MAYBE THIS TIME...MAYBE??

Have you ever played a silly game, like tossing playing cards into a hat with a friend and you keep missing the target? And you take a moment, grip the card carefully and exclaim, “OK, this time it goes in.” And then you flip it forward and it misses the mark. Then you say, “OK, THIS TIME!”

And you miss again.  All this is repeated again and again, until you finally make it.

I’ve been thinking about this scenario for the past 24 hours in relationship to the horror in Orlando and our national disgrace related to assault weapons.

Could it be that after so many heart-wrenching mass shootings, after so many funerals and so many ineffectual thoughts and prayers, we might finally actually get the card in the hat and actually do something constructive about the proliferation of assault weapons in our country?

For years, I’ve been saying to myself: OK, this time…this time we will finally take action to reduce the number of assault weapons in circulation.

I really thought after Sandy Hook, after all those kids were killed, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

I really thought after the Aurora shooting, after a massacre in such a general location as a movie theater, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

I thought after San Bernardino, after tragedy struck at an innocuous holiday party for a bunch of low level government bureaucrats, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

Could the massacre at Pulse in Orlando finally be the one?

I get it. The odds of meaningful gun reform are long. Really long.  But, here are a couple of things we may wish to consider.

·         People who steadfastly support the NRA are by their nature, fearful people. True, they fetishize guns and love the macho power of assault weapons, but at their heart, they are afraid. They fear the unknown and unseen madman who can strike at any moment, at any place.

·         At its core, the situation of Omar Mateen is terrifying on so many levels. He was on the FBI watch list, and yet cleared to buy an AR-15. He passed background checks to become a security guard. He lives in a country where he can purchase assault weapons with no problem whatsoever, but was denied purchase of body armor. He was not a member of ISIS, but apparently become radicalized because of a simple website.

Think about that for a second. If Omar Mateen can become a mass shooter, literally anyone can. He wasn’t some crazed loner, like the Aurora shooter, or some mental defect like the Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook shooters.  He was an angry man – apparently extremely homophobic - and easily walked among us.

And the FBI, questioned him in 2014 and didn’t have enough to stop him at all. 

·         And, he didn’t strike some military base or some meaningful target to further the goals of ISIS. He simply cloaked himself in the violent and nihilistic rhetoric of ISIS to carry out his personal homophobic rage on a gay nightclub. He simply exploited the idea of ISIS to vent his hatred of people completely disassociated with that terror group’s designs.

If law enforcement and our intelligence community couldn’t stop Mateen, they can’t stop anyone of similar intent. And if he could be radicalized by ISIS propaganda – really, only for the justification for mass murder against personal objects of disgust – then anyone can.

And so I come back to the idea that this time it might be different. I think Mateen represents a kind of watershed moment of clarity surrounding our feelings of safety and security.  I think many people - maybe enough people - are going to realize that NOTHING could have stopped him from doing what he did and NOTHING is going to stop others from committing similar acts of terror and hate on their own bete noires. And more importantly, many people – maybe enough people – are going to realize that in order to take back a certain level of safety and security we have to at least make it harder for these would-be mass murders to kill us in such great numbers.

Mateen was a literally a stew. A stew of rage, intent, outward normalcy, malleability, access and an assault weapon. There is only one ingredient society could realistically remove from this stew that would have saved lives on June 12 – the gun.

Maybe this time?