The first reaction to the dreadful crime in Florida – the worst mass shooting in US history – must be one of sympathy and solidarity for the victims and those who loved them, and for the city of Orlando. It is dreadful that people who had come out for an evening of joyful dancing, and of celebration of their freedom to love whom they will, should have their lives ended or shattered in gunfire. This is true, and overwhelmingly important, whatever the motives of the gunman turn out to be when they have been thoroughly investigated. Whether or to what extent it is an act of organised terrorism remains to be discovered. We do not know whether the victims were murdered for being American, or gay, or for both reasons: Isis, after all, has a record of monstrous crimes and cruelties against gay people.
This ignorance will not stop anyone from leaping to conclusions. But while the police and the FBI go about their work of unpicking the background to the atrocity, responsible politicians need to show calm and resolution. The damage done to the victims and their families is dreadful enough. It is one of the tasks of leadership to minimise the damage that the attacks can do to wider society. This is a task which – predictably – Donald Trump is failing. “When will we get tough, smart, and vigilant?” he tweeted to his followers: but there is no evidence that anyone in Orlando was anything less than tough, smart, or vigilant as the attack unfolded.
The awful truth is that American society is vulnerable to these attacks in a way that others are not because of its belief that freedom requires easy, widespread access to lethal weapons. While it is true that guns don’t kill people, as the slogan has it, people with guns do kill people, and they do so much more quickly and effectively than people without guns can manage.
There have been 43 mass shootings in the US in the past 10 years, those in which more than four people were killed in a public space. Very few of them had recognisable ideological causes. Some occurred in states, such as Florida, where it is legal for almost anyone who applies for a licence to walk around with concealed, lethal weapons – something which does not in practice save anyone’s life if bullets start flying, but which is felt as a reassurance until they do.
The problem here is that the US, a country that valorises freedom above almost everything else, is damaging its real freedoms in pursuit of illusory ones. The freedom that was enjoyed – in both senses of the word – by the dancers at the Pulse nightclub is upheld by tolerance as well as by firm and unbiased enforcement of the laws. It is a general freedom for every kind of American: LGBT as well as straight, Muslim, atheist and Christian. This is what serves as a real beacon to the rest of the world. But this kind of freedom is also what the attack, and the possible reactions to it, must tend to damage.
Whatever the motives of the attacker turn out to be, no gay person in the US can feel as secure today as they did on Saturday – a rejection compounded by the refusal of the authorities to accept blood donations from sexually active gay men. This is an additional tragedy on top of the deaths. The country must not compound it by lurching from fear into fantasies of omnipotence, in which everything gets better if only the strong man lashes out at his enemies. That would damage exactly the freedoms it purports to defend.
