Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Lessons from Orlando
This is getting to be a regular type of post for me on Ricochet. I am not happy about that fact.
My heart goes out to everyone affected by the horror in the Pulse nightclub, and I join with those who are calling for peace in the wake of this massacre. But I am also preparing for war.
By now, the motive behind the worst mass-shooting on American soil is known, and the motive was radical Islamic terrorism. Again.
Here’s what we know about what happened in Orlando early Sunday morning.
Background Checks Didn’t Stop the Attack
The shooter (who I will never, ever call by his name because he deserves our scorn, not our recognition) had a Florida security guard license, which means he passed quite of a number of background checks based on his previous activities (or lack thereof). He was investigated by the FBI (twice!), but there was not enough evidence to arrest him. If only he’d been a member of a Tea Party group or something similar, then the government would have kept close tabs on him…
“Gun-Free Zones” Didn’t Stop the Attack
Florida law does not permit taking a firearm into a business that makes more than 50 percent of its revenue from the sales of alcohol. The Pulse nightclub was therefore a “gun free zone,” and the shooter ignored that little part of Florida law on his way to commit other, multiple, violations of state and federal laws. Why, it’s almost as if criminals live outside the law and chose to ignore them.
A Good Guy with a Gun Stopped Him
Actually, a whole bunch of good guys. Kudos to the Orlando Police Department and other agencies for the efforts in stopping this attacker in his tracks.
You Are on Your Own
That sounds rather scary, and it is, to some extent. No one likes to think that’s they’re alone in a hostile world, but the fact is, people who wish to do us harm select people who cannot or will not fight back. Take all the steps you can right now to lessen your chances of being a victim of violence. Churches and synagogues have been a target of Islamic terror in the Middle East, and there is no reason to believe they won’t be a target here as well. Keep at least one eye out, and if something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
Have the Will to Fight
In Peter Jackson’s excellent movie adaptation of Tolkien’s “The Two Towers,” Theoden, king of Rohan asks, “What can men do against such reckless hate?” The answer his companion Aragorn gives is both succinct and chock-full of wisdom: “Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them. For Rohan. For your people.”
Fighting a defensive battle on our own soil will not defeat an ideology based in the Middle East. We are facing a global existential threat to Western culture, and it is time for the men (and women) of the west to stop calling ISIS “the JV team” and treat Islamic jihad as the threat it really is.
It’s Not the Guns, Stupid
There are three things needed to commit a crime: Motive, means, and opportunity. The motive was radical Islamic terrorism (again) which does not tolerate Christians, gays, Jews, or intellectuals. The opportunity was a large group of people who fit one of those descriptions who, by Florida law, could not be armed at their location. The means, therefore, was at best tertiary. This is backed up by the fact that in Israel, Islamic terrorists use knives to kill Jews. In Iraq, its car bombs to kill Christians. In Bangladesh, they hack intellectuals and gays to death.
The NRA does not exist in any of those countries, and and yet this kind of terror happens overseas. It’s long past time that our media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) stop blaming the inanimate objects that constitute the means of such massacres, and start addressing the motives and the opportunities.
Published in Culture, Guns, Islamist Terrorism, Politics
I don’t think it is. The only way ISIS and all the associated groups that hold as their objective the destruction of the West could achieve their aim is by obtaining not just a single nuclear weapon, but an arsenal capable of surviving a first strike. It’s not completely beyond imagination in some future hypothetical dystopia, but it’s certainly completely beyond their capability now.
It isn’t pretty to imagine how much damage they could do short of destroying Western civilization, but don’t give in to despair. It’s bad enough that they can commit truly barbarous acts of terrorism and cause great grief, destruction, fear, and fury.
Just a singular nuclear weapon set off at an altitude of 5000 ft over the middle of US Eastern seaboard and the electromagnetic pulse would put the Eastern half of the country back to about 1820. Similar effect for Western Europe.
Our culture has already been nuked by the Left. You have sharia courts operating in the UK and sharia law making inroads in Canada’s justice system. You have kafir western apologists for Islam from the Catholic pope and US presidents down to local law enforcement in Germany, Sweden, and Britain, who cover for Muslim rapists. How’s that “religious freedom” working for us now? Looks more like an Achilles heel for Islamists to exploit, doesn’t it?
