Part I: We may have an Ideology problem instead of a gun problem | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post is the first installment of a two part series. The second installment can be found here.

    After the shooting in Orlando on June 12, 2016, there will no doubt be a rush to solutions which range from more gun control to more tolerance for LGBT rights, including political twist to take advantage in the present election process.

First, I freely admit I have no armchair chair solution to the problem.  I have opinions, but some may remember the old saying about opinions being like "????????",everyone has one.  In the absence of anything other than an uninformed opinion, most think people will look to the experts for an answer or at least an informed opinion.  

    Normally, I would look to our political leadership to assemble knowledgeable people to address the issue, but I have lost all confidence in our current crop of political leaders on either side of the political spectrum to identify the problem much less provide a reasoned path forward.

    Anger and shock are not the time to make snap judgements on actions and new laws that may be required to calm the angst of the population.  I have for many years been concerned about the absolute ideology of any movement.  If you think back over our recent history you will find that ideology is the root of many of our abhorrent disasters.

• Radical Christians felt that they had the right to kill doctors and bomb clinics that provide abortions.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph)

• Radical anarchist felt that they had the right to blow up a government building in Oklahoma. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh)

• Radical White supremacist ideology sparked a massacre in Ruby Ridge when the federal government overreacted to this aberrant ideology by laying siege on the home of Randy Weaver. (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/incident-at-ruby-ridge)

• Radical Progressive ideology has been played out on our college campuses when students and professors called for more muscle to prevent a news reporter from covering their event in Missouri. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/01/25/i-need-some-muscle-over-here-missouri-prof-melissa-click-charged-with-assault/)

• Radical Left Wing ideology founded the Weather Underground because they felt that peaceful means were not sufficient to convert non-believers to followers their beliefs. (http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/movement.html)

   

• Radical Right Wing Ideology formed the Ku Klux Klan to maintain a system of racial supremacists that felt it was appropriate to lynch black people just for being black. (http://www.history.com/topics/ku-klux-klan)

    None of the above had anything to do with the Islam religion but were the result of an Ideology that the adherents believed justified their actions.  The point I am belaboring here is that the problem is not the bombs, guns, or extra muscle that caused the problem.  It is the extrapolation that one's ideology gives them license to kill, attack, eject or maim anyone who disagrees with their ideology.

This has been the human condition since humans were first place on this earth.  The second generation of humans resorted to the use of force over differing ideologies. (Genesis 4:1–16)

    Some would ask what this world is coming to when they look at the current frequency of ideology-based attacks on our civilization. This is not a recent phenomenon. Ask any World War II sailor who served in the pacific fleet at the end of the war. An ideology run amuck resulted in the "Divine Wind" attacks by Japanese pilots on US Naval ships in the Kamikaze attacks.   (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-kamikaze-attack-of-the-war-begins)

    Before we descend into a debate once again about gun control, perhaps we should look to a more deeper analysis of our current war. Arguing over the weapon of choice in terrorist attacks is just a deflection of the core problem which is based on ideology. If you do not believe we are engaged in a war, I offer the quote often erroneously attributed to Leon Trotsky

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

    Fortunately, we have multiple sources of serious and well-reasoned analysis of the current fight with ISIS.  I offer one such source for those who have the patience and concern to delve deeper into the dilemma of how we deal with ISIS.  Based on the recent North Carolina primary election returns, I suspect that only seven percent (7%) have gotten this far in this article and fewer still will click on any links included here.  And that perhaps is where our problem lies.  Will it take another Pearl Harbor or World Trade Center event to galvanize our attention away from our "not my backyard" mentality? Secondly, do we as a country have the determination to solve the problem or will we forget as we always do in a few weeks until the next event. I have tried to stay away from the flame words of either the left or right political perspective, but my prejudices are apparent to those who may disagree with my political leanings. However, maybe just once we could focus on the problem instead of the weapon used.

    Here is one alternative from Sebastian Gorka.(The Gorka Briefing)

    "What I have been trying to convince this city of for many years now is that we have not even begun to engage in the information operations battlefield. We do almost everything at the tactical level and have allowed political correctness to infect the way we do Information Operations and Psychological Warfare. America is preeminent at the application of kinetic force. The U.S. Abbottabad raid will be taught from the Beijing Military Academy to Sandhurst for the next hundred years as how you do a kinetic application of lead-on target. But tactical perfection does not automatically add up to victory. Tactical victories do not necessarily bring strategic success. We must delegitimize the ideology of the enemy or this will be exercise in whack-a-mole. Your children, my grandchildren, will be hunting jihadists a hundred years from now unless we take down their ideology of Global Jihadism." Testimony to House Armed Services Committees Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, 8 Jan 2016.

Sebastian Gorka on the Ideology of Global Jihad