“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel: The Orlando massacre’s moral imperative: Don’t propagate hate
The Orlando massacre will haunt us for a long time. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history — 49 dead and 53 wounded — took place at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, during Pride Month. The perpetrator, Omar Mateen, was an American, born in New York to Afghan parents. A security guard, he was, according to his ex-wife, an angry and sometimes violent man. He bizarrely called 911 in the midst of his rampage to announce his allegiance to the Islamic State, yet his father said, “This had nothing to do with religion,” saying that his son was outraged by the sight of gay men kissing on the street. It was, as President Obama stated, “an act of terror and an act of hate.” [..]
The Orlando massacre generates fear, rage and frustration. Rather than simply striking out and cracking down, we need to come together. Surely we should ban weapons of war from our communities, even while knowing that will not end the threat. Surely we’d be wise to reassess our course in the Middle East, to bring the endless wars without victory to an end, even while knowing that terrorists — both homegrown and foreign — will not suddenly disappear.
Eugene Robinson: Assault weapons must be banned in America
The only reasonable response to the massacre in Orlando is to ban the sale of military-style assault weapons. All else, I’m afraid, is just noise.
If this ensconces me in an ideological corner, I’m fine with that. If it insults the Constitution, so be it — any other response would do far greater harm to our freedoms. Or we could argue for a while and then do nothing. We’ve tried that course of action many times, and it doesn’t work. [..]
The Second Amendment enshrines the right to keep and bear arms, and the Supreme Court has ruled that this is an individual right, not a collective one. The court has made clear, however, that this does not preclude reasonable gun control measures. Not all weapons must be considered suitable for private hands. [..]
No hunter needs an AR-15 to bring down a deer. None of us needs such a weapon to defend our families against intruders. And for those who believe assault rifles offer protection against a hypothetical tyrannical government — or who perhaps consider the present government tyrannical — I have sobering news: If and when the black helicopters come, they will be accompanied by tanks.
Why focus exclusively on the guns? Because other proposed solutions would violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution — and surely wouldn’t work anyway.
Richard North Patterson: From Golden Boy To Fool’s Gold: The Decline Of Paul Ryan
It is strange to see Paul Ryan looking like the subject of a hostage video.
This, of course, is the effect of being confronted by reporters with the existence of Donald Trump. But Ryan became a prisoner long ago — first, of the rigidity of his ideas; second, of his party’s fratricide and incoherence. Beneath the narcissistic railings of a carnival barker Ryan surely hears the premonitory echoes of his own political demise. [..]
Politics does not seem to have changed his essence. He sleeps in his office, goes home to his family in Wisconsin as soon and often as he can. His pursuits are the same — hunting and fishing — and so are his friends from youth. By all appearances, he is as grounded as politics allows. And, more than his Republican peers, he has a passion for ideas.
But here, for many, lies the problem — those ideas, too, are rooted in his youth. Specifically, college — that heady time of imbalance between intellectual self — confidence and one’s actual experience of life.
Lucia Graves: You can’t get rid of hate. But you can take away people’s ability to act on it
It should have been just another Sunday. If it was notable in any way, it was supposed to be because it was the weekend after Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination becoming the first woman – in either party – to do so. Or even just the calm before President Barack Obama joined her on the campaign trail for the very first time. Instead, Sunday marked the most horrific mass shooting in American history, and everything else was out the window. And it wasn’t just an act of terror, as Obama would tell us later that day, but an act of hate. [..]
Hate-driven murder can come from the left or right. We can’t will it away. But we can stop semi-automatic weapons like the one the shooter used from being sold down the street. Or can we? When Senate Democrats pushed an amendment that might have prevented the Orlando shooter from accessing a firearm (it blocked people on terror watch lists from buying guns), they were defeated. We shouldn’t be surprised. Americans response to every mass shooting in recent history has amounted to nothing, so much so that Senator Chris Murphy called Congress “complicit” in the deaths of the slain.
They say you can’t change what’s happened, but you can change what you do about it. So hear this America: your thoughts and prayers aren’t enough this time. You can’t legislate away hate and intolerance; Trump’s rise is proof of that. Nor can you root out extremism everywhere it takes root. What you can take away is the ability of people to act on it. Meanwhile keep loving and marrying freely. Dance unafraid, and kiss whomever you like in the streets.
Richard Wolffe: Is Donald Trump running to be conspiracy-theorist-in-chief?
Donald Trump needs help. Not just help with all those pesky policy details that he can’t seem to master; not even help with a coherent political strategy for winning in November. He needs psychological help and he needs it now.
His unhinged reaction to the Orlando mass murders sends a clear message to his party and to voters in general: this presidential thing isn’t working out well for him or the nation.
At first, it was all too easy to dismiss his histrionics. His conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birth certificate were just a desperate cry for attention: an appeal to the fringes that made him the butt of all jokes.
Then, after he gained political traction, the conventional wisdom was that the hype was just one big theatrical act: a marketing wheeze that would end with defeat in the crowded Republican primaries.
But of course the wild accusations, irrational behavior and self-engrossed eruptions didn’t end there. Now, at a time of national mourning, the Republican presidential nominee has accused the 44th president of the United States of sympathizing with terrorists.
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