Of course Islamic jihad is an existential threat! But, mostly because the West has decided to submit. We’ve been berated and scolded by the Left for so long for our success, we no longer believe we have the moral authority to fight back. Sharansky warned about what happens when a people loses its (Judeo-Christian) identity. We’re too busy insisting Christian bakers bake cakes for gay weddings to defend gay nightclubs, let alone assert that Islamic societies shouldn’t throw suspected gays off buildings. Who’s going to get dirty in the fight and possibly die for a culture where privileged college kids demand safe spaces for hurtful speech and gender confusion is the new norm in school restrooms?
What a waste.
I think that’s a risk, but more from North Korea than from ISIS. It’s a good argument for hardening the grid, though, either way.
In the better-news department, Libyan forces have retaken Siirte. ISIS isn’t going to be around forever. While the cleanup will take a long time, and the risk won’t go away overnight, the world will — slowly and with many setbacks — rid itself of this scourge.
I hope everybody listens to Milo at this link–and reads the rest of it. We do not have to keep importing this backward, bigoted, intolerant and murderous ideology. It is simply not compatible with our way of life. It is not somehow going to be “good” for us. We’re already way, way, ahead, centuries ahead. That’s why Omega has to hark back to the Crusades when he wants to chastise us (gee, remind me: who was prez of the US back in the 11th century?) That was a thousand years ago now–but they’re still back there. Thank you Locke On!!
Of what???
Of the population of the USA? A bit over 3 hundredths of a percent (0.03%) of the US population. So what?
Microbes and other demons in the freezer. The war is evolving and polite society, a fairly small blip in history, will be put on hold at some point regardless of what polite society wants.
I hope so, but if memory serves an earlier manifestation of this scourge roared out of the sands of Arabia to consume the Byzantine and Persian empires, and much of Europe before being pushed back and becoming more moderate. I hate to think what might’ve happened had earlier western civilizations suffered from paralyzing cultural guilt and leadership delusions that they were dealing with a “junior varsity” threat that didn’t really mean what it said.
The nightclub is a good model of a disarmed populace. Hundreds of people with no defense against one bad guy with a gun.
Accurate reports are hard to come by, but Coalition airstrikes have probably killed a good 30-40,000 ISIS fighters. We’re not living in antiquity. The reason they resort to asymmetric warfare is because it’s the only thing they’ve got. I can imagine many terrible kinds of terrorist attack, and obviously there are some scenarios that can’t be completely ruled out — they could get incredibly lucky with biological weapons, for example. But any sensible person would wager on “a coalition of highly advanced, 21st-century nation-states” over “a 7th century rabble.”
I think “an arsenal capable of surviving a first strike” gives the US government way too much credit: they know about it and where it is, and they are willing to make first use of nuclear weapons to destroy it. And of course some unknown portion might remain.
Our civilization has a much lower threshold for “unacceptable level of loss” than theirs. The loss of one capital city to a nuclear weapon would forever change the trajectory of the West. Take the TSA and Patriot acts times a hundred. By popular demand we would probably see the end of free and open society. No more right to bear arms, no more freedom from search and seizure, no more presumption of innocence before abridging civil rights. The end of reasonable travel. Requirements to show “papers” before making certain types of purchases or traveling into major cities. I’m picturing the backdrop to Children of Men (without the infertility plot). Bars on all windows, armored vehicles and soldiers everywhere, checkpoints on every road. Does that not sound plausible to you, Claire?
I’m not in favor of gun bans, but there is about zero chance that he would have killed 50 people with a knife. I do think people have a point when they talk about the higher levels of destruction and carnage a criminal with semi-auto rifles with large magazines can achieve. That point deserves a serious response from our side but I’m kind of at a loss. This talk about “good guys with guns” shooting back everywhere (although I support concealed-carry) is not a great solution.
It would be the immediate response, I imagine. And would probably remain so until people felt assured it wouldn’t happen again, and I don’t know what it would take for people to feel that way.
I don’t particularly enjoy contemplating the loss of a Western city, but the West has lost whole cities to war before and survived, albeit very changed for the experience. Sherman didn’t destroy Western Civilization; he did destroy cities and cultures. What happened in Europe in the First and Second World Wars vastly exceeded the loss of any single capital city.
I couldn’t make predictions about what would happen in the wake of a nuclear attack, though, because it’s unlike any experience we’ve had. I don’t think it’s especially likely to come from ISIS if it happens: It’s not at all easy to build and deliver a nuclear weapon. (As you’d be the first to point out.)
I don’t think there is a good response. We know that even in countries that put higher hurdles up against the acquisition of that kind of weapon, terrorists manage to get them. But in France, at least, that’s because the terrorist cells have been plugged into more organized jihadi networks with connections to smuggling rings.
