After a post (in continuous development) that I expect will continue on for many, many more lines, I hope to constrain the growth of this post to some degree. There are just a few points that I want to make about the mass shooting incident at the GLBT nightclub/community locus, the Pulse, in Orlando, Florida, apparently the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
1. Mass shootings are a horrible reality in American life that we sadly have to endure, in part, because the weapons of mass murder are so widely available in the U.S. thanks to current juridical readings of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution of 1787. In making this point, I do not want to overemphasize the significance of radically liberal availability of firearms in the U.S. There are other countries, Canada for example, where access to firearms is relatively unrestricted. As I have previously attempted to argue on this blog, we have bigger problems than relatively open availability of firearms relative to the recurrence of mass shooting incidents in the U.S. - the disintegration of a broader sense of community, embracing individuals otherwise stricken by a sense of isolation, social disconnection, and psychological alienation from their own capacities to conceptualize futures of meaning for themselves in connection with broader American society. Critically, millions of Americans exist in unaddressed and unrecognized states of emotional/mental distress and such individuals are fodder for the growth of murderous violence with firearms. In this regard, as someone who spent a prolonged stint under medicinal psychiatric treatment for anxiety and depression, I do not think the answer is to medicate millions more than are already under some sort of psychiatric treatment. Rather, beyond the potential impact of legislative action on either a federal state level, we need to really reinvigorate the sorts of voluntary local practices that might encourage a generalized sense of inclusive community, even and especially in an American society that it becoming increasingly heterogeneous on racial, linguistic, and ethnic grounds. As such, the key response to mass shooting incidents in the U.S. remains, in my mind, the creation of local institutions that can bring diverse people together to identify their diversities as a source of strength to the larger community rather than as a source of division. Regarding the Orlando mass shooting incident as, essentially, an incident of prejudice against LGBT individuals, between Americans, that erupted into murderous violence, I would be confident that I could leave my comments here, with the addendum that we need to grieve the dead and work harder to ensure that LGBT individuals achieve recognition as full human beings outside of the limited confines of the federal judiciary, where their rights have been ceaselessly codified despite the lingering reality of widespread prejudice against non-traditional conceptions of love by a significant proportion of the U.S. population. Sadly, the massacre in Orlando cannot simply be regarded as an incident of domestic militant homophobic prejudice, linked intrinsically, perhaps, to the recent progress of gay rights and the struggle to expand the rights of transgender individuals in the U.S., because Omar Mateen, the murderer at the Pulse nightclub, was a Muslim-American and had the nerve to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) online two hours into the attack(!).
2. We need to differentiate between the religiously grounded motivations of a murderous, militant Sunni Muslim Salafist against the broader institutions of Western liberal culture, including but certainly not limited to LGBT rights, and the motivations of a homegrown, American, psychological disturbed, sexually confused, and violent, homophobic bigot. I cannot claim to be an expert on Omar Mateen and his like within the framework of American racial, ethnic, and religious demography. Nor am I an expert on Islam, in the U.S. or elsewhere, the theological postulates of Salafism, the circumstances that might draw a Sunni Muslim toward Salafist ideas, and the conditions under which Salafists ethical transcend the boundaries of traditional religious discourse to accept, as a matter of principle, the use of violence against apostates and non-believers of Islam. Emphatically, I do not know that Mr. Mateen was a faithfully practicing Sunni Muslim or that he had any conception of the theological precepts of Salafism.
No comments:
Post a Comment