The worst mass shooting in U.S. history happened in my hometown this weekend.
Everyone is now playing their assigned roles. The gun nuts are doing their usual thing: ignoring, averting, “praying”, reminding us all that they have a God-given right to legally purchase, own, and presumably use machines that have absolutely no intended purpose beyond the murder of human beings. The partisans are trying to score points in this election season for pretending that this was a 9/11-style terrorist attack. Amidst the calls for calm reflection and intelligent action, there’s a thunder of “I told you so’s” – some making valid points, most not, but everybody fighting to climb to the top of Message Mountain.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of waking up to these headlines. I’m tired of the so-predictable dramas and the absol-fucking-lute lack of anything that ultimately gets done about it. I’m tired of everyone – everyone – using these tragedies for their own attention seeking needs.
I don’t know the solution here. Maybe there isn’t one. But I have to believe that, if there is a practical, workable answer to this, it’s built on the foundation of clear understanding of the situation. So in this aftermath of blood and carnage, I’d like to say a few things.
Orlando is a fucking dangerous town.
It hasn’t always been. My family moved there in 1979, and I left in 2007 – I grew up in Orlando, and I remember the now-long-gone orange groves that are now parking lots.
Something essential to the city’s character was lost after the Navy base shut down in the early 90’s and the town leaders (Glenda Hood, I’m looking at you) panicked over the loss of lots of good military and defense contractor jobs as the Cold War wound down. They embarked on a growth-at-any-cost strategy and the population quickly spun out of control, where it still is today.
Long before George Zimmerman got his gun on, the FBI had noticed that there were a lot of weapons in Orlando. This was back around 2007/2008, when I left – at one point Orlando managed to get itself ranked the most heavily armed city in the nation, and not with 9mm pistols either, but with assault rifles. The murder rate was through the roof. People went missing often enough that it stopped being news.
Yeah, I know; in recent years there has been an influx of law enforcement cash to fight that crime wave back, and it has helped. But it’s still a dangerous, overpopulated town full of transient residents and shockingly easy-to-get guns. Few stay long enough to become invested in their communities or anything else. Drugs and gang crime are still pretty bad. It’s a dangerous place to live – and yet, a town full of bread and circuses, where ample plastic trinkets and comforting corporate logos will help distract you from what your unbalanced neighbor is doing at the moment.
I remember when I first moved to Modesto, and one day I was crossing the street at a crosswalk, and was shocked when a woman stopped at the light just smiled, waved, and didn’t try to run me down. You can ask Kristi. It took me years to start breaking the habit of dashing across crosswalks, and even now I still have my moments (my first few forays into San Francisco were quite amusing on that score). In Orlando, being safe on foot mostly means being nimble, fast, well-timed, and more than a little lucky.
Orlando has racial issues, gender issues, LGBT issues, class issues, economic issues, everything. The difference between it and most cities is that all those people are crammed together in close quarters, in the blisteringly humid sun, and collectively told to go fuck themselves.
Here, have a Mickey Mouse tote bag.
And, oh, there’s a gun show in Daytona this weekend, don’t miss the gun show!
Something like this was always a matter of time.
The shooter wasn’t a terrorist. He was an asshole who really, really hated gay people.
[Ed. – And for perhaps a compelling reason. See notes and links at the bottom of this post.]
Further details may come to turn this whole story in a different direction, and if it turns out that this shooter was indeed taking his marching orders from assholes in Syria, then so be it. But until that happens, here’s the fact as we know it:
This. Wasn’t. Terrorism.
If anything, it was a hate crime. Very, very different thing.
The only reasons why anyone is “investigating” this as a terrorist attack are 1) the guy’s name and national ancestry (i.e., his race), and 2) he called 911 before shooting and ranted about allegiance to ISIS. However, there’s no evidence to date that he was in any way in contact with ISIS or any other terrorist organization. His parents have clearly stated that he wasn’t, that this had nothing to do with religion – he just really, really didn’t like gay people, and flipped the fuck out when he and his son saw two men kissing in Miami.
