John McCain Directly Responsible for Orlando Shooting

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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John McCain has received approximately 7.5 million dollars from the NRA in the course of his (failure-laden) political career. The same NRA has fought tirelessly to prevent universal background check laws AND (probably more significantly) to continue to allow people on the FBI terrorist watch list (such as the Orlando night-club shooter) to purchase and use firearms.

In a recent display of sour grapes the likes of which the political world hasn’t seen in a long, long time, McCain, who was soundly trounced by President Obama in the 2008 presidential election, publicly claimed that Obama is “directly responsible” for the worst mass shooting in US history as a result of his withdrawal of US troops in Iraq. Strange view of causation he must have, to say the least. Apparently, withdrawing troops from Iraq led to ISIS (tenuous connection number one, since ISIS originally emerged in Syria) which led to the shooting (tenuous connection number two since the shooter himself actually had no direct connection to ISIS), and therefore, it’s Obama’s fault the shooting happened. Gee, where have i heard disgruntled Republicans passing the buck for their own fuck-ups using that excuse before? (Wait, it’s been the central pillar of virtually every political position Republicans have taken since McCain was so soundly put in his place by Obama 7.5 years ago - that’s where)

Certainly it’s safe to assume that when the most powerful political lobbying group in the country (namely, the NRA) invests 7 and a half million dollars in the career of a prominent politician, they expect, shall we say, favors in return. i would propose an alternate trail of “direct responsibility” for the Orlando shooting which traces back to the NRA (that’s an easy and direct connection, given that people on the terrorist watch list would have been banned from purchasing firearms following the earlier San Bernadino shooting had it not been for the lobbying efforts of the NRA), and then, by extension, to McCain and his myriad other political cohorts who do the NRA’s work for them in political offices throughout the country. In that light, support for the NRA at this point in history essentially translates into direct support for mass murder, so McCain (and his aforementioned cohorts) are hereby declared guilty of facilitating the Orlando shooting, as well as the 132 other mass shootings which have occurred in the US this year alone.

Of course, blaming Obama is safer, more gratifying, and more politically correct for disgruntled Republicans than blaming the NRA. So let’s for a moment entertain this delusional notion of Obama’s complicit hand in the shooting. If Obama is responsible, who is responsible for Obama? i say we blame McCain for Obama, since he’s the one that failed so miserably to beat Obama to the White House.

In conclusion, we can pretty directly trace the line of responsibility for the shooting back to McCain via the NRA, or if we are victims of the common Republican delusion that Obama is to blame for everything, we can trace the line of responsibilty back to McCain via his piss-poor showing in the 2008 presidential election. McCain’s to blame!

See how easy this sort of skewed political logic is to fabricate and sell?

2

Gun violence is an epidemic in the US. You get right wing apologists here and elsewhere trying to say there’s no real problem, but they aren’t looking at the statistics, not even thinking about the significance of daily persistent gun violence in this supposedly civilized, modern first world nation.

The right is driven by paranoia. The NRA and other conservatives, many of them anyway, literally believe that the Evil Big Liberal Government is out to get them, to take away their land, maybe come try to arrest them and throw them in a “FEMA camp”. The conspiratorial paranoias are staggering, and Trump is simply a manifestation of all that stuff. I know some conservatives who are good reasonable and emotionally stable people, I have friends who are conservatives, but it is sad what has happened to the conservative movement. It’s been taken over by radical right wing extremists who will deny until the end of time that easy proliferation of guns leads to increased social violence and crime, for example, because deep in their heart they believe that people have a RIGHT to commit acts of violence and mass killing. Oh you’ll never hear a right winger come out and say that, but this is what they believe.

Here is the values-process involved in typical right wing thinking on the issue of guns:

1- I have a right to do whatever I want, and the government only wants to play Big Brother and tell me what to do; thus wants to take away my God given right

2- Just because other people use guns to kill and commit mass murder doesn’t mean I should lose my right to do whatever I want, because I’m not like those other crazy killers.

(By this point a rationalization sets in, where guns are needed as a concept to shore-up this disconnect between what “other people do” and what “I do”, so you end up with the clever inversion: “more guns actually makes people more safe!”)

3- Gun control is only making people less safe, in fact gun control is the real reason we have gun violence!

This is a fairly accurate portrayal of the values and thought process of an average right wing conservative in the US today. Note that these ideas aren’t thought out in any great detail, they remain vague at the level of imminent values-expressions (guns good, gun control bad, more guns good, liberals bad, me good, mass shooters bad, etc.) It’s somewhat like if you asked a 6 year old to construct a logical argument for there being more guns in society. The actually high rates of gun violence and the irrationality of the second amendment to the 21st century (right in the language of the second amendment it clearly says that the right to keep and bear arms is connected to the need for a “well regulated militia”, which we no longer need), are simply facts to be deliberately ignored while the psychopathological compensation-denial machine of rhetoric and emotional constipation keeps churning on and on.

