This column was written on Tuesday, June 14 in the wake of the Orlando tragedies, but was held in the interim.

“God walked into a bar…”

Only it’s not god, and it’s no joke. A man walked into a bar thinking like he was god and proceeded to perpetrate the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States. He was correcting us for something that he felt was wrong. Maybe he was simultaneously correcting himself for flirting with temptation.

Omar Mateen’s shooting spree at Pulse nightclub in Orlando Saturday night accounts for more deaths than all the murders in Orlando combined from the previous three years. It exceeds numbers from Virginia Tech and Newtown. It was a bloodbath of unfathomable proportions. And it probably could have been avoided.

Whether we call it terrorism or a hate crime doesn’t matter — semantics won’t change what happened. But I wince when I hear people say they won’t let terrorism run them around or change their behavior, because we’re forced to give in to it by our very nature. We have to process, discuss, argue, and grieve. Saying we won’t give in presents a brave front: sure, we won’t stop going to nightclubs. Us LGBTQ folks won’t stop being who we are or cower at home in our closets for fear of whatever evil might be lurking. But culturally speaking, terrorism forces us to give in at least on some level because it demands a response. And when people die, we can’t ignore it.

Our ceremonious value of individual human life is being mocked.

Up until recently, I’d never had really strong feelings about gun control. I don’t like guns much, don’t feel comfortable holding them and don’t aspire to learn how to use them with greater precision.

Certainly not in the years beforehand, but after getting sober I briefly harbored a fantasy about becoming law enforcement. In that case, becoming a trained shot would have been part of the plan, but I was already in my 30’s when that daydream bubble launched above my head. The reality is that I lacked the balls to even investigate for fear of being told I was too old.

When my father died, I found a Walther PPK in his apartment. The sight of it startled me. I brought it to a pawn shop and used the proceeds to purchase a pricey Goorin Brothers hat I’d been coveting. I like to think I transformed his gun—the type favored by James Bond, by the way—into a weapon of fashion.

Omar Mateen had been under FBI surveillance for potential terrorist ties, and yet he was still afforded the freedom to hold a valid firearms license. This goes well beyond defying logic. At least in part, it puts the blame for what happened back on this country, our people, our policies. We fucked up. Carrying a gun shouldn’t be something the majority of US citizens are engaged in doing, so it doesn’t seem too far a stretch to say that if you’ve been investigated by the FBI for worrisome foreign alignments, your right to possess a gun is off the table even after you’ve been cleared. That’s not discrimination. It’s really just sensible thinking.

Don’t like it? You’re free to leave.

I’m not saying that Mateen wouldn’t have found a way to get a weapon without a license. But given his history, in letting him do so legally, we become complicit in his crime. And now, like the forty-nine innocent club goers he murdered, he’s dead. We can’t punish him, even if that would’ve just meant making him wait on death row. He got off too easy.

Mateen was mocking our freedoms. Certainly he turned the right to bear arms into a mockery. Essentially he has told us that our attempt to regulate possession of firearms is ludicrous since it doesn’t work properly, and yet we allow gays and lesbians to run rampant in public. Apparently, our priorities are way off base.  

According to his father, Mateen was enraged by having witnessed two men kissing publicly in Miami. Apparently he was even more upset that his three year old son saw the PDA as well. This is the logic the elder Mateen used in making his statement that, “…the killings had nothing to do with religion.”

Not so fast, Pops. They did and they didn’t. It’s not so simple.

While the killings may not have sprung directly from any specific religious ideal, Mateen’s confusion about who he was and how that related to the world around him is rooted in a spiritual disconnect. He was just one of many people caught in a frustrating spot between two worlds. If he was struggling with his sexuality, as has been speculated, that only exacerbates the problem. He was raised to believe certain things, but is existing in a free land where the majority of people around him don’t share his beliefs. Our government doesn’t share his beliefs. There’s irony inherent in the fact that our beliefs allowed him to be born here and to coexist here with us. We afforded him the opportunity to do what he did to us.

Even if it seems fairly plain on the surface, it’s got to be disillusioning. To grow up being taught certain ideals only to find oneself surrounded by people behaving otherwise must stir inner conflict. Looking at ways to spiritually reconnect might lead someone who’s already feeling confused and conflicted—angry, even—to align themselves with more distinct, radical bodies of thought. Voila, a terrorist is born. It’s similar to Gang Theory.

There are plenty more arrogant mockeries in the Orlando tragedy and in what led up to it. By taking hostages and lying about having accomplices and explosives, he further exploited our system of civilian protections and value of human life, forcing officers to walk on eggshells while he attempted to run the show. 

He also mocked our collective ignorance about extremist groups and ideologies by saying different things at different times. Initially he claimed familial connections to Al Qaeda. At Pulse on Saturday, he declared his affiliation to ISIS/the Islamic State. At another time, he said he was a member of Hezbollah, a Shiite group that’s in conflict with the other two.

Mateen even mocked our sensitivity to bullying. He told the FBI that worrisome comments he’d made to coworkers about wanting to kill people were a result of being teased for his Muslim heritage. Apparently it was believable. We will never be done wiping the egg off of our faces.

A recent report in the New York Times entitled “How They Got Their Guns” laid out the chilling truth: documented mental health problems and criminal histories did little to prevent half of the gunmen in our 16 most recent mass shootings from obtaining their weapons. Really? We’re so busy arguing over how much Hillary’s Armani jacket cost that we can’t seem to protect our citizens from seriously dangerous people.

As I lay in bed last night letting my imagination wander, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe Donald Trump hired Omar Mateen to commit this brutal crime. It certainly allows him to add a few I Told Ya So’s into his toxic stew of misinformation. And really, to a guy like Trump, what’s a couple dozen homos in trade for the oval office? Stranger things have happened.

Regardless, Trump’s trumpeting is way off base. This isn’t about profiling. I know full well that horrible, ignorant assumptions are made about people of faith all the time. This is about people on the fringe, angry about their lack of affiliation and living in a world where they’re constantly exposed to (and potentially tempted by) behavior which they believe is sinful. Having faith means knowing that spiritual forces will handle the world’s sinful imbalances, but perhaps living in the United States is too much of a strain on certain belief systems. Which isn’t to imply that people engaged in that spiritual struggle aren’t welcome here. This is America. Of course they are. But maybe New Millennium America isn’t a reality suited to all beliefs.

Straying from faith sometimes means taking matters into one’s own hands and aligning anger with extremist behavior. It’s not faith or any one religion that’s the culprit here; it’s the loss of it and the temptation to play god that presents the real danger.