Orlando massacre screams of terror, guns and hate

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A man holds a sign in support of the victims of the terror attack at gay nightclub Pulse on June 12, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. | Getty Images

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Christopher Hanson was at the bar, ordering a drink, when he heard the gunfire and saw the bodies fall. It went on forever.

“It could have lasted a whole song,” he later said.

That is a startling way to measure time in a mass murder, in increments of music, but fitting. It is how mass murder announces itself. Children are reading in a classroom, families are watching a movie in a theater, couples are dancing in a nightclub, and in a flash of slaughter they are dead. It is an American song.

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Our thoughts today are swimming with images of horror from the shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Our hearts broke on Sunday for those who died and those who loved them. A sobbing mother on TV described how her son, who was among the 50 people killed, started the gay-straight alliance at his high school, and she begged us to “get along.”

We watched the rescue effort in Orlando, again on TV, and wished we were there to help. So many good people. So many acts of heroism. A young man ripped off his shirt to make tourniquets for another young man who had been shot at least three times, and then he hugged the wounded man tight to hold in the blood as an ambulance rushed them to a hospital.

We watched and read all day to learn about the killer, Omar Mateen, and we tried to resist the temptation — though understandable in our anger — to assign a motive too quickly or easily. But three intertwined explanations soon became undeniable: terror, guns and hate.

Mateen had come to the FBI’s attention years before because of inflammatory comments he made to co-workers. He also apparently made a call to 911 just before the attack in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS and mentioned the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

This is terror. At minimum, ISIS inspired Mateen from afar.

How our nation confronts the threat of terror remains the challenge. We can stand together against the likes of ISIS and its followers, as President Obama said Sunday, or we can tear each other down in our fear, as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would have us do. Trump wants to ban Muslims from entering the country and has called for police patrols of Muslim neighborhoods.

In the first hours after the Orlando massacre, when Trump had a chance to say any number of thoughtful things, he tweeted out a typically self-satisfied boast that many people had sent him “congrats” for being right.

Regarding the scourge of guns, let us just note here that Mateen used the assault rifle of choice among American mass murderers, an AR-15. The same gun was used to mow down first graders at Sandy Hook, slaughter Batman fans at a Colorado movie theater, and kill county workers at a party in San Bernardino.

Voices of sanity have been begging Congress for decades to ban assault weapons, which are of no use to hunters or elderly people defending their homes. They are designed to kill dozens of human beings as fast as possible. But much of Congress is owned by the National Rifle Association.

Congress is in session this week and could approve a ban on assault weapons, but it won’t, compounding its complicity in the slaughter in Orlando.

And then there is the simple fact of hate.

Mateen, his father said, was not motivated by religious fundamentalism, but by a hatred for gay people. He said his son had seen two men kissing in Miami recently and become enraged. ISIS despises gay people, as everybody knows, but intolerance in our own country is no import. Homegrown hate for homosexuals remains strong, even as legal barriers to equality fall.

Case in point: On Sunday, only hours after the Orlando massacre, police in California arrested a man armed with guns and explosives who was on his way to the gay pride parade in Los Angeles. He reportedly told police he was going there to do some “harm.”

Mass murder is an American tune. No other country is so constantly beset by such horror. Yet we do so little about it. We close our ears to the gunfire and the screams.

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