Whether or not Chattanooga shooter Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a jihadist, opined Esquire’s Charles Pierce in a Friday blog post, the key to Thursday’s murders is that he had a quintessentially American trait: he was gun-crazy.
“He had a grudge. The basis of that grudge, whether it was rooted in a bloody-minded version of religion or an anger at the country's policies across the seas, is beside the point,” wrote Pierce. “Abdulazeez was angry at someone or something. He had a problem he could not solve and, being an American, he reached for that most American of solutions. He reached for a gun.”
From Pierce’s post (bolding added):
By all the criteria of which we boast of our exceptionalism to the world, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was as much of an American as the four people he allegedly murdered. His motivation doesn't matter. He was a citizen. His victims were citizens. Americans killing other Americans. It's an old story being rehearsed again with unfortunate frequency…
…[W]e all are pretending to be shocked today, just as we all pretended to be shocked after Charleston, and Newtown, and Oklahoma City, and Jonesboro, and Aurora…[V]iolence is as American as cherry pie. It is baked into the culture of this nation and everybody pretends not to notice until it festers and boils up again.
In that sense, and in that context, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was every bit an American. He had a grudge. The basis of that grudge, whether it was rooted in a bloody-minded version of religion or an anger at the country's policies across the seas, is beside the point. Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was angry at someone or something. He had a problem he could not solve and, being an American, he reached for that most American of solutions. He reached for a gun.
…Already, we got a con run on us about how this act was inspired by ISIS…We are claiming that a bunch of barbarians driving pick-up trucks around the desert have the ability to perform elaborate intercontinental social-media Jedi mind-tricks. In this case, to do so without any concrete evidence, is to ignore the very obvious domestic nature of the crime in question.
According to estimates, so far in 2015, on almost 27,000 occasions, an American chose that same course of action. They all had problems they had decided they could not solve. They all had grudges. They all had something that made them angry enough. And, as a result, almost 7,000 of our fellow citizens are as dead as the people in Tennessee…Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, an American citizen, chose a very American course of action. He had a problem he couldn't solve so he reached for the most American of solutions. He reached for a gun and he killed some of his fellow citizens.