There’s a strong case to be made that French laws have made it more difficult for ambitious jihadi self-starters (as opposed to well-connected professionals) to pull off that kind of attack. Imagine this attack, for example, if it had been easier for him to get his hands on the kinds of weapons that he was obviously fantasizing about. Or this one.
I feel safer in France because of the restrictions on the sale of that kind of weapon, but I can’t imagine it being remotely practical to try to get these weapons out of circulation in the US. I seem to remember the statistic that there are 2.5 million AR-15 rifles in the US — someone here is sure to know and to correct me if that’s wildly off. And these do seem to be the weapons of choice for terrorists and spree shooters. If we were starting from zero, in some imaginary world in which there were no such weapons in the US, I’d say that trying to keep it that way would be sensible. I don’t see a ban on semi-auto weapons as obviously more unconstitutional than a ban on automatic weapons.
But the reason the latter ban works is because there were so few in circulation in the first place. I really can’t imagine a scheme that would genuinely make it difficult for someone determined to get his hands on one to get one in the US.
I agree that the knee-jerk “more good guys with guns” response is as silly as the “make guns illegal” response. TTAG (which is anything but an anti-gun site) tried recreating the Charlie Hebdo attack with a “good guy with one handgun,” and found that wasn’t enough:
But an alert (and armed) guard at the door might have stopped him from getting into the club, and that’s probably increasingly what we’ll see. I don’t know what security at the Pulse was like; I’m sure we’ll learn in the coming days, but that’s obviously something other nightclubs should be thinking about.
So do we jettison religious freedom? What other freedoms are we willing to sacrifice?
And why slam the Pope and President with a low rent term like “kafir?” Go ahead and slam, but geeesh.
And should we even be discussing gay weddings given the events under discussion?
WC can (and will) speak for herself, but I took that reference as a juxtaposition – in the US, these days, someone who wishes to remain completely unconnected from a “gay wedding” (but who would, most likely, try to defend the participants against physical violence) is treated/viewed as evil beyond compare, but an organized belief system that condones murdering homosexuals is “nothing to see, here.”
Claire – you are always challenging us to think outside the box and I think you should as well. The threat I see to the West is through the sharia-supremacist ideology that Islamists today push (think Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR here in the USA). They are playing a long game – they see us as weak and assume we won’t fight back (and they have a useful idiot in Barack Obama who can’t even come to utter the word Islam unless he is speaking of his boyhood in Indonesia).
Muslims are flooding into Europe and creating havoc everywhere. They do not want to assimilate as a Westerner.
As the Editors at NR write this morning:
And that ideology is Islam. It is unfortunate that they don’t come out and say this directly, but that is what they mean. Islam is evil, just as is communism or naziism. Islam wants to convert you, kill you, or enslave you.
Nope. Detonations in an atmosphere tend to blunt the EMP effects (the rule of thumb is that the EMP works about as far as the blast radius). A nuke has to be set off exo-atmospheric to accomplish the effects you describe.
This is a tough one because Islam is more than a religion, it is a political ideology that governs everything. And the sharia component is directly opposite to what we hold dear. I would suspect that many, if not most, muslims would see the banning of sharia as the banning of Islam.
Islam has a huge problem in order to try to fit into the Western world. I’ve given Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address as an example here numerous times – when he called for introspective reason – they responded with violence.
The Pope has a large bully pulpit from which to combat evil. Yet, rather than warning us of the evil we get drivel like this:
That is not helpful at all. It just reinforces the progressive talking points about the “religion of peace”.
The thing is 1% of them are not terrorists. There are 4 million Muslims in France. Did we have 40,000 terrorist incidents over there?
“By now, the motive behind the worst mass-shooting on American soil is known, and the motive was radical Islamic terrorism. Again.”
Was that the motive or the final pretext? The guy was a thug, looking for an excuse to act out, just like the attackers in Paris and Brussels.
“A voice is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know/That voice that shook our palaces four hundred years ago-/It is he that saith not kismet, it is he that knows not fate,/ It is Raymond, it is Richard, it is Godfrey at the gate!/ It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth-/Set down your foot upon him, that our peace may rule the earth!”
From “Lepanto”, G.K.Chesterton
JavaMan, you are right. We need a Martel, a Don John. And we need, yes, the resolve of the Crusaders. (Oh, I know, people today think the Crusades were about oil.) They marched across the world to liberate the holy sites of Christianity. The early Crusades ( before it degenerated into European internecine attacks) are nothing to be ashamed of.
