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Orlando
There have been so many "sensitive" responses to the nightclub massacre in Orlando, that I should like to add an insensitive one, for the sake of variety. I note that the pundits -- and every amateur politician is a talking head these days -- divide roughly along party lines on whether the shooter was an Islamic fanatic, or a generic madman. This strikes me as a "both/and" proposition, rather than an "either/or".
This is a key point. Whether or not the Orlando killer was truly bipolar (he grew up in an Afghani household, where behaviour that seems insane in the West is expected), the diagnosably dangerous follow fads -- identifying as Napolean one decade, raped by aliens another, killing at the order of angels or now picking up the gauntlet of jihad. And in terms of jihad, both Al Qaeda and ISIS have been sending orders through the internet to "kill the unbelievers where you live." Muslim jihad has always made use of the unbalanced as well as of the trained warrior to spread terror and speed conquest. The current age is no different, for all that to us living in it it's modernity.
Yes, Florida gun laws seem a bit lax, perhaps they should be tightened. But then I held this opinion before the massacre, keeping it to myself only because it was none of my business. Perhaps I am over-Canadian, for I tend to think the open sale of battlefield weapons such as the semi-automatic assault rifle this Omar Mateen was carrying, a little over-the-top. I presume that, "even in America," the citizen’s right to bear arms does not extend to, say, nuclear weapons. Reasonable men might decide upon some reasonable limits; but between the current spokesmen for the respective political parties, I do not detect much reasonable manliness; only a propensity to grandstanding.

..."Let us be clear," as the Obama loves to say, in his station as talking-head-in-chief. Grand displays of public grieving are invariably fraudulent. Those who knew none of the victims are faking it. Those who encourage them are morally disordered.

As a customary principle of politics, whether "electoral" or "appointive," I think it unwise to adjust legislation, or offer to adjust it, in response to behaviour by the criminally insane. This confers too much power on them. Verily, it is a mark of our present social condition that "reforms" are guided more and more by the hardest and strangest cases. (Dare I mention the word, "trans"? Was there really a continuing national crisis in the designation of toilet facilities?)

...Which points again to the deeper "problematic" (one tires of the misuse of this word) in politics as practised today. We not only legislate in response to the transient behaviour of the criminally insane. Worse, our legislators, though arguably sane to start with, get in the habit of indulging insanity, even within themselves.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2016-06-14
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=459168