By ann summers

The framing of that meme of “the worst act of mass shooting in US history” comes not only as an “act of terror and an act of hate” but also raises some other peripheral issues in the early hours of its occurrence. Profiling speech acts whether oral or textual focuses some of the terrorist’s message, even as the media message creates new elements that constitute the message.

 

The shooter made two sets of investigated inflammatory remarks to co-workers by the dead shooter related to terrorists in the past four years. These were inconclusive.

The specter of the shootings in San Bernadino also has the context of workplace issues of hate speech as well as the attempt to affiliate with international terror.

Complete 911 conversations between the shooter and authorities have yet to be released.

So pledges to Daesh like pledges to flags are more arbitrary than they are random. A reminder of course that they have intent, and opportunity whose causality is more than the sum of media effects.

The takeaway from this not unlike previous attacks is that a combination of factors, some rationalized to result in a psychotic action much like racism and homophobia are part of the ensemble, some mediated, some as reported by the shooter’s family, more unmediated, and not as some might want to claim, “stochastic”. They are institutionally aided in terms of gun access by a state-licensed, security officer as well as matters of collateral effect.

Access to weapons and other familial background relates also to very recent purchases by the shooter, but also open homophobic speech acts as well as domestic violence. A side note of course about FL gun laws is the George Zimmerman resale of the gun returned to him after killing Trayvon Martin.

A coincident incident in Santa Monica involved a threat to today’s Pride Parade in West Hollywood, CA, makes it clear that it is more than media effects in terms of finding causality in potential attacks on specific identity groups.

Federal and local law enforcement decided against canceling the annual parade, which went forward Sunday morning under tightened security. Investigators are now trying to piece together what happened but said they don’t believe their is any connection between the incident and the massacre at a gay bar in Orlando that killed 50 people overnight.

Early Sunday,  Santa Monica police received a call of a suspected prowler near Olympic Boulevard and 11th Street. Patrol officers responded and encountered an individual who told officers he was waiting for a friend, according to a law enforcement source familiar with details of the arrest. That led officers to inspect the car and find several weapons – including three rifles, one of them an “assault rifle” — and a lot of ammunition as well as tannerite, an ingredient that could be used to create a pipe bomb, said the source.

The car had Indiana plates, and the law enforcement source said the man arrested was white.

As GOP idiots have a history of public pledging in Orlando, a temporary ban of Muslim immigration would not have counterfactually prevented this and in fact in the Orlando shooter’s case it was more about his parents coming to the US during the Reagan administration.

While this event initially seems perhaps more literal than figurative here, it is clear that the antidemocratic homophobia shared by extremists covers a range of religious ideologies.

In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas pulls no punches as he compares how the Republican Party and Islamic radicals maintain similar worldviews and tactics. He also challenges the media, fellow progressives, and our elected officials to call the radical right on their jihadist tactics more forcefully for the good of our nation and safety of all citizens.

 

Fortunately folks are donating blood even as many bodies have yet to be removed.