Before any discussion of Orlando can take place, I must first express limitless sorrow for the people who lost their lives during the night of Saturday, June 11, 2016. May they rest in peace. May their loved ones find comfort and solace. May the injured return to full health soon. May the soul of the perpetrator rot in hell for all eternity.
The tragedy in Orlando hits so many chords for so many people. For the leftists who hate guns, it reinforces their desire to ban guns, outlaw gun ownership, and falsely paint the vast majority of law-abiding gun owners as dangerous radicals. It is sadly predictable that they call for more meaningless gun control laws and willfully ignore the fact that the perpetrator of the horrific act in Orlando was an Islamic terrorist waging jihad.
Yes, he apparently was a native-born American citizen. That just shows that the sickness known as radical Islamic jihad can strike even native-born Americans. Yes, he apparently hated gays. This leads me to call upon leading Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious authorities to re-think their condemnation of homosexuality. As Christian theologian Mark Achtemeier has written in his book The Bible’s YES to Same-Sex Marriage: An Evangelical’s Change of Heart, there is a compelling case for same-sex marriage in the Christian tradition and I urge thoughtful Christians of all political persuasions to review this book. I don’t believe that Jesus would have supported condemnation of gays, and in any event the state has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults based on religious teachings.
As usual, the predictable suspects – President Obama, Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety, as well as various Democrats large and small – have renewed their calls for more gun control laws in the wake of this horrible incident.
There’s just one problem. GUN CONTROL DOESN’T WORK. If it did, Omar Mateen would not have had a handgun and a common modern sporting rifle available to murder his victims. An individual with that much rage and hatred in his heart would have found other means to murder his victims. Let’s just remember Timothy McVeigh, who murdered three times as many with a fertilizer bomb.
While Omar Mir Seddique Mateen may have been born in America – just like I was – he apparently chose Islam as his religion. While he may have bought his guns legally, his motives in buying that common modern sporting rifle were not self-defense, nor target shooting, nor hunting, nor collecting. No, his motive was murder. As such, I have no doubt he would have been able to purchase the tool to murder and maim over 100 people with or without having to pass a background check. Clearly, none of the tens of thousands of gun control laws already on the books prevented this tragedy.
Omar Mateen was an adherent of a religion – a major religion with over a billion followers – that condemns the homosexual lifestyle and homosexuals in no uncertain terms. They openly delight in throwing gays off tall buildings then finishing the job with stones. In Iran gays are executed by hanging. (And the #BadIranDeal brokered by Democrats merely empowers the theocracy that allows this.)
As the Wall Street Journal has written this morning:
“The distressing truth is that no amount of domestic vigilance can stop every ISIS-inspired act of terror. That’s why the only real solution is to destroy Islamic State in its havens abroad so young Muslims around the world won’t see it as the vanguard of the future.
Part of President Obama’s legacy will be that Islamic State grew so dangerous on his watch, prospering in the political vacuum that was created when he chose to withdraw from Iraq and then do little in Syria. The job of the next President will be to repair the damage done by those two historic mistakes.”
Let us not forget that the foreign policy architect of those two historic mistakes was none other than former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. In all likelihood, the problem of ISIS would only grow worse under a Clinton Administration.
Finally, this incident just reinforces that fact that self-defense is an unalienable right, of which the right to keep and bear arms is but a corollary. The Second Amendment affirms this right, it does not grant it.
As the world grows more dangerous due to the Left’s inexplicable desire to “coexist” with people who want to kill us, it becomes more and more evident that further infringing the right to keep and bear arms not only puts people more in harm’s way, it actively empowers the enemies among us who wish to do us harm.
By Richard D. Turnquist
June 13, 2016
