Deja Vu: Orlando Was All So Predictable

Remember this blog? I barely did either, but today necessitates its use for, if nothing else, my sanity.

I love America. I truly, truly do. It, in a very real way, was my first love. I've been to 47 of her states; I served in her Army for 5 years. Every political stance I take is predicated on what I believe to be what's best for my country as a whole and not my wallet or some other self serving interest.

In lieu of yet another tragic mass shooting, this time at a gay night club in Orlando, it's time for me to yet again give me thoughts on another tragedy.

There is so much blame to go around. The shooter, obviously, first and foremost. ISIS, who apparently radicalized him and inspired him via the internet, is probably a close second. Homophobia is right up there. Guns themselves certainly have a place. This particular mass shooting, the worst one in America's dubious history of them, is probably a despicable concoction of domestic terrorism with foreign terrorist roots with a side of hate crime and potentially a mental health disorder as well.

All of these elements are worth analyzing, addressing and eliminating. Yet one of those elements to our country's gun violence epidemic is met with a collective shoulder shrug : guns themselves. It's painful to feel compelled to point out that guns are a huge part of the gun violence issue, but we've reached this point.

America makes up little less than 5% of the world's population but owns 31% of all of its mass shootings since the 1960s. We're a first world country with a third world crisis on steroids. But there never seems to be enough political will to tackle the gun portion of the gun violence issue. It's mind boggling.

How dismissive large segments of the population are to this issue is very much a cause of these tragedies. There's no panacea, but people dealing in the reality of the situation and mobilizing the political will to reform gun laws is absolutely a crucial step in curing this national health crisis and not being the best of the worst on this issue.

This is far from a cry to ban all guns and to rescind the 2nd Amendment. I do believe the Constitution guarantees the rights of individuals to own arms. I get the desire to own a firearm in order to help protect your family. (Though a midsize dog is a far better deterrent.) I also embrace the recreational activity of practicing one's marksmanship and hunting animals, especially when population control for the own animal's sake is necessary.

When i was six, I asked my parents for my own gun. They got me a BB gun and my dad spent a whole week training me on how to use it and how to respect it. He instilled in me a belief my BB Gun was no different that a AR-15. I treated it as such. I never shot towards a house or aimed my gun at a person. Why? It wasn't a toy. It was a weapon.

And that has been lost on people. While they can be used for sport and fun they're primary design, their origins are to kill people with ease. Period. End of story.

We let people own drones, but we don't let civilians own drones with hell-fire missiles and other military grade hardware attached to them. Yet we let people own de facto military grade weapons of war that can kill masses of people with ease. Can't we logically accept that civilians shouldn't own military grade drones and weapons?

The AR-15 is not all that different from an M4, what they issued to me to protect myself from the Taliban. To put it more bluntly, they gave me a slightly more jacked up AR-15 to kill the enemy. And the same gun fell into the hands of a known wife beating homophobic ISIS sympathizer. AR-15 and other powerful semi automatic weapons have also fallen into the hands of hateful racists, the deranged and domestic and foreign terrorists.

We're a country awash in private gun ownership and rarely do they protect the population from others with private guns. In a country of 300 million people and probably even more privately, legally owned guns, there's only 260 or so justifiable homicides a year. Thank goodness those people had their guns and protected themselves and loved ones from harm, but if the bad guys didn't have such easy access to those guns would the justifiable homicides have even been necessary in the first place? Oh, and about 11,200 gun homicides happen every year. Basic arithmetic and such.

I've heard a lot of people say that if people in that Orlando gay nightclub were packing heat that shooter wouldn't have killed nearly as many people. Let's just ignore how concerning it is some people feel compelled to have a gun on them at all times just to feel safe. Instead focus on the victim blaming. It's the exact same inexcusable action of blaming a rape victim. "Well, how much did she have to drink?" "Well, she was asking for it by what she was wearing." "Well, if he was wearing his holster maybe he wouldn't be dead right now."

America, I love you, but you've really let me, millions of others and, most of all, 50 precious Orlando lives down. It's not to say you're guilty. It is is to say you/we bare much of the responsibility. Drop the victim blaming, or saying it's a lack of prayer in schools, or that it's just foreign terrorism. Let's just collectively act like adults and admit it: semi-automatic rifles are far too powerful to be left in the hands of a civilian population that has a small minority of whack jobs and evil souls who do a large amount of damage with them. We're not safer because of them. Quite clearly the opposite is, and has been, true.

