Written by David Bass   

The most divisive tragedy in United States history unfolded a few days ago in Orlando, boiling three emotionally and politically charged issues in one big melting pot. Even now, I’m torn over the proper order in which to list them, so I’m going with alphabetical order:

• Guns
• Islamist extremism
• LGBTs

We all know what happened. Omar Mateen, right after making a 911 call pledging allegiance to ISIS, used legally purchased guns to murder 49 people and injure many more at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

The instruments of mass murder were guns, including two that the shooter legally purchased only a few days prior, including an AR-15 assault rifle. This is the same weapon as the M-16 military rifle, except for modifications to make the civilian version semi-automatic rather than fully automatic. Second Amendment activists on both sides seized the moment.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) filibustered to force a vote on banning firearms sales to suspected terrorists. The NRA opposes this ban, opposes closing the gun show loophole, opposes expanded background checks and opposes reinstating the assault weapons ban. They oppose everything that is sensible.

When it comes to Islamist extremism, Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) declared that President Obama is “directly responsible” for the deaths in Orlando for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq (c’mon man, “directly???”), while presumptive GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump tweeted that Obama should resign due to his lack of utterance of the phrase “radical Islamic extremism,” (“Islamic” and “Islamist” having very different meanings) and renewed his call for a total ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

Despite these sweeping generalizations and their illogical bases, Muslim-friendly politicians and pundits too easily overlook the harsh language in the Quran about homosexuality. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in at least nine Islamic countries and illegal in many others, while the Organization of Islamic Cooperation has blocked advancement of LGBT rights at the U.N.

Opposition to LGBT rights has been a priority for many state officials this year. North Carolina was so obsessed with squelching one city’s ordinance to advance LGBT rights that a special legislative session was called to rush passage of HB-2 to keep transgender individuals out of women’s bathrooms (face it, they don’t care who enters the men’s room; this is partly a resurrection of the decades old fear of black men raping white women, with the fears redirected towards a group conservatives believe is still acceptable to hate publicly). In Alabama, State Chief Justice Roy Moore defied the U.S. Supreme court by ordering the state’s probate judges to refuse applications for marriage licenses by same-sex couples. Now he is suspended. Hating the LGBTs has long been a staple of Republican candidates for elective office, especially where there are high concentrations of evangelical voters.

Pastor Roger Jimenez, who preaches at the Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento lauded the killing of “pedophiles” at The Pulse nightclub, saying Orlando’s children would be safer now. Meanwhile, LGBT activists complained that the early news coverage of the incident didn’t adequately emphasize that the shooter singled out a gay bar to attack specifically gay people. For them, the emphasis must be on the group that was targeted, not the instruments of murder nor ideology that motivated the killer.

And so the worst shooting massacre in U.S. history leads to all sorts of weird triangulation and histrionics at the extreme ends of each of the three issues.

We are told it wouldn’t have happened if Omar Mateen weren’t able to obtain guns so easily. It could have been stopped if patrons at The Pulse were themselves heavily armed. It wouldn’t have happened if gays just stayed in the closet and repented for their sins.

No, it is hateful evangelical preaching and GOP legislative targeting of LGBTs that creates the climate for targeting The Pulse. The shooter’s parents should never have been allowed into the U.S. in the first place; they were Taliban sympathizers. The FBI dropped the ball when it removed Mateen from their terrorism databases. Everything that goes wrong is “the Guv’ment’s” fault.

So much irony. So many paradoxes.

The staunchest defenders of gun rights consider our government’s policies towards ISIS and other Islamist inspired terror groups to be ineffective and weak, yet oppose a ban on the sale of guns to suspected terrorists.

A professed ISIS loyalist imposes Sharia law at a single location on U.S. soil. Some of the staunchest opponents of Sharia law say, well, those sinners deserved it.

A U.S. born, U.S. citizen exercises his 2nd Amendment rights to purchase guns, legally, a few days before the shooting. Only 31% of U.S. households have guns now, down from just over 50% in the late 1970’s. But there are over 350 million guns in the U.S. and this figure is growing about 3.5% per year, concentrating more weapons in fewer households. Seven of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history have occurred since 2007 and single and double victim shootings are so common they barely make the nightly news anymore.

As my father frequently reminds me, “the future is unpredictable, one thing leads to another, and everything connects.” The murders in Orlando are not just a gun issue, not just an Islamist / terrorist issue, not just an LGBT issue. They are all of the above. Everything connects.

We should collectively grieve the loss of innocent lives, tone down the partisan rhetoric, search for deeper understanding of how everything connects, and look for practical steps to take to make the rest of us incrementally safer.