Last Sunday, a 29-year-old gunman named Omar Mateen has killed 49 people and injured 53 in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Omar Mateen was born and raised in the United States, but his parents were Afghan immigrants. Soon after this gruesome shooting, people from all over the world have sent their condolence messages and condemned this crime. His parents were as shocked as everyone else by the crime that their son has committed. His father, Siddique has called it a terrorist attack. President Ashraf Ghani was amongst the first world leaders to have condemned it in the strongest terms.    

Omar Mateen was working for a security company, and in recent years, the FBI has questioned him three times. However he was freed in each times with no evidence of him being involved in any terrorist activities. He purchased all those lethal arms legally from a local store in Florida. However, with the Orlando shooting also opened a Pandora box of blaming and criticisms most of which have originated from jingoistic and emotional sentiments. At first, people started criticizing Afghan immigrants for this tragedy since the parents of Omar Mateen are Afghans. Then people turned to Islam, they blamed the religion of Islam for the motivation of this attack, and that Omar Mateen had ties with ISIS. But they were later proven wrong.

This incident also gave a very good excuse to bigots like Donald Trump who went on to bash Muslims, immigrants and Islam for it in his entire speech yesterday. He mentioned “Radical Islam” about 50 times in his few minutes’ speech. Donald Trump’s such rhetoric and bigotry is very dangerous at a time when the extremists look for any bit of excuse to blow themselves up. He inspires those extremists. Of course his intentions weren’t to speak the truth and look for the solution of this disease of mass shooting. Rather he wanted to score some cheap points ahead of the general election. His speech was full of contradictions. That might give him some boost in the polls, but the reality is that Omar Mateen was a product of “Homegrown Extremism” as was admitted by the US President Barack Obama. It’s not hidden from anyone that there has been a lot of discontent and dissatisfaction simmering amongst the new generation of the Western countries, who are let down by the politicians and their political system. This has breed a lot of intolerance amongst their youths. Homosexuality is one of the topics of huge controversy in the US and many other countries. There are both strong supporters and fierce opponents of it. Did Omar hate homosexuality and that’s why he committed this crime? Maybe, but recent reports have shown that he was himself a regular visitor to that nightclub and he has also used gay dating apps (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/14/orlando-gunman-was-a-regular-…).

So what could have been the real motivation behind Omar’s decision to kill 49 innocent people? To say that he had Afghan gene and therefore he has committed this crime would be an utter stupidity. He was born and raised in the US, he has never visited Afghanistan why you attack Americans, he/she will tell you because they attack our religion, Islam. But if you ask an American why Muslims did 9/11 and similar other attacks, he/she will tell you because they hate us and our way of life. There are that sorts of confusions and complexities that one must bear in mind before reaching to any kind of conclusions. It would obviously be very silly of us to let people like Donald Trump to cash in on this delicate matter for their political interests.

Now, the incident of Orlando is not the first one. We have seen many other similar mass-shootings in the past in the US. Most of them have one thing in common, that’s the purchase of heavy lethal guns. Regardless of every other motive, how come someone buys such lethal arms so easily? Why is it being allowed to purchase lethal arms? For me the only reason all these shooters have been able to kill all those innocent people is because of the availability of guns for them. Rather than focusing on who he was and where he came from? Think about how he got those guns and how did he manage to get into that nightclub? That’s the real issue, and that’s where the main solution lays. People like Donald Trump who have special interests with the NRA would obviously deviate from the real issue; instead they bicker and brag about all other peripheral issues. But if the US is serious about preventing another such tragedy (god-forbidden), they should introduce strict gun-control laws.

Therefore, the Orlando tragedy is purely an internal problem of the United States. It has nothing to do with the Afghans, Islam or some other country. These mass-shootings have many precedents in their country, like the Aurora, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook and many others. One thing that could stop such attacks is by eliminating guns from the reach of ordinary citizens. They must address this issue seriously. In the meantime, we must also not give in to the politics of fear and divisions that’s being exploited by people like Trump.

View expressed in this article are of the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pajhwok’s editorial policy.

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