Ireland: The People of Have Spoken!

While Ireland is certainly not the first country to legalize same-sex marriage, their acknowledging of gay equality in the eyes of the law is nothing short of a monumental historic achievement.

For the first time in human history, same-sex marriage was legalized by popular vote. It wasn't decided by a few dozen representatives in a parliamentary chamber. It was made law of the land by people taking to the streets and making their voices heard at the ballot, passing the measure by a 62% to 38% margin, an overwhelming victory.

Another reason why this is so consequential is because Ireland is a country with much of its history and identity deeply rooted in Catholicism. How much this referendum passing is a reflection of an increasingly marginalized Catholic church or the evolution and reform it's undergoing can't be definitively said. My guess though, it's a lot of both.

If you would have asked me a year ago if Ireland would have legalized same-sex marriage through any means, I would have told you "definitely no." After all, Ireland recently made divorce legal by popular referendum by a narrow margin in the mid 90s. But change is, and has been, in the air for some time

And that change is far from being limited to just Europe. Since 2003, after Massachusetts became the first, 37 states have made same-sex marriage legal. If the prevailing winds continue to hold -- and all signs point to that being the case -- it seems inevitable that gay marriage will be federally legalized and recognized.

It's long overdue. I've heard about every argument under the sun for and against . The arguments against just don't hold up to logic, and, I would argue morality, itself.

Let's go with the logic side of the house first: If being gay was a choice (and why that factors into the equation anyways is beyond me), who would choose to be ostracized or completely disowned by the family they love? Worse yet, coming out in some countries and cultures equates to certain death, violent at that. Again I ask you, who would choose that?

Over a thousand species have been documented to exhibit homosexual behavior, including many of our closest ancestral cousins. The evidence is and has been overwhelming for some time. I mean, can a gay buffalo really be living in sin?

While it's certainly true that we choose our sexual behavior, we have no say in our biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. For example, I grew up in the church and went to Protestant Christian schooling up until my junior year of high school. We were conditioned to treat abstinence like a badge of honor. Most of us, at least publicly, practiced what we were preached. Did us not having sex make us asexual? Nope. I assure you, my circle of friends and I were very much heterosexual. We just chose to behave like asexuals. See the difference?

So what government or society has any right whatsoever to tell two consenting adults how to behave sexually? It's not just their choice. It's their inherent right.

I'm very much on the far end of the heterosexual spectrum. I don't have fantasies about men. I don't have sexual dreams about them. I've never been aroused by them. There would be absolutely nothing wrong with that if I did experience those things, but the point is this: I had absolutely no say in my heterosexuality, at all, period.

I mean, did any person hit puberty go "Well, on one hand, we have penises. On the other, we have breasts. I better weigh these two on the proverbial scale and decide now, for forever and always, which one I'm attracted to"? I know I didn't. Breasts were just always fantastic. It was innate, hardwired into me. Since the heteros among us didn't choose to be straight, logic only dictates homosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals and transgendered had absolutely no say either.

Now for the morality side of the argument: Let's say you're a Protestant Christian man who has been partnered with a women for 20 years. You've built an entire life with this person, been to hell and back. She's your everything, your soul mate. Then one day on your way to work, you get broadsided by a pick-up truck. You're in the hospital, alive but in serious condition. All you want to do is see your partner.

The sad thing is, you can't. In this scenario, your partner you built a life with is Catholic and Protestant-Catholic marriages are illegal in your state/country. She is not "family" according to the law; she has no visitation rights.

How unspeakably cruel? Hey, you chose to be Protestant.

Why people try to stop same-sex couples from adopting children baffles me. For starters, a child raised by the state, in orphanages or foster homes their whole lives, tend to not fair as well as children raised by two devoted parents, regardless of the parents' sexual orientation. To cut same-sex couples off from such a noble undertaking not only deprives them of the right to pursue their happiness and life's fulfillment, it deprives those children of much, much more.

Doesn't seem to make sense, does it? Pure madness. But scenarios like this one have played out for same-sex couples countless times over the course of human history. It's time we put a stop to that.

Love is powerful and massive. Why societies continue to try to relegate it to narrow confines that don't exist in reality is nothing short of oppressive. The majority of Irish people have recognized that. Their gay population and people as a whole are now better off for it.

I just look forward to the day my friends in my home state of Ohio and across the nation I served and love with a passion can all marry the person they love. It's time for America to be become even more American. In the mean time, congratulations to the people of Ireland! You've done the world a great service.