As it turns out, I was on vacation and out of reach of cable news for the entire week, including during the horrific shooting in Chattanooga. (This no doubt came as a relief to some of our readers, though rumors of my early acceptance to the Mars Relocation Program were exaggerated.) I was still picking up details and some of the mainstream media coverage of the tragedy via social media, though, and I rather wish I hadn’t even had access to that. Upon arriving home and switching on CNN I was treated to Jane Harman talking to Wolf Blitzer and singing the praises of both the media and law enforcement for not jumping to conclusions as to the possible motives of Muhammad Youssed Abdulazeez for the attacks. Such assumptions, she assured us, could lead to unfairly biasing the story against the young man. One of CNN’s other experts, Tom Fuentes, wasn’t even sure if it was a Muslim name. (We wouldn’t want to assume, would we?)

This all came on the heels of incidents which you already read about here, such as Andrea Mitchell asking one of the killer’s HS classmates if he was into guns or hunting. We just wouldn’t want to assume because that would be wrong. And yet some of the few, early known facts might lead one to a reasonable suspicion, wouldn’t they? He was a Muslim immigrant from an Arab country. His father was a Palestinian. He had a blog with “interesting” comments. His yearbook was rapidly brought up for examination. There was that trip to Jordan which his friends said “changed him.” (Possibly multiple trips as we learn more.) True, none of that was definitive, so words such as “alleged” or “potentially” should certainly have been included. But it was verboten to even speculate?

Oddly enough the media had no trouble speculating when Dylan Roof shot up that church, did they? The authorities weren’t even finished dragging the bodies out when they were already talking about his social media posts and saying that this was most likely some evil racist who wanted to shoot up some black people. And you know what, media? You were right. The country is not chock full of hateful, violent racists as you so often like to suggest, but there are definitely some dead enders out there. And in Roof’s case you found one. Having found him, as virtually every conservative I’ve spoken to agrees, we now need to give him his full, due legal process and then strap him to a board and pump him full of poison. We found a monster, and when that happens you need to kill the monster.

So why, I might ask, is it so hard for you to make the mental leap to at least suggest that Muhammad Youssed Abdulazeez might have been a hate filled Muslim terrorist bent on killing members of our military, our police, and other citizens of the Great Satan? You were ready to convict Roof inside of an hour (and rightly so, as it turns out) but this monster needed to be treated with kid gloves? I mean, I could see if the circumstances were different. If Abdulazeez had shot up the homes of some relatives we might readily assume it was some domestic dispute gone badly awry. If he’d shot up any number of other targets where he at least had some direct connections to the victims, this might have been something else entirely. But he didn’t. He shot up our uniformed heroes. He attacked our military and our first responders, right out of the Jihadi 101 playbook. So why not at least pose the question?

For a prime example of snark which answers this rather obvious query, check out Streiff at Red State. The sarcasm is dripping to the point of being toxic, but it’s as close to being humorous as you’ll find in a dark hour such as this. And it’s absolutely true. There may be a one in a million chance that Abdulazeez isn’t an ISIS flavored, terrorist wannabe, but the odds are that he is. And even if his inspiration didn’t come from ISIS specificially, I really don’t much care. Maybe he wanted to join Boko Haram. Perhaps he wanted to start his own Muslim terror group. It’s all pretty much the same. And yet significant figures in our media won’t say it because that would hurt the feelings of the wrong people and make them look insensitive toward a politically sympathetic group.

Here’s a tip for you. You were right about Roof. And your unspoken instincts were right about Abdulazeez. You should have spoken up in the same fashion. If you had, you’d look slightly less ridiculous next week when this turns out to be exactly what it looks like. And with that, let’s get to the exit question. Is it finally time to start arming and hardening the recruiting stations? And perhaps automatic carry permits for service members in uniform traveling to and from work at those offices. Even in the bluest, most gun-grabby states we make allowances for a few people to have weapons close at hand. Surely our military qualifies. If the marines in Chattanooga had been armed that little cretin wouldn’t have gotten off very many rounds. Sounds to me like something that could be made to happen rather quickly without a lot of expense.

I can think of the families of four people who might have appreciated it quite a bit.