Borrowing a trademarked slogan from “Hijabman,” Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez wrote as his senior quote in the 2008 Red Bank High School yearbook: “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?”

No doubt he chose this statement at that time because he shared the same sense of frustration experienced by millions of ordinary Muslims, viewed with suspicion in post-9/11 America. And no doubt there are now many Islamophobic Americans who see those words as prophetic rather than ironic.

Indeed, the discovery of a short-lived blog attributed to Abdulazeez, writing on religious themes, will reinforce the assumption that the shooting rampage that the 24-year-old gunman went on in Chattanooga yesterday, was inspired by Islam.

Yet if Abdulazeez was an Islamic extremist, it’s strange that he would have selected the parable of the blind men and the elephant for one of the two entries on his blog.

Choosing a story that illustrates why no one has a monopoly on truth — a story shared by Sufis, Hindus, Buddhists and Jains — Abdulazeez wanted to disavow the narrow-mindedness of fellow Muslims:

As Muslims, we often do this. We have a certain understanding of Islam and keep a tunnel vision of what we think Islam is. What we know is Islam and everything else is not. And we don’t have appreciation for other points of view and accept the fact that we may be missing some important parts of the religion.

This appeal for tolerance doesn’t sound like the kind of message that would be expressed by anyone with an affinity for ISIS or any other extremist group.

Since Abdulazeez’s deadly motives will likely never be known, we can do no more than speculate about what was running through his mind yesterday.

The fact that in April he’d been stopped while apparently driving under the influence of marijuana, further undermines the notion that he was some kind of religious zealot.

Perhaps he dreaded an upcoming court appearance and ensuing parental rebukes for bringing shame upon his family.

A neighbor told the New York Times that Abdulazeez and his sisters were well behaved and polite, with strict parents and a structured lifestyle. Maybe in those circumstances, dying in a hail of bullets seemed preferable to living with a criminal record.

While the media focuses on questions about this case that will most likely never be answered, the elephant in the room — just as it was after the Charleston massacre — is gun control. (A national campaign against the Confederate flag turned out to be a very effective way of dodging that political bullet after the last mass shooting.)

The reason the contents of the mind of an Abdulazeez or a Dylann Roof suddenly become objects of national fascination, actually has nothing to do with anything of intrinsic interest about the cognitive functions of killers.

It is simply because these particular aberrant thoughts could find expression through the barrel of a gun — thoughts that could be translated into violence just as easily as attending, for instance, the Camp Jordan Arena gun show in Chattanooga last weekend.

The “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is what allowed Abdulazeez and Roof to gun down their victims, and yet this constitutional anachronism continues to be held as sacrosanct.

It is as though the gun was an indispensable extension of the American spirit, when in reality this passion for firearms is nothing more than the most graphic manifestation of American narrow-mindedness.

A country that spends billions of dollars on national security and fights an endless war on terrorism, yet is still reluctant to erect effective barriers to mass killing.

That’s plain dumb!

David Altheide writes: The future of guns in our society may be better understood if we knew more about what they mean to people and why people buy them.

Fear is a major factor for many firearm purchases. Recent trends in gun sales suggest that many citizens are becoming more fearful: Gallup poll data suggest that Americans are more fearful, at near-record high levels, about big government, compared to big business or big labor. This fear overlays the long-term public fear of crime and terrorism.

Reactions to mass killings, particularly the shooting of first-graders at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, sparked a national debate about gun control. But that, in turn, has heightened fear about government’s role in regulating assault weapons, especially popular semi-automatic models like the AK-47 and AR-15 that are bought and sold throughout both the US and the world.

Public reaction to the latest assault weapon massacre is disturbing in view of worldwide trends. Studies show that price increases for semi-automatic assault weapons reflect public moods and fears about social instability. According to author James Barr, in many countries, “The Kalashnikov index is effectively a futures market for violence.” More than 80m AK-47s circulate between countries in predictable patterns that are associated with social instability.

The cost of this weapon doubled and tripled in Iraq and Afghanistan just before the US invasions of those countries. Afghan arms merchants are selling the model favored by Osama bin Laden for $2,000, while Syrians are paying more than $2,100. Demand and prices fall only when citizens believe that things are settling down.

I’d be a bit wary about the idea of viewing the rise or fall of gun prices as a universally reliable index of social stability.

Each time there’s a new rush to buy assault weapons across America, it seems to happen for the same reason: buyers are afraid these weapons are going to get banned.

And even though fear of government is very much a part of American DNA, among those for whom this fear calls them to go out and buy more guns, I see little evidence that it serves as a driving force for broader political action — beyond perhaps attending an occasional Tea Party meeting or paying annual dues to the NRA.

In other words, as vexed as many Americans might be about the power of Big Government, so long as gun control doesn’t go further than a few cosmetic reforms like reducing permitted magazine sizes, then Americans who are afraid of having their guns taken away will remain quite content with the status quo. Indeed, sustaining the fear that gun ownership is under threat, ironically has the effect of legitimizing gun ownership.

The result is this utterly circular reality: that the freedom so many gun owners care more about protecting than any other freedom is the freedom to own a gun.

The government can assassinate U.S. citizens, monitor all electronic communications, use taxpayer money to bail out banks, fight wars without authorization of Congress, serve the interests of corporations above those of the electorate, and all of this will provoke little more than some idle grumbling.

Do anything else — just don’t take away our guns. Try and take away our guns and we’ll start another revolution!

I have my doubts. I don’t think there’s any prospect of an administration that would actually attempt to institute serious gun control — and even if it did, legislation would never get through Congress. But neither do I think in the unlikely event that such gun control was implemented would it provoke a revolution.

However fiercely independent Americans may once have been, that fierceness has given way to a more pervasive docility.