Banning Guns and Muslims Isn’t the Answer to Orlando

The United States suffered the worst act of terrorism since 9/11 over the weekend when ISIS supporter Omar Seddique Mateen killed 50 people and wounded another 53 with a handgun and a .223 rifle at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Americans are good at solving problems. We’ve put men on the moon, cured countless diseases, and invented nearly all modern technology from televisions and telephones to microchips and the Internet. We created a durable democracy that has lasted more than 200 years, ended slavery, destroyed Hitler’s Nazi regime, and bested the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Surely, then, we can solve terrorism, or at least drastically reduce it, but let’s get one thing clear. There is no such thing as The Answer. There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, no perfectly calibrated piece of legislation that Congress can pass to make terrorists leave us alone.

Even if there were such a thing, a government ban wouldn’t be it. If it were so easy, we’d just ban terrorism and be done with it. Yet a large swath of the left wants to solve this with a gun ban, and a large swath of the right wants to ban Muslims.

We’ve never solved any of our great problems with bans. Bans always backfire. Remember Prohibition? How’s the drug war coming along? What does the underground sex industry look like?

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she wants stricter gun laws after Orlando. Reasonable people can disagree about the particulars of this or that piece of proposed gun regulation, but Clinton is kidding herself or pulling a fast one on voters by suggesting that better background checks, closing the loopholes at gun shows, or an “assault” rifle ban will prevent terrorists from getting guns.

The Orlando shooter worked as a security guard. He passed all kinds of background checks. He didn’t need to exploit any loopholes at gun shows. If the rifle he used had not been available in stores, he could have bought one on the black market.

France has strict gun laws. France has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. That didn’t stop ISIS from getting its hands on automatic Kalashnikovs seven months ago in Paris and tripling the Orlando shooter’s body count.

Ban guns in stores and at gun shows all you want—it will affect law-abiding citizens, not terrorists. Anything and everything banned by governments just moves to the black market, from guns and drugs to prostitution. According to the National Observatory for Delinquency, the number of illegal weapons in France has been increasing by double-digit percentages for years. Criminals and terrorists don’t need to pass background checks, nor do they need Wal-mart. They buy their guns on the street.

Even a draconian absolute gun ban wouldn’t work. Under what theory would a war on guns work any better than the war on drugs? Does anyone seriously believe that the government could ever take so many weapons away from so many people that terrorists would have to resort to running around with butter knives? Come on.

The French gun ban accomplished a grand total of jack squat last year when ISIS hit Paris. And Mohammad Atta’s crew killed thousands of people on 9/11 armed with nothing but box cutters.

Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States is even more ludicrous. The vast majority of guns are never used in mass shootings, and the vast majority of Muslims never commit acts of terrorism.

Almost three million Muslims live in the United States. The percentage who have blown up or shot anyone is only slightly more than one in a million.

The Muslim world is enormous and varied. A ban on all Muslims would be a de-facto ban on the Kurds, and the Kurds are America’s best friends in the entire Middle East. They’re more militantly anti-ISIS than anyone else in the world, and they’ve supplied most of the ground troops against ISIS.

Here’s what my Kurdish friend Ejder Memis wrote on Facebook today. “Let me offer my commiserations to the LGBT community for the savage murder of 50 and the maiming of as many in [an] Orlando gay club by an Islamofascist terrorist.” After getting that out of the way, he goes after the Orlando shooter’s father who said that what his son did had nothing to do with religion. “Where were you when ISIS killed, raped and pillaged their way across Iraq, Syria and Kurdistan? Where were you when they attempted a genocide on Yazidis, enslaved ‘infidel’ girls and women, cut off heads and burnt prisoners? Where were you when they blew up worshipers in churches and peaceful protesters in Suruc and Ankara? Where were you when they threw gays off the roof tops? Pray tell you were not at a ‘No to Islamophobia’ march rubbing shoulders with those who would rather see you dead.”

Raise your hand if you think America will be safer if the man who wrote that can’t come here.

Should the United States be more careful about who it lets in? Absolutely. But here’s a not-so secret secret about Middle Easterners—many of them are more clear-eyed than Westerners are about the likes of ISIS.

Banning all of them with a blind and blunt instrument probably wouldn’t directly help ISIS recruitment as much as Clinton alleges. Psychopathic totalitarians are not provoked by Western illiberalism. They are, on the contrary, provoked by Western liberalism. Who thinks the Orlando shooter just randomly chose a gay night club?

Banning all Muslims would, however, sour America’s good relationships with moderate Muslims and their governments from Morocco and Tunisia to Jordan and Azerbaijan. And it would profoundly alienate the Muslims who already live here, which could make them more susceptible to radicalization down the road.

In any case, the Orlando shooter was born in America. Trump’s proposed Muslim ban wouldn’t have touched him. 

So what’s the answer? The answer is that The Answer doesn’t exist.

We can start, though, by destroying the Islamic State. That would do a lot more good than preventing me from buying a gun, and it would do even more good than preventing my Kurdish friends from visiting Washington. ISIS can recruit and inspire people far more easily if it looks like it’s winning rather than losing. Even if it isn’t winning per se, if it simply looks durable and permanent, it can and does recruit and inspire people.

Destroying the ISIS “state” in Syria and Iraq won’t kill the ideology, obviously. The ideology will live on, almost certainly for the rest of our lives. Nazis and Communists still exist, after all. They are, however, a lot less dangerous now that Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union are buried.