The Willingness to Die for a Cause

Gary North - June 14, 2016

Here is the story that no news agency ran over the weekend:

Oman Mateen, a 29-year old American citizen born in New York, shot and killed 49 party-goers at a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.

A few hours before the attack, Mateen had called 9-11 and had declared his allegiance to ISIS, the Islamic terrorist organization. ISIS representatives praised the shooting within hours.

Mateen had purchased the weapons legally. He had been employed since 2007 by a security firm that is a major contractor for the Department of Homeland Security. He had passed all background checks.

The FBI had interviewed him three times, in 2013 and 2014, but had found nothing justifying his arrest.

Such a story would have offset the following knee-jerk reactions:

1. We need tougher gun control laws. (The guy was investigated twice by the FBI. They found nothing legally objectionable. What kind of gun control laws do the critics have in mind?)

2. We need an immediate temporary freeze on Muslim immigration. (He was a natural-born American citizen. How temporary is "temporary"?)

3. Allowing individuals to carry concealed handguns to defend themselves would solve nothing. (There are 49 dead people and 53 wounded who were unarmed in a legally mandated gun-free zone.)

4. We need to take out ISIS. (How?)

The knee-jerk responses were already all over the Web within a couple of hours.

We also did not hear this response.

A law enforcement official said this: "In a free society, there is no institutional remedy for a man who is willing to die for a cause. Even if a society were to adopt pre-crime fighting techniques, this sort of event is inescapable. The willingness to die is the deal-closer. It's then a question of who is most willing to die, who is armed, and who can shoot straighter, faster."

That was the answer I was trained to provide by Jeff Cooper at Gunsite in 1980: "Two to the chest, one to the head, in three seconds." But this is not an answer acceptable to liberals.

The night before, a Christian young woman singer was shot dead by a murderer, who then killed himself. This also happened in Orlando. No one knows why the murderer did it. It happened in a legally mandated gun-free zone.

Gun control laws cannot control such actions. The willingness to die for a cause is the deal-closer.

Political liberals cannot understand this. Why not? Because they don't believe in causes worth dying for. They believe only in causes worth voting for. They believe in salvation by politics. But salvation by politics has always been a myth. It was the great myth of classical Greece. The polis was divine, in their view. Man is a political animal, in their view. But man isn't an animal. Animals are not in need of salvation. Second, salvation is not by politics. Put differently, Darwin was wrong, and Plato was wrong. (On Plato, see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume I.)

The massacre in Orlando elicited the standard knee-jerk reactions. They are all political. But politics cannot solve the problem of assassination. Another piece of legislation cannot solve it. Those whose faith is in political salvation have their faith tested by actions like these.

There will be lots more tests like these.

The party-goers were disarmed by law in that bar: alcohol was served. Liberals' legislation did that. The liberals' solution is simple: make the whole country one gigantic gun-free zone.

I have a two-word response: Omar Mateen.