The Ones to Blame

My Facebook feed this morning has been worrying about the Orlando shooting more or less the way a dog might worry about a bone.

Everyone is attacking their favourite scapegoat as being the “real problem” that must be immediately addressed.

The “real problem,” it turns out, is guns. It is the NRA. It is Republicans. It is prayer. It is belief in God. It is Christianity. It is men. We must show them no quarter. This is war!

I'm not making this up. I have seen all of these things and groups blamed for it, just this morning.

All of these are expressions of prejudice in textbook form. They are attempts, to use a parallel I have used recently elsewhere, to accuse the Jews of poisoning the wells, when a plague strikes the town. To find someone else to hurt, some “other,” because you feel bad.

Quite possibly the same impulse behind the Orlando shooting, of course.

Interestingly enough, nobody I have seen here is blaming Islam. That would be just as wrong, but that is not the issue here, I suspect. 

Muslims just don't make good scapegoats; they shoot back.

To be a bully, you also have to be a coward.