Huston: The Orlando Mass Murder
by TOM HUSTON
The candidates each sent out a fund-raising email on Monday and the difference in emphasis was stark:
Hillary: “We cannot demonize Muslim people.”
Trump: “We are going to make America safe again.”
ISIS EMPHASIZES soft targets and encourages “lone wolf” (falsely identified as “self-radicalized”) or small units, easy to organize and hard to detect operations. This is a uniquely difficult profile for the security services to contend with.
Electronic surveillance of international communications is less likely to pick up valuable intelligence. Informant coverage, which was the best source of intelligence against KKK violence in the late1960s, doesn’t work if there is no identifiable group to infiltrate. The best source of information is the most troublesome: local mosques. Lots of First Amendment and political correctness problems there.
The U.S. has the most vulnerable, high-value targets open to small-unit ISIS operations of any nation in the world. Shotguns, revolvers and hunting knives will do the trick. If you can’t eliminate the weapons, perhaps you need to think about eliminating the terrorists.
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THE RESPONSE OF THE LEFT to terrorist shootings is always to demand more gun control — and underpinning this demand is the implicit assumption that it is possible to draft a law that would pass constitutional muster that would keep guns out of the hands of determined terrorists.
No minimally intelligent person could actually believe such a thing, so the only logical conclusion is that the Left’s demand for more gun control in the wake of the San Bernardino and Orlando massacres is purely opportunistic.
Liberals seize upon terrorist killings to advance their gun-control passions knowing full well that they have no legislative proposals that would prevent acts of Islamic terrorism involving the use of firearms. By legislation they might succeed in changing the mix of weapons used (although even that is doubtful in light of the experience of the Clinton-era ban on “assault” weapons), but otherwise their anti-gun initiatives would have little effect.
The big problem with the anti-gun rhetoric of Obama and Clinton then is that it diverts attention from the real issue, which is how do you stop the people who are willing to pull the trigger on whatever weapon they can get their hands on?
Tom Charles Huston, A.B., J.D., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review, served as an officer in the United States Army assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is the author of “The Inevitability of an Attack Here.”
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