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For a more in depth analysis of the values structures behind both sides of the gun debate, let’s look at each side more closely:

Pro guns:

Pro gun sentiment is driven by a values-set that includes establishing and acknowledging the primacy of the value of the individual, and of centering social and personal power on the individual in order to disperse power throughout society and thus help prevent its concentration in a fascist central government. This goes beyond the obvious (and somewhat archaic and outdated) argument that The People need access to firearms to defend themselves against the government (the best way to defend yourself against a hostile government is to participate in the political process, not stock an armory in your basement), and is in fact a more abstract argument pointing to the general diffusion of power throughout society and the consequent emphasis of power in a de-centralized manner upon individuals rather than upon government.

One problem with this argument is that gun ownership only represents a minuscule example of real de-centering of power in society today; if you want to truly disperse power throughout The People then you need to focus more on institutional power, economic power and capital, and education rather than simply focusing on people having guns.

Another value here is self-defense, which is a rational value and must be incorporated as a right into any civilized society. Gun control doesn’t aim necessarily to remove all guns and could easily account for small arms for home defense purposes; however the problem with the self-defense argument is that having a gun isn’t a guarantee of self-defense capability, and more useful would be to learn martial arts than rely on your gun. Often people who want guns just use the self-defense argument as an excuse, while they really do nothing else that would help them protect themselves from an attacker. And in terms of self-defense the primary focus should be on society-wide changes, involving how we police and jail people, addressing the reasons for crime and poverty and low education. If you are concerned with crime and violence then you need to look much further than simply saying “we need more guns”.

Anti guns:

The anti-gun sentiment is fueled by the idea that guns represent a savage part of humanity and lead to violence. A gun is simply a tool for very easily killing another human being; if you look at it objectively and imagine say another sentient species comes to earth, they might say “this human species has decided to create tools designed to effortlessly take the lives of other humans, and have distributed these tools throughout their society”. It would be easy to see the irrationality of such a situation, where tools of death are commonplace in a supposedly sentient, evolved species.

Limiting access to guns has an effect on reducing gun violence. Countries like UK, Japan, Canada, Australia all have stronger gun laws and far less gun violence, with Austalia being a very good example where guns proliferated in society and then once gun control was passed gun ownership dried up and gun violence virtually disappeared overnight. It’s kind of hard to use a gun to kill people when you can’t get a gun in the first place.

The anti-gun people are well aware of the pro-gun argument that you can’t practically get rid of all or most guns that are out there, and that there will always be a black market; however this argument is nullified by the fact that there is a positive correlation between tighter gun laws and decrease of the number of guns, namely that gun control laws are not perfect but make progress toward the goal and represent an incremental progress that over time improves the situation. No one is saying that gun control laws would get rid of all or most guns immediately, it’s a long term process and the point is to have the right laws and systems and incentives in place so that, over time, the situation is always gradually improving. Pro-gun arguments are often subject to the logical fallacy of excluded middle in this way.

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When the government is thinking about putting tracking chips in people’s pills the paranoia is doubled.

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There is trick wording at play with pro gun control advocates. Really look at their studies . UK, Australalia , sure remove guns and folks do not get shot but they still get murdered. About the only positive is suicide rate did go down, not attempts, just successful suicides. But, now you have people that are alive , handicapped and or attached to machines. Knives, ropes and poison may kill or not, you might come out intact or not.

Removing guns did not decrease violence, it only changed tools. Education, awareness works far better.

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Expanding on looking into the valuations behind conservatives right-wing sentiment around guns and gun violence:

I previously said that for a right-winger, they literally believe that people have a right to commit mass murder. I also said they would never admit that they believe this, but mostly that is because they don’t fully realize they believe this. It in fact follows absolutely from two of their “principles”, namely:

  1. People have free will and have the right to choose to do what they want (and then be held responsible for their choices).

  2. Government does not have a right to restrict the people’s access to guns.

If you combine 1 and 2 above, you get the following “principle” of theirs: “A person has a right to choose to use guns in horrible ways, such as mass murder, but then if they choose to do that they should be held responsible for their actions and suffer the consequences.”

The opposite of this view is intimated by liberal ideals, which is that people do NOT have a right to commit mass murder: that it isn’t enough to enshrine “personal responsibility” as a fundamental right and then from that right hold everyone accountable for what they do, because if that is where the thought stops there would simply be chaos and this idea must condone every kind of irrationality, horrible crime, harm and madness that anyone would “choose” to do. The conservative position is “people will do what they do, you can’t stop that, but you can hold them responsible”, whereas the liberal view is “there are motives, reasons and incentives behind what people do, and society can and should be involved in understanding and influencing these causal factors”. Speaking of “choice”, the conservative view is woefully inadequate when it comes to understanding the actual psychology and causality behind why people do things. The conservative view as outlined above in its two primary “principles” on the issue of guns, is basically a child-like and Biblical, naive idea of free will as well as a refusal to look deeper into the reasons, motives and causes for why people do what they do (or don’t do what they don’t do).

