Hours after the horrific massacre at an Orlando gay club last Sunday, a narcissist who has a real shot at being our President for the next four years, God forbid, politicized the tragedy by re-stating his solution: ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Hillary Clinton responded, reasonably enough, I thought: “A ban on Muslims would not have stopped this attack. Neither would a wall.” The gunman, Omar Siddiqui Mateen, was an American citizen born in Queens, not far from where the Donald entered this world.

Last week, too, Britain suffered its own crisis. Just a few days before the country is due to vote on whether to remain in the European Union or leave it (“Brexit”), Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox (who supported remaining) was stabbed and shot to death. Her assailant, a suspected white supremacist, was shouting “Britain First!” during the attack. The response by both sides of the debate was immediate and total: stop campaigning. No politicizing of the situation, just an outpouring of grief. Major events planned for the weekend were canceled.

I note this, not as a criticism of my adopted country — I think what happened over here is more about Donald Trump’s desperate need for attention than a general response by his party — but as perhaps indicative of my native country’s occasional willingness to stand back from politics and recognize that “a life is a life.” From what I read, all sides in the debate, no matter how extreme their views, mourn Jo Cox.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Islamic terrorism in general. Listening to the likes of Trump and Ted Cruz, you’d think we were all fighting for our lives against Muslims. In this view, all Muslims over here are rabidly anti-American, wanting to institute Sharia law, put women in burqas and make homosexuality a capital offense.

Actually, American Muslims are pretty liberal compared to many of us. A 2014 Pew survey found that 45 percent of Muslims living in the U.S. think that homosexuality should be accepted by society, a higher percentage than evangelical Christians, Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Forty percent of them support same-sex marriage (compared with 53 percent of all Americans), and they’re right up there with the general 65-70 percent of us who favor civil rights protection of LGBTs in jobs and housing. Even the claim that all Islamic countries condemn gays is up for grabs: according to this site, homosexuality is officially condoned in five Muslim countries (Mali, Jordan, Indonesia, Turkey, Albania), while being gay is not against the law per se in many others (including Iraq) with majority Muslim populations.

I have no idea whether the Orlando shooting should be classified as a “Muslim terrorist” attack (Mateen doesn’t seem to have had any formal association with ISIS), but compared with homicides in the U.S., terrorism (of any type) is small potatoes. A total of 3,369 people have been killed by terrorists in the U.S. since 1963, including 2,996 in the 9/11 attacks. That works out to about 70 per year on average (8 per year if the outlier of 9/11 is excluded). Which, compared to our annual homicide rate of nearly 14,000, is a blip: half a percent of murders in the U.S. can be attributed to terrorism.

Banning Muslims or building walls wouldn’t have saved the 168 people who died in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, perpetrated by two U.S. militia movement sympathizers. (FEMA)

So despite the high profile of Muslim terrorist attacks kept alive by Islamophobic politicians, we are not under siege. And if we’re going to be afraid of anyone, it’s not foreign-born gunmen: US citizens have committed 80 percent of terrorist attacks since 9/11. In the 14 years since, not one domestic terrorist attack has been committed by a foreign terrorist organization. A good analysis of recent terrorist attacks is found here on Vox, which points out that “domestic terrorist attacks have, since 2001, been more commonly perpetrated by right-wing groups than by Islamic extremists.”

Vox graph

Maybe somebody else here can bring up gun control. I’m done for now.

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.