Rare News Desk
The Islamic State, it now appears, wasn’t party to the recent mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Though killer Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS during a 911 call, investigators are now “becoming increasingly convinced that the motive for this attack had very little — or maybe nothing — to do with ISIS,” according to reporting by NPR. The profile of Mateen that’s emerging is one of a standard mass shooter, with all the anger issues and troubled mental history that accompany it.
Videos by Rare
But you know Rahm Emanuel’s old saying. The Internet has political commentators to feed and they’re damned if they’re going to let this killing slide before they shoehorn their agendas into it. Thus did we find Max Boot, the Commentary writer, splaying the entire neoconservative id through the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal last weekend. Boot’s piece is a list of recommendations to prevent the next Orlando. It borrows from the most paranoid corners of right and left, and balls them up into a dark and dystopian vision for America’s future.
Let’s run through some of his points. First, this:
There is no reason why the American public should be able to purchase military-style semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15, which has become a favorite of mass shooters. As retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, one of the leaders of a new veterans’ group for gun control, notes, the purpose of the AR-15 is to kill a great many people as quickly as possible. It is also important to ban high-capacity magazines, which allow a killer to keep killing without reloading.
There is, actually, a fine reason why the American public should be able to purchase AR-15s and high-capacity magazines: the Bill of Rights protects their bearing of arms, a right that’s been interpreted as applying at the individual level by all serious constitutional historians and the Supreme Court in the Heller case. There’s an old jape that the right’s ideal constitution contains only the Second Amendment; for some conservatives, apparently even that gets whited out.
Even if bans on assault weapons and high capacity magazines aren’t politically possible, Congress should, at a minimum, prevent suspects on terrorism watch lists from purchasing firearms legally—something that they were able to do 223 times in 2015, according to the Government Accountability Office. (Only one transaction in 10 was denied.)
There’s no evidence any of those purchases were used in an attempted terrorist attack. There is, however, plenty of evidence that thousands of names on the watch list have no connection whatsoever to wrongdoing. Infants are on the list. So, too, was civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis. Boot would deny Lewis the means to protect his family because he’d gone through all the scrutiny of an arbitrary finger-point from the government. Not on the list: Omar Mateen, who purchased his firearms after he was officially removed from it in 2014.
By all means, let’s follow the example of Israel and have more security guards and more metal detectors at the entrances of clubs and malls. But a determined attacker will still get through.
Until Mateen started firing inside Pulse, there had never been a terrorist attack on a nightclub in America, and there still hasn’t been a terrorist attack on a mall in America. Boot is either confusing Kenya with the United States, or 24 with reality. And what a bleak proposal: stripping your belt to enter a Filene’s, emptying your pockets to enjoy a drink at a club (talk about a cover charge). Israel can be forgiven these infringements, given the terrorist threat that exists inside its borders, but America sits an ocean and a continent away from any of that. Even Boot admits this proposal won’t work, so why does he endorse it anyway?
Other controversial counterterrorism programs need to be continued or revived. After 9/11, the New York Police Department sent plainclothes detectives into mosques and Muslim neighborhoods to try to spot early signs of radicalization.
This was former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s so-called Demographics Unit, which Ted Cruz has also called to be revived. The unit won exactly one conviction: two Keystone Kop terrorists who were accused of attempting to bomb a subway station, in a case that raised serious question of police entrapment. There’s a reason veteran police chief Bill Bratton shuttered the Demographics Unit: as he said, it “never developed one piece of actionable intelligence.”
The USA Freedom Act, passed by Congress in 2015, ended the NSA’s collection of “metadata,” which reveals the phone numbers that everyone dials but not the content of calls. This wasn’t a crippling change, but it suggests that we are returning to a pre-9/11 mind-set.
There’s no evidence that this “pre-9/11 mindset” NSA has been saddled from preventing a single terrorist attack. No less a spy apologist than former NSA director Michael Hayden has mocked the USA Freedom Act as watered-down.
Even if these reforms weren’t ineffective, we’re still left with a dark vision of an America premised not on the rule of law and constitutional rights, but on the illusion of absolute public safety, and thus on the elastic government power needed to prevent tragedies from ever happening. One need not draw upon Ben Franklin to understand why this is dangerous.
As we sort through the debris at Pulse, we should remember that it’s not just Donald Trump who wants to capitalize on this tragedy. His neoconservative critics do, too; their solutions differ in direction, not in origin.
