A Curious Case
A series of socially-relevant online columns
We sit in the aftermath of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history with the absolute massacre at the Pulse nightclub last night, that killed 50. This comes barely a day after a lone gunmen murdered YouTuber and former “The Voice” contestant Christina Grimmie, and all we can talk about is the race and background of these evil men, rather than the important issues that allowed for these atrocities to happen.
America has a gun problem. There’s no denying that. President Obama described in an interview earlier this month that it’s almost impossible to regulate guns the same way we regulate cars, as any and all attempts to understand the root causes of gun violence are perceived as taking away people’s guns. According to the president, under the current gun laws, he couldn’t even stop an ISIL sympathiser from walking into a gun shop and purchasing firearms to his heart’s content.
And that flimsy legislature yields results. America has more firearms per capita than any other nation in he world, and we are a world leader in firearm deaths.
We also have a profound problem with racism, homophobia, transphobia, and basically anything discriminatory you can imagine. This has become no more apparent than the rise of Donald Trump, who has called for a mass exodus of Islamic and Mexican people from his country, not that he’ll ever follow through on his promises.
America needs to face some ugly truths. We are one of the most dangerous countries to live in, despite being the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. In some ways, we are a world leader in social equality, but in other ways, we still have a very long ways to learn.
There has been a large pushback on being “politically correct,” and I get why some people dig this. Our society is overly sensitive in some ways. Heck, if I misplace a comma in this article, or write something somebody doesn’t agree with, some people will throw a fit. However, there is a delineation between catering to small stuff that doesn’t mattered (misplaced comma, understandable human errors/mistakes) and being outright disrespectful, and I really don’t think that the anti-LGBT community fully understands the way they are affecting people.
I think a lot of these bigots don’t view LGBT people as fully fleshed out human beings, they just boil the whole group into a set of traits they don’t agree with– into something they can easily attack without remorse. Chances are, Omar S. Mateen, the Orlando shooter, either had never held a longstanding friendship with a gay person or possessed no form of morality or sentimentality, because what he did (kill 50 people in cold blood), is just not something a normal person could ever do, if he had fully understood the atrocities he was committing.
The thing with identities is that they’re easy to attack. Identities, labels, they’re not people. What America is constantly forgetting is that LGBT people are not just their labels. They are fully functioning people, with hopes and dreams, just like you, and when you shun them, when you fight for legislature that pretends that they don’t exist, and when you commit an act of violence against, them, you hurt them.
You’re not just attacking some label or set of ideas, you’re hurting real people in real-time.
Quite frankly, America needs their guns taken away. If we can’t even understand that words hurt people, why should we be trusted with firearms?
Mitchell Chapman 