Crises have this way of turning normally rational people into jittery jive talkers.
Americans were reeling this past weekend from the news out of Orlando, Fla., where someone opened fire in a nightclub and killed 49 people in the worst mass murder in U.S. history.
The police killed the gunman.
It turns out the monster who did this deed was an American, born in New York state. He was a Muslim. His parents were Afghan immigrants. He supposedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before committing his horrendous act.
Two days later, a guy walks into an Amarillo Walmart store, takes a couple of hostages, fires a gun into the ceiling and then is shot to death by Amarillo Police Department SWAT officers.
How did the hair-trigger rumor mill handle this? It went wild.
The gunman was “identified” — by whom remains unclear, I guess — as a Somali Muslim immigrant. I would bet anyone some real American money that a lot of Amarillo residents suspected the guy had terrorist leanings.
He didn’t. It turns out he wasn’t from Somalia. He was from Iran. He wasn’t even a Muslim. He was a Baha’i, which is one of the most peaceful religions on the planet.
Mohammad Sadegh Moghaddam left Iran in 2003. He came to the United States to start a new life. He fled the repression and terror of his homeland. He was married; he had children. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
This man worked at Walmart. But he got into a dispute with a store manager. Something snapped.
The tragedy in Orlando won’t wash away anytime soon. Americans are fearful of what might happen in their communities, no matter where they live.
Amarillo is not immune from that fear, as we learned from the incident at Walmart and the reaction in its immediate aftermath.
That fear, though, mustn’t consume us and lead us toward erroneous conclusions about those who react badly to circumstances that lead to violence.