Because of this failure conservative philosophy is an oxymoron. Philosophy means valuing truth above everything else, and yet the right wing cannot look honestly at things beyond a certain point; they don’t actually have a philosophy at all and are operating on a kind of psycho-pathological system of denial and repression-compensation mechanisms. This is why I called above their principles only “principles” (in quotes), because they really aren’t principles at all. The next time you hear a conservative or right-winger say something about principles, and they do it a lot, ask yourself what they are REALLY saying, what the actual substance of their idea is, and where is it truly coming from.

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ROTFLMAO, that is like saying all Muslims or all Christians or all Jewish people believe exactly the same thing. Lumping all followers into one way is wrong, it has been proven wrong time after time and it is the laziest argument around. Only ego makes such an argument, not true intellect , thought or real observation. Try again. Oh and do not get defensive, that only makes arguments worse. Reach beyond your beliefs and truly see.

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I think it’s wonderful that after weeks of listening to lefties whine and bitch and clutch their fucking pearls over Trump’s ‘inciteful rhetoric’, it is apparently a standard liberal talking point that John McCain is responsible for the Orlando shooting, and conservatives belive in the right to commit mass murder. It was all over the news when Trump blamed Obama for the attacks, but “The NRA did this” was posted on front pages everywhere. We can’t blame the Muslims, because that would be racist, but we can blame our own as long as they are on the ‘tolerant’ left’s list of acceptable targets.

What’s going on in this thread is what happens when you have a brain that’s poisoned by a mix of political correctness and progressive ideology. Every once in a while you have a situation (gay radical Muslim murders a bunch of other gays because Islam teaches him to murder people he doesn’t agree with) where everybody involved is on the progressive’s ‘protected class citizens’ list. Nothing in society can be a homosexuals fault, nothing in society can be a Muslims fault. That’s par for the course.

When it was Charlie Hebdo writers that were murdered (in a country with strict-as-fuck gun laws, I might add), the narrative was easy to defend- nothing can be the fault of Muslims (because they are brown), so therefore the Charlie Hebdo writers were blamed for ‘inciting’ the Muslims. When the Paris attacks happened, (again, strict as fuck gun laws, and far more people massacred than in Orlando), nobody was blamed at all- the narrative simply shifted to how terribly important it was that Muslims suffer no backlash, and we were all warned that ‘right wing groups’ would ‘capitalize on the tragedy’.

When the Cologne mass sexual assaults happened (again, plenty of gun restrictions), the primary victims were women, and the narrative states that you can never ever blame women for sexual crimes against them no matter what. So progressive narrative compelled the whole fucking thing to be simply covered up- the police were ordered not to report on the ethnicity of the perpetrators, people were banned off of Facebook, and etc.

And Brussells, and so on.

So now, several massacres later, we get to another one: same kind of perpetrator as in all those previous, motived by the same kinds of things, attacking in the same kind of way with the same sort of result. But this time it happened in a country where guns are permitted, so this time it’s the NRA’s fault.

Now anybody with two brain cells to rub together that haven’t been poisoned by progressive ideology would immediately realize that when you have mass assaults from radical Muslims claiming ISIS affiliation happening all over the world, the blame would be on the ideology motivating the attacks. Simple logic suggests that if 75% of the attacks happen in places with no 2nd Amendment and no gun rights, that the one attack that does happen in a place with gun rights is not the fault of the people defending those rights. But progressive ideology overrides common sense: only a handful of targets (conservatives, white men, Christians, the rich, gun owners) are available to blame for anything that happens, and one of these MUST be the culprit whenever there is a tragedy. Sometimes this works (sometimes it is even true)! But other times, the limited list of available targets forces the progressive to engage in a full break from reality.

The reality is this: If 2nd Amendment defenders are to blame for the Orlando attacks because they allow people to own guns, then 1st Amendment defenders are to blame to exactly the same degree because they allow people to practice fundamentalist Islam in the USA. I prefer to blame the perpetrators of an act and the ideology that motivates them, and not defenders of basic rights. But I’m not a pants-on-head retarded fucking liberal.

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Well, damn I actually have to agree with you. Stop that Ucci, we are supposed to disagree on things.

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Cats are bullshit.

Better?

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Much, thank you. Folks that argue that all of a category are the same may as well have a dermatologist perform heart surgery, I mean , a doctor is a doctor right?

