We know Orlando jihad terrorist Omar Mateen worked for a DHS contractor – the people supposed to guard our airports, federal buildings, and nuclear facilities.
We know in 2013 and 2014 his co-workers reported to his employer that he was acting weirdly and he was reported to the FBI and watched for a while. Why wasn't he fired?
Because the employer had a diversity requirement imposed by the DHS and because CAIR et. al. were sure to finance a lawsuit against them even if DHS didn't hold them to strict account for such a firing.
Of course the FBI agents, probably like the Ft. Hood shooters' military co-workers had to fear reprisals if they acted on their suspicions and stripped away his gun licence. But the media and government will, I predict, be all too happy to blame the contractor for the government’s failures...
Strong emotional reactions to dramatic events exacerbate the effects of two already serious flaws in our political discourse.
First, much of the public is ignorant about public policy issues, and forms opinions without serious consideration of the evidence. Such ignorance is not necessarily a sign of stupidity or bad moral character, but is usually just a result of rational behavior by individual citizens.
Nonetheless, if you know very little about terrorism, gun control, radical Islamism, and so on, your immediate emotional reactions to a terrorist attack are unlikely to be a good guide to policy. Anger and sorrow are not substitutes for knowledge.
Unfortunately, however, in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy, there is an even stronger instinct than usually to just “do something” that feels good in reaction to the event instead of carefully considering our options, or at least acknowledging the limitations of your insight.
At such times, politicians have incentives to cater to angry,but poorly-informed public opinion, often with harmful results. Second, most people have a strong tendency to evaluate political events in a highly biased manner.
Instead of acting as truth-seekers and weighing new evidence objectively, we often react to events “political fans,” overvaluing any new information that seems to reinforce our preexisting views, while ignoring or dismissing anything that cuts the other way. Often people re interpreting convenient evidence in ways that supports their views, even if it actually does not, a process known to experts as “confirmation bias.”
Such bias is particularly strong in an era of high political polarization, where we also have strong partisan bias in favor of our own party’s ideas, and against those associated with the opposition...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volo...to-policy/
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