Orlando: A study in complexity and rigid assumptions

The massacre in an Orlando gay club has sparked quite a bit of emotion — mourning, anger, bewilderment, all of which is appropriate.

It’s sparked debate — over terrorism, over homophobia, Islam and Islamaphobia, over war and crime and guns.

And it’s caused a lot of us to jump to conclusions.

Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016

The Orlando shooting — perpetrated by an American-born Muslim who claimed a connection to ISIS — is a classic case of Islamic terrorism. Or it’s a hate crime against the LGBTQ+ community. Or it was about religious extremism. Or it was an action perpetrated by a mentally ill individual. Or it was caused by easy access to guns.

The dead, some say, do not care, their lives ended, taken from them. What we call it shouldn’t matter, you’ll here and so on.

I’ve engaged in some of these debates, made my own claims, offered my own assumptions — because, for most of us, all we can offer is an assumption, partially informed opinions crafted from afar, from listening to TV talking heads and radio wonks, from what they read in even the better newspapers and on the more accurate news sites.

My takes, at first, was that this was a hate crime, and I still believe that. And I downplayed the notion that this was terrorism because there were no obvious operational ties or directly political ends. I still believe this is different than Paris, but it is a form of terrorism — perpetrated by what is often described as the lone wolf terrorist. In that, it is like the Fort Hood and San Bernadino shootings — acts conducted by individuals in sympathy with other movements.

But it’s also similar to the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook shootings.

Basically, I can see merit in all of the narratives, within reason, and find myself more concerned with the calcification of public opinion on the massacre that has been taking place. There is far too much certainty out there — whether it’s Donald Trump patting himself on his back or gun control and gun rights advocates offering the same arguments they’ve been offering.

This piece in The New York Times is probably the smartest piece I’ve read — reminding us, as it does, that it is impossible ultimately to fully grasp an individual’s motivations when they commit heinous crimes like this. Even the shooter may not be clear about the why.

“Efforts to divine a motivation speak to something deeper than politics,” Max Fisher writes, “a desire to make sense of seemingly senseless violence.”

Offering an explanation — whether it is radical Islam or mental illness or homophobia or gun access — is also a way of trying to comfort ourselves by asserting false clarity over something that is ultimately unknowable: the chain of personal experiences and decisions that led this man to murder 49 people in Orlando.

“There is a strong impulse, particularly in America, to ‘do something’ after a tragedy like this,” said Will McCants, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “If we know why the tragedy happened, we’ll know what to do.”

In truth, Mr. McCants said, terrorist attacks have “a confluence of causes, and because we’re dealing with the human mind and the interplay of complex social and political factors, it’s difficult to separate the crucial from the incidental.”

Ultimately, Fisher writes, an attack like Orlando or San Bernadino “is a deeply personal decision that people make for reasons that are almost entirely individual, and which may or may not even be political.”

“How individuals get to this point is really complex, and if we try to boil it down to one factor we’re going to miss a lot of that complexity,” said Paul Gill, a lecturer at University College London who studies terrorism. “And it’s in that complexity that we’re going to really understand what happened.”

This reveals a difficult truth. External factors such as ideology and access to guns, though important, cannot fully explain why someone decides to lash out. Even if every detail of Mr. Mateen’s life were ultimately revealed, it would still not fully answer that most crucial question. By shoehorning these attacks into familiar narratives — gun violence, homophobia, jihadism — we can make sense of them, helping us to grieve, and also to process the danger and how to respond to it. Even more, it allows us to validate a pre-existing worldview or belief whose truth we feel has gone unacknowledged.

But because no single narrative is ever sufficient, the debate is always unsettled — and always raging.

Raging is an appropriate word, I think. It truly captures the public discourse of the last few days and underscores its mostly emotional — as opposed to rational — nature.

In the end, we will need to device policies to address this — including more rational gun laws, better mental health coverage, and more public efforts at inclusion — while also acknowledging that attacks may still occur, regardless of what we put in place. Send me an e-mail.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet