This is an excellent piece from McClatchy, and lines us with what I already suspected. I don’t believe the Orlando shooter was a terrorist, but our national ADD makes us want easy answers to everything:
Focusing on extremist ideology as the driver of radicalization, rather than as the end result, is often misleading and even dangerous, according to experts who’ve studied the backgrounds of violent jihadists.
“It can make us less safe. It means that we’re missing a really important conversation about all the other drivers, and all the other complexities that we might be able to address,” saidQuintan Wiktorowicz, a former White House senior adviser on countering violent extremism who’s now a managing partner of Affinis Labs, a Virginia-based startup incubator whose projects include apps to combat radical messaging.
A reporter for The New York Times posted more than 150 numbered tweets related to the Islamic State angle; prominent Washington policy figures implored her to stop, given the many unknowns in the case. Cable news channels splashed Arizona Sen. John McCain’s statements that President Barack Obama was “directly responsible” for the Orlando killings because of his policies toward the Islamic State – with little discussion of the weaknesses of such a charge.
Obama himself initially alluded to “lone actors or small cells of terrorists,” though his rhetoric softened after Brennan’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Presidential candidates also chimed in – Hillary Clinton said she has no problem using the terms “radical jihadism or radical Islamism” when asked about Orlando, while Donald Trump used the attack to double down on his opposition to admitting Muslim refugees and to disparage American Muslims for failing to police their communities.
The extremism-focused discourse continued even after reports said Mateen had espoused support for Hezbollah, the Nusra Front and Islamic State – groups that don’t share the same sect or worldview, and that are at war with one another in Syria. That Mateen could say he supported them all showed that he had little real understanding of what the groups stand for.
“If you say you have six favorite colors, you don’t have a favorite color,” said the attorney in the Chattanooga case.
Wiktorowicz, who’s studied dozens of extremists over 20 years, said the roots of radicalization often lie in identity crises, being the victim of violence, or feeling disillusioned or marginalized. In many cases, perpetrators engage in behavior generally frowned upon in conservative communities – drinking, smoking, dating – and, in their shame, turned to extremist causes as “almost a form of redemption, a catharsis.”
“You don’t just take what a perpetrator says at face value,” Wiktorowicz said. “They may be driven to these horrific acts for a variety of reasons, but their forward-facing or public explanation is to tie it to something bigger than themselves, to give it meaning.”
My problem with the mentally-ill label is it is too often applied in a way that suggest we have no way to combat this; we will always have mentally-ill people in our society. It makes us even more afraid of mentally-ill people who are themselves more likely to be the target of violence than the general public.
Mateen was an unstable young man who grew up in a culture steeped in toxic masculinity and homophobia – he did not happen in a vacuum.
A positive first step would be to keep sick fucks from getting a couple of automatic weapons and enough ammo to gun down more than a hundred people. As the NRA likes to claim, they’d still be able to use their pickup trucks or bread machines or whatever, but I’d risk it.