The editors of the Wall Street Journal could not have
written a more inviting editorial to start a debate and help make a few points
about an issue that is of utmost importance to North
America at this time. They wrote: “The Motive in San Bernardino ,” a piece that also came under
the subtitle: “Obama blames guns, but some evidence points to sudden jihad,”
published on December 4, 2015 in the Journal.
A backgrounder needs to be laid out before we tackle the
core of the subject. And the best way to do this is to ask the following
question: What is more substantive; the means to an end or the end itself?
Okay, let's be more specific: What is more substantive: giving a poor man a
fish to eat, or giving him a hook and a line, and teaching him to fish?
You see, eating is the end. While it's a good thing to help
a hungry man fulfill that end, it's even better teaching him to fish for; he
will have the means to obtain a meal each time that he feels hungry, whether or
not you are around to help him. Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier
is that most of the time, the means to an end is more substantive than the end
itself.
That was the positive way to formulate the question and the
answer to it. Unfortunately, the same can also be done in a negative way. Here
is an example: What is more substantive; the murder of someone or the climate
that leads people to murder each other? And the answer is that murdering
someone is a bad thing, but worse is the fashioning of a climate that leads to
murder.
Up to now, this discussion has been conducted in the
abstract. It is no longer sufficient because in real life, you need a tool to
murder as much as you need a tool to fish. However, introducing these elements
into the discussion can complicate things, but we should be smart enough to
navigate around the complication. There is also another complicating element
called motivation. While hunger is the most powerful factor motivating people
to eat, murder has many factors … among these are fear, theft, jealousy,
religious fanaticism and others.
At this stage of the game – the way it is playing itself out
in America
– the most worrisome tool used in the commission of murder is the firearm, also
referred to as the gun. And the most worrisome element motivating people to kill
is religious fanaticism. But while the gun itself does not kill, neither does
religion. Rather, it is “madmen” using the gun and/or religion who do the
killing.
That realization forces us to ask the question: Should we
ban the gun or religion or both to reduce the murderous tendency that is the
hallmark of our species – more so in America at this time than anywhere
else in the world at any time? Well, because the means to an end is more
substantive than the end itself, we better ask this other question: What are
the means which motivate someone to grab a tool – be it a gun, religion or both
– and go kill someone?
If we go by what the editors of the Wall Street Journal are
saying, Islamic radicalization is the means by which young people are motivated
to commit murder. At the same time, however, they reject the notion, advanced
by President Obama, that if we curtail the ownership of firearms – like taking
away the hook and the line form a fisherman – we could reduce the frequency of
such acts.
This takes us back to the question: What is more
substantive; the means to an end or the end itself? At first blush, it looks
like the editors of the Journal make a stronger argument than the President.
That's because curtailing the ownership of firearms is an end in itself whereas
the motivation to kill is the means to that end. As shown earlier, as long as
the means is there, the end will always be done … which means that the killing
will continue despite the effort to curtail it by curtailing the ownership of
firearms.
But when we recall that people – the editors of the Journal
among them – who used to say that the gun does not kill, are now saying that
religion kills, we pull back and take a closer look at who is talking. We
realize that we are facing a mix of motivations; that of the people who commit
murder as an end in itself, and that of the double-talkers who use motivation
as a means to manipulate those who commit murder.
While the editors have not – this one time – come right out
and said that everybody must get on the bandwagon and utter the words “radical
Islamic terrorism,” they and others like them have been saying it all along,
and will say it again when the circumstances will be more amenable.
This being the mentality that has alienated the European
Muslims and pushed them into the arms of those who would radicalize them, the
people in America – such as the editors of the Journal and its contributors –
are adopting that same mentality in a deliberate attempt to fashion a climate
that will lead to murder. It is clear, therefore, that the aim of these people
is to start a war of the religions on the American continent.
Under these circumstances, President Obama's argument proves
to be the strongest, and the approach of curtailment he has espoused should be
used as an interim solution to dampen, if temporarily, the killing spree that America is
going through at this time.