Texas Senator Ted Cruz believes that allowing “Syrian Muslim refugees” into the United States following last Friday’s ISIS attacks in Paris that left 129 people dead is “absolute lunacy.” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, another GOP presidential hopeful, was one of the first of 27 governors (all but one, Republicans) who now insist that Syrian refugees are not welcome in their states.
Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator who, like Cruz, wants to be the GOP standard-bearer in next year’s presidential election, had supported offering safe-harbor to Syrians fleeing war. After Paris, however, he’s reversed that position.
“We won’t be able to take more refugees,” a pragmatic Rubio said on Sunday. “It’s not that we don’t want to….It’s that we can’t.”
Rubio explained his change of heart by offering this risk-analysis story problem: “You allow 10,000 people in. And 9,999 of them are innocent people feeling oppression. And one of them is a well-trained ISIS fighter. What if we get one of them wrong? Just one of them wrong.”
I applaud Senator Rubio. His proposal is clearly based on Vice-President Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine,” which held that any potential terrorist threat that was even 1 percent credible had to be treated as a certainty. One percent may have been good enough in the simpler, more innocent days following 9/11. But as the world has grown more dangerous, Cruz is invoking what, should he become president, will be known as “The 1/100th of One Percent Doctrine.”
Cruz and the others are on to something, but if we really want to keep the Homeland safe, we have to go further. Much further.
Let’s drill down into the threat database
In 2015, 151 people have died in France from terrorism. With a population of 66 million, that gives France a terrorism death rate of .23 per 100,000 residents for the current year.
So far this year, no Americans have died from foreign terrorist attacks carried out on U.S. soil – for a death rate of 0.00 per 100,000 residents.
But threats do remain.
Rubio’s state of Florida has a population of about 20 million and 987 Floridians were murdered with guns in 2010 (the latest year for which statistics are available). That’s a gun murder rate of 3.9 per 100,000. To put that in perspective, the average Floridian is 17 times more likely to be shot to death than a French citizen is to be killed by a terrorist.
Texas, the state served by Senator Cruz (population 25 million), had 1,246 gun deaths, or 3.2 per 100,000 residents. Governor Jindal’s Louisiana ranks first in the nation with a whopping 7.7 gun murders per 100,000 people.
I have a solution that will make Americans safer – especially those living in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana – and destroy ISIS at the same time.
Clearly, Syrian refugees aren’t the problem here. Gun owners are. But they could also be the solution.
Hear me out.
Most gun owners are responsible people. More than that, they are great defenders of the Constitution (at least of the 2nd Amendment) and they proudly declare their patriotism every chance they get. If you’ve ever attended an annual NRA gathering, as I have, you know that there’s more red, white, and blue bunting on display there than at all the 4th of July celebrations across the U.S. put together.
However, as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan wisely pointed out today when calling for a “pause” in the flow of Syrian refugees into this country: “It is better to be safe than sorry.”
Indeed.
So, here is what we do: we must “pause” the citizenship of gun owners and ship them off (fully armed, of course) to Syria. Sure, some of them are bound to be terrorists who will swell the ranks of ISIS. But most are patriotic Americans and they could make the critical difference in toppling the terrorist organization.
I can hear some of you asking: How would that work when we don’t know who owns guns and who doesn’t?
I’m glad you asked that question.
In fact, we have a pretty good idea of likely gun owners. Not perfect, mind you, but, you know, adequate. According to a recent study in Injury Prevention, most gun owners are married white men, aged 55 and older. That narrows the pool considerably. Combine this knowledge with statistics on gun ownership by state, apply that to states with the highest gun murder rates and: Mission Accomplished. In Florida 32.5 percent of residents own guns. The figure is 35.7 percent in Texas and 44.5 percent in Louisiana. All we have to do is round up those percentages of married, white +55 year-old men in each of those states and ship ‘em off to Syria.
To those naïfs and ACLUers whining that my proposal is too extreme, or hard-hearted, or unconstitutional, or unworkable, my response is simple. To paraphrase Senator Rubio: It’s not that I want to do this. It’s that we have to.
You’re welcome.
