground to engage in it nor do we have the wisdom and ethics to do it fairly and competently.
Again, not a bad idea in general, but it wouldn't have saved anyone in Orlando.
Perhaps a large part of the Islamic terror strikes have been a result of American meddling in the Middle East, but I don't think this one was. This seems to have been a simple case of the guy deciding that "God hates fags" and volunteering to be God's assistant. Even the fact that he was Muslim may be coincidental; there are Christians who express the same sentiments. Beyond Christians, I've heard these sentiments from at least one Jew, at least one Sikh, and at least one atheist. There's plenty of room at the gay-bashing extremist table, and I think the fact that this guy was a radical Muslim might be irrelevant, at least in the Orlando case.
) opposing checks?