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Hello UPF
No one is “directly” responsible for the Orlando shooting; let’s get that shit straight. John McCain’s point is that the US “soft” (slowly-but-surely approach) policy on ISIS has allowed them to exist as someone for these fuckers to look up to. My question to McCain is who is responsible for Sandy Hook, or for South Carolina, for Columbine (need I go on?). Shootings are so frequent that we have a problem with causality. It would be nice, for GOP folks who kiss the ring of the NRA, if ALL shootings, all massacres were perpetrated by those pledging allegiance to ISIS, but that is not the case and so he misses the larger issue here that might be the cause of all these incidents.

“Failure laden”? That is very dramatic on your part but wrong, in my opinion. Background checks did not prevent the mass shooting in Orlando. Finally, be careful what you wish for. We like to think that people get on the “Terrorist watch list” for good reason, and perhaps under Obama they are, but what about other future Presidents? Would you want Trump to have the ability to take away Constitutional Rights from citizens arbitrarily? It is, essentially, the same argument that the courts partially defeated the NSA operations. To me the issue is the lack of willingness to even debate and discuss measures that even if flawed, would allow data to enter the discussion, so that we are discussing actual cases rather than what-if scenarios. Being on a terror list, facebook page, no-fly list, black book whatever the fuck should be a disqualifier and the issue we have to take is what protections can be afforded to those in that list, what recourse they would have so that their freedoms are protected even as we try to protect the innocents. Sounds easy but it would be quite hard as the information used to put someone on a terror list is probably classified and would not be shared with courts, forcing judges to dismiss, which would then defeat the prohibition of giving access to guns to someone on a terrorist list.

It is the democratic process that we allowed to take place and the eventual mismanagement of government by Iraqis that created enough animosity towards govt that ISIS became the least of two evils. When a person forgets that little detail of the Shia/Sunni/Kurd divide that led some experts to propose breaking up the State of Iraq then they willfully misrepresent the history behind ISIS growth in Iraq. McCain however has a point. Were we too naïve to think that in such volatile situation the democratic process had a chance? Shouldn’t we have stayed and finish the job of rebuilding at least the basic necessities of a working State? It would have cost a lot, in money and perhaps in lives, and certainly we were broke, BUT what if we had stayed, if we could’ve stayed and basically stayed there as a referee as well as an administrator of the rebuilding process. When we left there was no public work nothing good, no lasting good in the lives of average Iraqis that was done by our hand and in our name. The had the destruction of two American led Gulf Wars but no American led electric grid.

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Well, you have given us an example of someplace where a ban did not work. Where have you seen this approach of education and awareness that has worked better? Please tell me you are not using the USA as your “better” example.

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I thought it was a completely different dude who did the shooting? Are you guys saying that people believe that Obama or McCain shot those people?

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I can’t think of a place that has even tried, yet when has’nt education and awareness worked for other issues? Has making drugs illegal stopped addictions or use? No, but education and awareness prevents more from use. We don’t tell kids to not do something and not explain why. Try the old stand by “Because I said so” , it does not work, you just end up with a punished confused angry or sad kid. Adults are no different. Learning why saves a lot of problems.

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When’s the last time Australia had a mass killing?

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No not just this time, the NRA is complicit in most if not all the mass shootings this country has had.

The rest of your post is basically just a long-winded ad hom.

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how would I know? And are you only interested in stopping such murders and accept any other type?

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If i support drunk driving laws, does that mean i’m only interested in preventing drunk driving accidents while accepting all other types of accidents?

The fact that Australia rarely if ever suffers a mass killing while the US has suffered 133 in the last year alone is pertinent to the claims you are making.

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And as for the whole “the problem isn’t guns, the problem is radical islam” argument goes, i have another question (not directed specifically at you Kris): Of the hundreds and hundreds of mass shootings that have occurred in the US since, say, 9-11 (to arbitrarily pick a starting point), how many have been committed by Muslim fundamentalists as opposed to disgruntled white guys? And yet, we’ve got Uccisore and Trump et al implying that we should ban fundamentalist Islam despite the clear unconstitutionality of such a move, yet when liberals suggest banning weapons commonly used in mass shootings, gun advocates fly into hysterics about the government taking away their supposed “right” to own AR-15s and other similar guns - a right which exists only if we stretch and massage and reinterpret the 2nd amendment to the point of near-absurdity.

Don’t get me wrong, fundamentalist Islam is a dangerous problem, but the hypocrisy here on the part of gun advocates and conservatives in general couldn’t be clearer or more brazen.

i’d wager that of the aforementioned hundreds and hundreds of mass shootings, far more have been committed using AR-15s and similar weapons than have been committed by radical Muslims. Which is the problem? Or do we then simply walk back everything we’ve said and deny that mass shootings in this country are a problem in the first place? That’s a pretty tough stance to hold and still be taken seriously.

Oh wait, i forgot, if we can just get rid of Obama all these problems will disappear.