Jihadism and Guns

Hillary Clinton [is shown] at a campaign rally in Cleveland, Ohio on June 12, 2016.

The worst massacre the U.S. has suffered since 9/11 was the fruit of a combination of jihadi ideology disseminated over the internet, and the permissive U.S. culture regarding arms. The combination of these two factors increases the sense of vulnerability in a country that makes huge investments in defense and maintains a dense network of intelligence agencies to track the planet in search of potential enemies, but is overwhelmed by a murderer who, at the moment, is considered to be a lone wolf because there is no evidence linking him to networks or cells.

The spread of jihadi ideology is very easy among the countries that believe in freedom of expression. In Europe, they have experienced various attacks while others have been avoided, but the security services know the extensive use the terrorists make of the internet. In this aspect, there is no difference in the risk taken on either side of the Atlantic.

But there are differences with respect to the gun culture. In the United States, you can kill dozens of people in seconds with assault rifles purchased in stores. Omar Mateen, the murderer of Orlando, did it with an AR-15, the rifle found in 3.7 million American homes. Before him, others had used the same type of weapon to commit massive crimes: Adam Lanza in 2012 caused 26 deaths at a school in Sandy Hook (Newtown), and terrorists in San Bernardino committed 14 murders in 2015. The popular assault rifle was also used to kill 12 people in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, and nine at [Umpqua Community College in Oregon] last year.

The Orlando crime added fuel to the fire of the debate over gun ownership. The action of a lone wolf is the most difficult to predict, as the security services know. This has not prevented Donald Trump from suggesting some relationship between the last terrorist act and Barack Obama, either for lack of intelligence, or because he has “something else in mind,” in the words of the paranoid Republican aspirant to the White House.

Obama has clearly linked the frequency of mass killings to the absence of laws that would prevent criminals from easily obtaining weapons. But there is no doubt that Trump is willing to use the 49 dead from Orlando during the election campaign, having defended for months both the ban on Muslims from entering the United States and the need for greater facilities dedicated to arms sales. In opposition to this, his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, wants to ban them.

An act of mass violence erupts at a crucial time in the United States. It is no longer just about the usual campaigns of the National Rifle Association for the sale of weapons for hunting animals and “local defense.” Now, the dangerous Donald Trump is trying to increasingly inflame the election campaign, diverting attention from the issues that this country should focus on, which include, among other things, limiting its vulnerabilities to terrorism.