In the wake of yet another bizarre and uniquely American mass shooting, we once again we find ourselves bombarded by copypasta Facebook rants and half-literate pleas by experts on television.
Depending on your preferred source for news and deep thinking, what happened in Orlando proves that: 1. We need less guns 2. We need far more guns 3. Foreign Muslims are going to kill us all 4. American-born males are the greatest threat to our nation 4. Something about abortion legislation and double standards 5. Donald Trump would be a swell president.
Of course, the most important takeaway from this tragedy is that it was a heinous act of hate -- dare we say, terrorism? -- which shows that the homeland is still vulnerable and requires more money for security.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind our readers that, in all likelihood, they will most likely die from heart disease. Or maybe in a car accident. A few might perish from self-inflicted gunshot wounds or diabetes. But very, very few reading this sentence right now -- we'd wager zero percent, actually -- will die from anything that could be even vaguely connected to "terrorism," that strange, almost meaningless abstract concept which we continue to spend so much money "fighting," year after year.
In case you didn't read the memo that the NSA illegally intercepted, we live in a giant, miserable panopticon security state that feeds on irrational fear.
We don't need more "security," 5.1 million Americans already have security clearances; that's more people than the entire population of Norway. And please, save your laments about "if only the FBI did this" and yadda yadda -- good grief, according to Human Rights Watch, U.S. government organizations are "directly involved" in most high-profile terror plots on U.S. soil.
Even the TSA, despite being up to its eyeballs in "anti-terror" funding, fails 95 percent of airport security tests.
It's security theater, my friends. And the tickets are pricey.
Type strange messages on Facebook until your fingers turn blue about how Orlando shows __________. That is your constitutional right. But for Pete's sake, stop buying into this insane "domestic terrorism" narrative. Is the boring vanilla terrorism not scary enough now? Or is it because people are beginning to realize that their student debt will kill them, and not "the terrorists"?
If 9/11 showed us anything, it's that rushed and reactionary legislation in the wake of a tragedy never ends well. And that's the understatement of the millennium.