Whenever there's a terrorist attack in a Western country, no matter the size or scope, there's an impulse to conclude that things are, or will be, different now. The attack has demonstrated that what we thought was true no longer is, or it will fundamentally change what will happen from this point forward.
That conclusion is usually wrong. While we're trying to understand what happened and why, we should remind ourselves of what's still true when it comes to terrorism, guns, and our safety:
ISIS can still inspire people anywhere in the world, despite its setbacks on the battlefield. While the U.S.-led coalition is unquestionably making progress against ISIS-taking back territory the group had won, disrupting their financing, and so on-the group will be able to create propaganda and recruit sympathizers almost until the moment it's completely defeated. And of course, the more attention the West pays to it, the more it can claim to be the West's most potent enemy. If you're an angry, violent person with grievances against America and an internet connection, you'll be able to find your way to ISIS, and may be persuaded by it to kill people in your community.
America is still largely safe from attacks planned and directed by ISIS. For all that some people worry about the possibility of ISIS sending fighters to pose as refugees and infiltrate the United States, the greatest threat comes from people like Omar Mateen: an American who decided to commit an act like this because of some combination of his own violent nature and the varieties of hate that combined to convince him that he could achieve something by killing as many people as he could. But for a variety of reasons, a carefully planned operation to commit a terrorist attack is highly unlikely.
ISIS is preoccupied with holding the territory it has gained in Iraq and Syria. They're happy to encourage people around the world to kill civilians, but they don't seem to have much interest in investing significant resources to mount an attack against Americans. We're too far away and too well-protected. Another 9/11-style attack would be much harder to pull off now than it was at the time, and for them there just doesn't appear to be all that much to be gained by trying.
The ubiquity of guns in America makes us vulnerable to this kind of attack no matter what we do. Some kinds of terrorist attacks are difficult to carry out. Bomb-making requires a certain degree of research, and some of the materials can be at least a little bit complicated to obtain. If you want to target an airplane, you'd have to evade security. But if all you want to do is kill a lot of people, it's incredibly easy to do.
Like most mass shooters, Mateen used an AR-15, the most popular gun in America. You can get one at any gun store or gun show (though Walmart stopped selling them last August). While your gun will be semi-automatic when you buy it (requiring a separate trigger pull for each bullet fired), you can order yourself a "bump fire" conversion kit that effectively turns it into a fully automatic rifle without violating the law against ownership of machine guns. Get yourself a high-capacity magazine, which can be legally purchased in 42 states, and you're ready to kill as many or more people than you would have been able to with a bomb, so long as you're willing to be killed or captured in the process. And of course, the NRA and the Republican Party have worked their hearts out to make sure you can buy as many guns and as much ammo as you want with the least amount of hassle from the government. And don't worry if you're on the FBI's terrorist watch list-it's still legal for you to assemble your arsenal, thanks to Republicans.
There probably won't be any change in America's gun laws any time soon. When President Obama spoke Sunday about the shooting, he said, "This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that's the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well." He's absolutely right about that, but he said it with the resigned tone of a president who has had to deliver similar remarks after a mass shooting on 15 separate occasions.
The fact is that one of our two great parties is absolutely, categorically committed to opposing any restrictions on gun purchases, no matter how sensible they might seem. Congress couldn't even pass universal background checks, a measure supported by nine out of ten Americans, including the overwhelming majority of gun owners, after 20 elementary school children were slaughtered in Newtown, thanks to near-uniform Republican opposition. That won't be changing in the near future.
There is no set of policies that, in the short term, can significantly reduce the possibility that this kind of attack will occur. When a politician says that if we just "get tough" or start some carpet-bombing then we can make sure that this kind of thing won't happen again, it's a clear sign they either don't understand how terrorism works or they are trying to fool you. Even if we're successful in defeating ISIS, that's a process that is likely to take years. And chances are that just as ISIS superceded Al Qaeda, its place will be taken by some other terrorist group.
From what we've learned so far, it appears that Omar Mateen wasn't an ordinary person seduced by ISIS's propaganda into killing dozens of people. He was an unbalanced and violent man who at some point decided to channel his hatred in the direction ISIS pointed. If there were another group with a different name and different goals encouraging him, that's probably what he would have used to justify his act. Don't forget that we have plenty of right-wing terrorists who don't need events 6,000 miles away to inspire them to violence.
We can never be completely free of the threat of terrorism. We can declare war on it, but terrorism is a tactic, and it will always be a tactic available to those who want to strike out at a great power like the United States. We've been very fortunate up until now-as awful as it is to say, having 50 people killed in a terrorist attack is basically an ordinary Wednesday in Baghdad. Our relative safety from terrorism comes from our geographic isolation, but mostly from the fact that there simply aren't that many Americans who want to commit these kinds of acts. Unlike what we see in many places, American Muslims are overwhelmingly assimilated and patriotic-and maintaining those feelings in the last 15 years, in the face of government harassment and widespread bigotry, is pretty heroic. The reason ISIS hasn't been able to inspire or direct more attacks like the one in Orlando is that in America, there just aren't many takers for their hateful ideology.
But this threat will always be there. The question is whether we can acknowledge that and work to minimize it without losing our minds.
