The Orlando jihad vs Gun Control

Last week, a US born jihadist, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando. He called TV stations and the police to pledge his allegiance to ISIS.

All of the headlines are about mass shootings, not the fact that they guy was a Muslim who hated gays. They words Muslim, Islamic, or terrorism are absent. The identify of the shooter is buried in the article, while the focus is on guns.   Let's compare this to when the young white guy (Dylan Roof) with confederate flags (who turned out to be a leftist), shot up a black church. What was the conversation about? Everyone wanted to ban confederate flags.

The media and their Democrat allies are desperate to spin this into a story of anything besides Islamic jihad. There is stories on guns, or the AG, but not ONE story on the mosque he attended?! Not ONE story about how many gays have been killed in Iraq by ISIS. Their execution of choice is throw them off the top of a tall building.   Of course this is the clash that the left doesn't want. They apologize for Muslims though they kill gays, yet the demonize Christians whose chief complain is against gays marrying. They can't pick sides, so they ignore the religious element and attack the guns.

 I find it interesting that in the period from the end of WWII to the early 1980s there was only one major mass shooting, despite the wide availability of semi automatic rifles. While I am not opposed to any gun control at all if it would be effective, I don't the think the availability of guns is the driver of these mass killings. There are too many flaws in the theory.  Why is Switzerland have a high rate of gun ownership but low crime? Why does Idaho have low gun crime despite high levels of gun ownership and why does Illinois have high levels of gun crime despite strict gun laws? France and Belgium have strict gun laws yet still were victims of mass killings. Why didn't  the laws stop them?


Mass Murderers switch to other weapons Boston Marathon was a pressure cooker, Belgium airport was a bomb, Oklahoma city was fertilizer. A knife welding man killed 29 in China in 2014. Someone killed 6 with a knife in Chicago earlier this year. In Chiyoda in 2008 a guy drove his car into a crowd of people, got out and started stabbing people. Mostly in the US, people have used guns because they are available, but in the absence of guns, people will switch to other weapons if they want to kill. There are also would be negative side effects from the banning of all guns, e.g., the US has a very low rate of home invasion at night, compared to other countries.


The left often cites statistics of "gun deaths" or "gun crimes." Logic would say to look at overall crime, but this is spin. They ignore that criminals switch to other weapons while law abiding citizens are defenseless.  Do they not consider that low burglary rate is due to gun ownership levels? Statistics like "gun deaths" also include suicide and people intent on suicide find a way.


If we don't find the real causes, we will be playing wack-a-mole banning one thing after another as murderers switch to other weapons. First we will ban AR-15s, then other black guns, then pressure cookers, then swords, then gasoline, etc.