Will Orlando drive us from our ideological corners?
The immediate reactions on social media to the killings at Pulse, a popular gay dance club, etched a portrait of our national divisions, our mutual mistrust and our inclination to know what we think even when we lack all the facts.
Even before President Obama spoke Sunday afternoon, there were declarations of great certainty that he would attribute the massacre to guns and not “Islamism” — and would therefore feed support for Donald Trump.
At 12:43 p.m., he turned to his communications medium of choice and tweeted: Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance.
[...] it’s entirely true that those of us who have long believed that our scandalously lax national gun laws make sickening slaughters inevitable had predictable reactions of our own.
Congress has become complicit in these murders by its total, unconscionable deafening silence.
Why can we never include a reappraisal of our weapons laws as part of democracy’s arsenal of responses to terrorism and mass violence?
Why are those who tout themselves as being the toughest among us in calling out terrorism inspired by Islam so timid as soon as any plausible answer is labeled “gun control”?
Terrorism terrorizes advocates of gun control and supporters of gun rights alike.
[...] those on both sides of the gun issue will want to know why three FBI interviews with the killer, Omar Mateen, did not raise more alarms in light of evidence of his apparent terrorist sympathies.
We should despise what happened if our fellow citizens were gunned down by a man who was inspired by foreign terrorists.
[...] we should despise what happened if people had their lives snuffed out because of their sexual orientation.