I know this is going to piss some people off but I say this because we are at war with a group of people who do not follow the rules of the Geneva Convention. In fact, the only rules they follow are ones that create nothing but evil actions from the devil himself. This is not about gun control and I don’t like profiling, but I can accept it at this time. As long as we keep it limited.
When you want to sell athletic shoes you seek your customers at sports events. When you want to help the homeless you do outreach looking for them in camps, the woods and areas of concentration such as soup kitchens. When you are looking for bad guys who blow up abortion clinics you look for the extreme agencies who want to cause harm to abortion clinics. So one would think if you are looking for people who are from a certain faith that want to cause harm to America and its friends you go to those churches looking for the ones in that group who want to do their extreme death upon America. I am a Catholic and if there were some extreme Catholics who were blowing up abortion clinics I then say, come Mr. FBI and look upon our churches, as long as it is done respectfully and rights are not violated. Come to my church and look around for the bad guys. So this means yes, go to the Mosques and look for the bad guys and leave the good guys alone. To stay out of the Mosques as a matter of policy because of profiling is, well, very stupid.
We hear that 99 percent of the great Muslim faith are nice and are peaceful people and don’t want to cause harm to America. This is most likely the truth. Did anyone look at how many people are left over from the 99 percent? Well that comes to about 15 to 16 million people who may want to cause harm to Americans.
It is time to take the handcuffs off of law enforcement, declare war against the people who are doing the harm and, with that, comes a different set of rules. We can profile as long as we do it in the most respectful way. Let’s stop making the 12 year old child with Down syndrome be treated like a terrorist at an airport in a TSA line and focus on better suspects. Sure, we need to check her out in case someone else gave her something to carry on a plane, like a bomb, without the parent’s knowledge. If TSA fails 95 percent of the time, then get rid of TSA and put real cops there, someone with the ability to look for suspicious people. I am not saying we should just assume people from the Middle East are guilty because we have seen that, recently, many of these bad guys are born here in America. But if someone is saying they hate America and praises ISIS, then there is no need to even profile because they just set their own profile up and that is one of a bad guy. When it comes to war, we need to become a little more aggressive.
I don’t want to hear that the FBI is short of manpower anymore. These guys and gals want to do a good job and limiting them ends up making them look bad when it is not them who is at fault. They need to go to where the threat level is in real time and do active investigations that are valid because they are out there making arrests, stopping other terrorist acts that were going to occur. If there is no law breaking by the suspect, like the scumbag in Orlando, their hands are again tied, so they move on to investigate other active plots. Why? Because they are shorthanded because of budgets. I can solve this problem in several ways. Let’s say we take 100 million dollars off of the Planet Mars budget and give it to the FBI because the Martians are not attacking and killing us.
Let’s use our retired police officers and put them on these colder cases and let them keep an eye on someone who was cleared at the time. I am sure many who miss their line of work who would volunteer or even work at a lesser pay while they are in retirement. I don’t think money should be a reason to shorthand the FBI but, if it is an issue, then train civilians and others who have knowledge with social media etc.… and allow them to track the individual and to report to the FBI if things seem to escalate or, why not use the computers we have to keep track and to report it? There has to be better technology we are not using that we can use. Who would have ever thought we would allow pilots on our commercial flights to have handguns and be Flight Deck Officers. But after some training, they are officers in the Air protecting the airplane. I have an old client who names an FBI agent by name and sends me emails about how this agent is doing everything criminal. He targets this agent in many different ways. As I get these emails and I see them escalate, I then forward the email to the agent so he is aware of the latest thoughts from this mentally ill person. Me knowing the client, I know that the FBI agent is doing nothing wrong. But I do my job just in case the client starts to get to a point in life where he may cause harm to the agent.
We can complain all we want about the FBI but we, the citizens who are doing the complaining, need to meet with our members of congress and let them know we want more funding so the FBI can do everything they need to do and that is to keep us safe. They, in no way, want to do a bad job but if we keep the manpower from them, all we can do is blame ourselves.
Should the government be allowed to be notified when this Orlando Shooter bought his new guns? I think so. There is a record anyway, so why not let the government know in real time. This way the Feds could have changed him from cold to hot and start investigating once again. I am not saying he should be put on a “No gun” list if he is not guilty of anything other than his thinking. Maybe if we declared war, then maybe some of his gun rights could have been taken away with a “No Gun” list.
What can we do to be ready for these mass shootings? At our shelter we had an “active shooter policy.” It was put out by Homeland Security and we had drills. Some of the people we took in were people who would give blanket threats if they were discharged. Over the years there has been incidents where shelter workers have been killed. Just last month, one of our former clients was arrested for dropping off a fake bomb at a synagogue. The FBI made the fake bomb because the man said he wanted to hurt this synagogue. So they made the fake bomb and he dropped it off. Yes, we were prepared for the worse case, including safe spaces for active shooters, certain staff members had weapons and we had 12 bulletproof vests to get our people to safety. I am not saying we would take action before the police because the police is the first one we would call. These plans were put into place before the police would arrive. We even invited the police to come and do a drill for an active shooter.
We need to reach out and teach our citizens what to do when an active shooter is in your presence. The rule is to RUN, if you can’t run then HIDE in a safe place and if that does not work FIGHT the attacker as a last resort. For instance, when he was changing clips of new ammo. This would be a good time to try to run or jump the attacker. Even playing dead under an already poor dead person would work. In the 1950’s, our civil defense people developed films to show in the schools, it was called “Duck and Cover.” This is how the government wanted us to be safe if the USA was being bombed. See the below video. The government needs to teach us how to respond to a mass shooting.
I don’t have all the answers when it comes to this but years before 9/11 it was our think tank which actually was our first agency of COSAC that said Airport Security was at its worst and we wrote letters to Uncle Sam to get rid of the contractors at airports and to use real law enforcement screening the passengers. We bought weapons such as a Walkman used for the radio that had a small .25 cal gun inside its case. We then made flyers and sent them to airports as a way of keeping informed. This was in 1998. We looked at so many airport security checkpoints and most of the time we saw the security person not doing their job. They were too busy talking to their other workers about music and ball games. Look, we have a problem in America and we need to fix it but we can’t fix it unless we push our leaders to do more. Our politicians need to stop fighting and stop name calling and just do their damn job. Today, pray for our law enforcement so they have what they need and pray for our leaders who need to fix the best place on earth and that is The United States of America.
Written By: Sean Cononie
DIRECTOR OF THE COSAC FOUNDATION, INC
DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST TERRORISM, INC
PRESIDENT OF STOPPING HATE CRIMES USA
BOARD MEMBER OF THE HOMELESS VOICE, INC
Some people wonder why a homeless agency devotes time to terrorism. Actually our first agency, basically a think tank dealt with the issues of airport security. Besides all of this, many people will become homeless every time there is a terrorist attack. Why? Because some of these families will become homeless as they become dysfunctional from the sadness in their heart. They won’t go to work, causing them to lose their job and then their homes and some families will break apart from the stress of the whole situation. All these issues can and will cause homelessness. As we have seen in the events of 9/11, many people lost their jobs at airports because some people did not want to fly and then the businesses at the airport in turn felt the impact, causing staff to be cut at places such as restaurants located in the actual airport.