Anger management

It's been an angry, angry weekend. In the south of France, puce men in adidas trainers fought running battles with police, locals and anyone else who'd take them on, while 7,630km away a man with issues walked into a nightclub and shot dead 50 people with an assault rifle, the kind intended for the battlefield.

On the back of these events, people rightfully became angrier still. In the one case, it was UEFA, the French interior minister, football pundits, normal fans, taxi drivers and the bloke to your right in the pub, all sounding off about the latest hooligan atrocity. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, America became ever-more divided across different fault lines: those in favour of gun control, those constitutionally against it; those who saw Omar Mateen's murderous spree in Pulse purely as a homophobic hate crime versus those who saw it purely as another Islamic terrorist attack, and those who saw it simply as another ocean of crimson on America's already blood-drenched record on gun crime.

The anger from Orlando even spilled over onto late night British TV: The Guardian writer Owen Jones stormed off the set of Sky News' review of the newspaper first editions as a discussion between him, anchor Mark Longhurst and columnist Julia Hartley-Brewer overheated as it began to compare Mateen's killing spree with the Bataclan attack by ISIS terrorists in Paris last November.

An increasingly agitated Jones saw the Orlando outrage purely as homophobic, though he acknowledged that it was also terrorism. "It is one of the worst atrocities committed against LGBT people in the western world for generations," he fumed at Longhurst and Hartley-Brewer, "and it has to be called out as such." You could see an angry microphone-shedding departure coming, and thus it did.

Opinions were divided on Twitter as to whether Jones, who had pre-warned on the very same medium before the show that he'd been wound up by events in Florida. Some felt Longhurst wasn't giving him fair voice, others branded Jones petulant and trying to politicise the attacks by accusing Sky of trying to deflect the homophobic angle (telling Longhurst that he did not understand "because he wasn’t gay").

Emotions were clearly running high. Jones made the correct view that, had the attack been on a synagogue, the media narrative would be one of anti-semitism. Longhurst bravely tried to push the case that the attacks weren't about any one interest, but that people had died in the nightclub, but Jones eventually decided "I've had enough of this. I'm going home, sorry." and removed his microphone and exited stage right. He was angry. Proper angry.

Twitter/Jon Sopel

Meanwhile, back on Twitter, full-scale lunacy was in flow. Reliably, presidential candidate Donald Trump waded in with a couple of his ill-considered statements, one which effectly tried to say "I told you so [about muslims]" while fake-modestly shying away from accepting any congratulations for doing so.

As usual it was all about him, and the bile from both anti- and pro-Trump tweeters took on a particularly caustic nature. With little encouragement, unsurprisingly, Trump inflamed further frenzied accusations of Islamaphobia and anti-Islamaphobia. Perhaps that's what he wanted. Further chaos in an already chaotic reaction.

Immigration, however, wasn't the only Trump fault line opened up: his views on gun control, once more repeating the view that had Pulse not been in a gun-free zone, people in the club would have been armed and able to defend themselves. Somehow, I think not. He peddled this same line in the wake of November 13. Having two good friends of mine get out of the Bataclan alive because there wasn't an all-out repeat of the OK Corral will remain one of the things in my life for which  I will be forever thankful.

The attackers in November had been supplied by their ISIS quartermasters. Mateen, on the other hand, had acquired, for a price somewhere around $700, an AR-15-style rifle, the civilian cousin of the American military's M-16 and M-4 assault weapons. Even in its civvie form, the AR-15, its derivatives and its clones, have a vicious rate of semi-automatic fire. An apparently trained shooter like Mateen would have been able to down many of his 50 victims In minutes with few of them knowing anything about it. Smartphone footage from outside the club attest to a rapid sequence of gunshots, something close to what a soldier would call suppression fire. In a crowded nightclub, much like a crowded music hall, that ammounts to cything people down.

And so the pro-gun lobby worked themselves into a frenzy, and the anti-gun lobby did likewise. In fairness, there are arguments on both side that carry water. But the question is, where does it end? At what point is it right that a murderously-inclined individual, with hate crime of any sort on his or her mind, can walk into a shop and, after handing over cash and a seemingly rudimentary amount of background checking transpires, walk out with a military-grade weapon? One, too, responsible for the deaths of 26 teachers and children at Sandy Hook primary school, 12 cinemagoers in Aurora, and 14 public employees in San Bernadino?

I understand the attraction of shooting as a sport. I have American friends who do it. I even have close relatives who have been practicing archers for as long as I can remember. I understand, too, that in many rural and remote parts of the United States, a rifle or a handgun is a necessary colonial throwback, a tool as commonplace as a pitchfork or a tractor. But that, somehow, doesn't discriminate for the murderous and the unhinged getting their hands on the self-same tools. That's why things had to change in Britain. Until Dunblane, firearms ownership was already strictly regulated. But on that occasion, Thomas Hamilton - killing sixteen school children and a teacher - led to the UK adopting some of the most stringent firearms regulations in the world. They may not have stopped gun crime in inner cities, but the blanket ban certainly put weapons designed for war out of the hands of those of diminished responsibility. A sad curtailment of a legitimate sport, but necessarily so.

There have, then, been many reasons this weekend-past for blood pressure to rise and tempers to flare. Acts of racism, xenophobia, knuckle-scraping on an industrial scale, homophobia, islamaphobia, hate and all the demons that bunk with it. But while people seek to pursue their causes and political agendas - no matter how worthy - we should also spare a thought for the 50 families now grieving for their sons and brothers. They may have been drawn from the LGBT community, and were also exclusively drawn from Florida's hispanic community, but they were also drawn from our community: human people. And that, more than anything else, is a cause worth getting angry about.