”
“Gun-Free Zones” Didn’t Stop the Attack
Florida law does not permit taking a firearm into a business that makes more than 50 percent of its revenue from the sales of alcohol. The Pulse nightclub was therefore a “gun free zone,” and the shooter ignored that little part of Florida law on his way to commit other, multiple, violations of state and federal laws. Why, it’s almost as if criminals live outside the law and chose to ignore them.”
See in my mind this is actually a reasonable law one of the few places were experience shows it actually is a reasonable safety measure. Drunk people and loaded weapons are a toxic combination in which one is just asking for trouble. Just talk to police officers who regular have to deal with domestic issues how much they hate dealing with it.
I just think off all the stories of shooting in bars and nightclubs and how many deaths occurred over the years in and around them. I would need to look into the number but I would bet a law like this prevents at lest a few incidents per year. Now if mass shooting like this were to become more common in places that server booze, you would be right. The gun free zone safety provided by drunken rage attacks would be a lot smaller safety issue than protecting against terrorist attacks.
This is what what everyone is missing. This is a complete change in attack profile that is dangerous because it is such a smarter tactic. Before it has been about attacking high profile target aka symbols but those the police can target to protect reasonably well. However there are 1000’s if not 10,000’s of soft targets like this around the U.S. and police just can’t protect them all. If your goal is body count then a gun free zone like this is a smart target to cause terror. A church would actually be more dangerous for a terrorist to attack. I guarantee there is quite a few people packing in my church during a given service. He or she would have a few minute at most before someone started shooting back.
In the end this guy was smart. He picked a packed night club which in Florida I can’t think of a better target for a lone gunman to rack up a large body count. That is the problem with home grown terrorist they understand the culture and how things are better than any foreign and know how to cause damage and terror because they have local knowledge that is so important to plan effective attacks. Therefore a reasonable smart homegrown terrorist is way more dangerous than foreign born genus from the middle east.
I didn’t know any of the victims, fortunately. I know a fair number of people in the gay/arts community though, and some of them were friends with some of the victims.
Pulse is three miles from my house. I ate dinner a couple of blocks south of there the evening of the attack, and drive past it all of the time.
I also live two blocks from the Plaza Theater, where that nutcase killed Christina Grimmie.
It’s been a weird few days.
There was an armed guard – an actual off-duty police officer. Unfortunately, it was closing time, and he was out of position and only armed with a pistol. There were also two other on-duty cops nearby. They exchanged gunfire before he went into the club.
A key tenant of religion that enjoys freedom is tolerance. What evidence is there Islam is a religion and not just a tyrannical political ideology.
What is a ‘gay wedding’. What evidence do we have that God sanctions a union between two people of the same sex as marriage?
I just now found out that one of my co-workers – and a good friend – lost a friend in the Pulse attack.
He’s French. From Paris.
He is very, VERY angry right now, and he’s not a quiet person in the first place.
There is no evidence, not only on our own culture but in every human culture. We have heard a lot about various ceremonies recognizing various same-sex relationships, but to my knowledge, every culture also has a wedding rite, and it is separate and distinct.
But here’s an important distinction: I believe very strongly that our Supreme Court should not have ruled that the sacred ceremony, as a prerequisite of civil status, must be extended to same-sex couples. But–and pay attention, please!
I do not want them dead.
And I do believe very strongly that every person should be free to establish a household with any person they want.
Live and let live–not live and make die.
As Milo Y points out, in at least 11 countries, gay people could be killed for who they are. “That is not ISIS; that is mainline Muslim culture.” So the argument about “extremists” vs. the peaceful majority, is spurious.
What evidence do we have that God exists?
Respecting religious beliefs is about respecting what people believe because they believe it, it doesn’t depend on evidence that what they believe is true.
That’s why the separation between what undergirds the Church (rules regulating an individual’s religious life) and State (the rules regulating an individual’s political and economic life) is so important. The former is not based on evidence, it can’t be proved or disproved in a human time frame – the latter, at least in theory, can and in fact should be.
I understand the argument that the US’ strengths are a function of its Judeo-Christian tradition and that giving other religious traditions similar weight can diminish these, but then perhaps one should to carve out a unique relationship between Jewish and Christian beliefs and the American State – basically make America a Judeo-Christian State – rather than the State being neutral to an individual’s religous beliefs in the private sphere as is the theory now. It seems a fraught approach.
That’s a little reassuring.
Still, exo-atmospheric is what? 30,000 ft, 60,000 ft. My point is a sophisticated guidance system isn’t a requirement, just the lift capability to get the device up high enough from a floating platform.
One city destroyed by a device smuggled in via shipping container is probably more likely.