As many of you may know, there was a shooting at a gay bar in Orlando (its name is Pulse). Many were quick to label it a terrorist attack, while the LGBT+ community argued that it was a hate crime. As both parties are set in their convictions, many times neither will hear the other side of the story. Here's the catch- defining the attack as one of them doesn't necessarily negate it from being defined as the other.
According to the FBI, a hate crime is " a criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity” and Domestic terrorism" means activities with the following three characteristics:
1) involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law
2) appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping
3) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.
In my mind, that means that a hate crime could be considered a type of terrorism and that terrorism could be simply defined as a hate crime with an agenda. The attack fits the description for both, the only question left is whether the attack was directed at the American people or at the LGBT community. Since the attacker was fatally shot before he could be put in police custody and questioned, we may never truly know what the motive was for certain. However, who’s to say that there was only one motive? He could have had multiple influencers and reasons for the attack. Whatever the cause, the important thing is that as a country we work towards making sure that it doesn’t happen again (or at least put as many obstacles in the way as possible)
The only thing that the arguments are doing is further dividing the sides when we should be cooperating to try to find a solution. This isn’t an isolated occurrence- in 2013 alone, the United States had almost 6,000 hate crimes and 20 percent (approximately 1,200) of them were committed based on victims’ sexual orientation, according to the FBI. The overall amount of terrorist attacks in the United States has declined since 2001, but that doesn’t mean that the severity of them has gone down as well. Hopefully, the United States can work together to find a solution rather than working against the other side based on minor disagreements.