Really, that’s it.
So ISIS put out a statement of solidarity with the shooter. Big fucking deal. Kim Jong Un puts out some bullshit crazy ass statement like that every other day, and nobody really takes him seriously. ISIS wanted some free press. Should we be surprised at that?
So if he wasn’t a Islamic radical sleeper cell splinter agent terrorist whatever, then why is everyone falling over each other to report him as one?
Because in America today, “terrorist” is a magic word that opens doors.
Ask anyone in law enforcement: they’re not awash in cash. They have hard jobs to do, for the most part they’re underappreciated given the risks they take, and they’re chronically underbudgeted. Most state budgets are stripped to the bone already, and Florida (which has no state income tax) has always been particularly shoestring because everyone wants public services but nobody wants to pay for it. Bilk the tourists and snowbirds.
If this is just a random guy who committed a terrible crime, well, looks like OPD better step up its game, right? However, rating it as terrorism means that maybe, just maybe, Homeland Security gets involved, and that’s some sweet federal budget right there. Words make a difference, especially in election years.
Yes, the FBI has stated that they are investigating this as terrorism. But shouldn’t they? Would you rather they just didn’t do their jobs? Of course they’re investigating it as terrorism, given the ISIS 911 call thing. But that’s a LONG goddamned way from a determination that the Orlando mass shooting was terrorism.
Crime is background noise. It happens here. Terrorism sells papers, wins votes, secures funding, scares the bejeezus out of the average suburbanite, and gets a whole lot of attention. It happens there. But for a single word, reactions differ greatly.
That difference isn’t lost on the folks who write press releases, craft speeches, edit newspapers, or tub-thump on the campaign trail.
It’s going to happen again. And again. And again. And again.
Let’s get real here for a minute. Can we do that at least?
Mass shootings have to stop, but they’re not going to. If kindergarteners being gunned down in cold blood in their classroom at Christmas wasn’t enough to make us all say, hey, maybe we should stop selling dangerous assault rifles, then a bunch of dead gays in an Orlando nightclub certainly won’t. And if you’re not outraged at that, then you’re complicit in it.
And basically, because you don’t think it can happen to you.
It happens over there. To them. Those people.
Not here. Not us.
Neil Gabler once wrote that Americans had so completely mastered the power of illusion that they could create false realities so believable, so REAL, that they could live in them. We’re all doing that: creating illusory worlds to live in, where we get to be right, and we get to be around good “normal” people who aren’t those “evil doers” and where there’s such a goddamned clean cut line between the two, and where there’s usually an army of slobbering trolls just outside the gates waiting to enslave us to the powers of darkness, but they’re out there, beyond the comforting light of the campfire, and the other folks warming their hands over the flames are just as nice and normal and safe as we think we ourselves are.
The American Dream, in a nutshell.
We see this kind of shit on the news and, you know, it’s just more reality TV. It’s all on the other side of the glass, which means we can ignore it.. after, of course, the prerequisite fake hand wringing and faux prayers and pleas to avoid politicization out of thinly contrived respect to the victims and their families. It doesn’t fit the day-to-day false narratives we have created for ourselves, where we get to be safe all the time and where we can’t suddenly and tragically lose our lives at any moment, for any reason, to be forgotten after a few news cycles.
For the survivors of the Orlando massacre, life is suddenly very fucking real again.
Hopefully we as a society won’t have to face terrifying chaos, seething hatred, and mass death before life’s real again for the rest of us, as well.
[Ed. – Recent reports now have several people pointing out that the shooter had visited gay clubs for years – including Pulse – regularly used gay dating apps, and at least one media outlet is reporting that his ex-wife knew he was gay. And then there’s the male former classmate of his in Palm Beach, who rebuffed his romantic advances. So yeah. Story’s a bit more complicated than the partisans want you to think.]