I feel like trying to figure out motivation is pointless. Whether it’s a church full of black people, a nightclub of gay people, an elementary school of 1st and 2nd graders …so many factors go into why someone would do this, no one can ever figure it out in time to prevent the next. I wish the press would just report it as “people” being slaughtered.
good background on the guy…
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-life-of-violent-threats-paved-way-for-orlando-attack-1466127324
@balletmom:
" I wish the press would just report it as “people” being slaughtered."
The problem with that is it then allows people to ignore issues in our society and to pretend that things like discrimination and hate don’t exist. For example, if you reported that the gunman shot 9 people in a church in south carolina, it makes it seem like a random event in an otherwise great society. If we reported the club shooting in Orlando as 49 people killed and 50 wounded by a gunman, it makes it seem like the work of a random koo koo, but if we examine the motive it makes people realize our world has problems. Back in the 60’s, when 4 black girls were killed when rednecks bombed the church they were in, if it had been reported as 4 girls killed by some whackjob, it wouldn’t have raised the consciousness of the viciousness of what was going on down south as much as bring home that 4 little girls were killed because they were black.
Newtown was a deranged person who had access to guns, and I wish it had done more to spur action about keeping guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them (in that case, both the mother and the son). A shooting by a deranged person has one impact, a killing by someone doing so out of hate is a different beast, and it is important that people see the consequences of hate. Put it this way, a standard line among homophopic religious groups has been that this is about the right to their beliefs, that homosexuality is a sin, etc, but what a shooting like this points out is that the way they express that and more importantly, their followers express that, has consequences, that believing something is a sin is one thing (since we are all sinners), saying that someone because they think they are a sinner is a pervert or a deviant or broken or a degenerate and should be locked up, fired or are the equivalent of a pedophile or a bestiophile is what fires up hate and violence.
The Wall Street Journal article is behind a paywall, but from other accounts, the story is clear. This guy gave so many warnings that he might commit jihad, mass murder, that he was practically screaming it.
I saw a gun store owner last night on the news say that when Mateen came in wanting body armor he told him he didn’t carry it. Mateen then calls someone on his cell phone, ranting (not in English). Mateen then wants to buy a lot of ammo which the gun store doesn’t sell him. The store employee then calls the FBI and reported this suspicious behavior.
This combined with his association with a suicide bomber, the domestic abuse, his jihadist rantings to co-workers, really what does it take?
This is not a case where no one came forward. Lots of people came forward and law enforcement did nothing.
@zobroward
I read the WSJ article on him. 31 school disciplinary events between 1992-99, including assaulting a student. On top of that, another 15 school diciplinary events between 1999-2001 involving 48 days of suspension. The kid bragged he was in w Hezobollah & w Al Queda-- 2 organizations which hate each other.
I got the impression he didn’t understand what the heck he supposedly believed in and just liked being angry all the time.
I heard the first gun store owner say he called the police, but the police say they have no record of the call.
He threatened to shoot partygoers at a BBQ when pork touched his hamburger. Sheesh.
And now comes speculation of a conspiracy.
One (just one so far, thank goodness) fairly obnoxious radio talk show host this morning entertained calls from people who apparently believe that there was intent by the FBI to cover for this guy all along, given the abandoned surveillance and the report that agents instructed his wife not to publicly disclose his sexuality. Have these suspicious people asked themselves, ‘whom would benefit from such a conspiracy?’
The “false flag” people are the worst. Really? You think the Sandy Hook killings were ** staged? ** Go live in a cave somewhere and leave the rest of us alone.
I don’t think there is any FBI conspiracy, just sloppiness. There might be others, besides the wife, who knew what he was planning. He signed his house over to his brother-in-law. That’s quite odd. Did the brother-in-law even ask why? I know I would if out of the blue someone just signed over a house to me with no reason.
Yes, @greenwitch , there are people who believe that. I was reading comments yesterday from people who believe passionately that Orlando was a false flag operation. They seem especially upset about the mother who was on several shows crying because she couldn’t find any news about her son. Proof positive that this was all faked, apparently. There’s no point in trying to reason with those folks, as they are obviously not living in the same world the rest of us are.
GMT, I think you’re exactly right. I think the guy was filled with homophobic self-loathing; in addition he was angry about being dissed because he didn’t get a police job he wanted. Add in mental instability. Then he discovered an ideology which matched up with his ethnicity, and told him his anger was justified and he should take revenge, so he latched onto it.
I don’t think he ‘just latched onto’ an ideology. I think he was steeped in it his whole life. His father was pro-Taliban. His BIL, according to some sources, is also. He cheered the 9/11 attacks when he was in elementary school, FTLOG. That kind of radical hate, as a child, was inculcated in him from an early age.
People who believe in conspiracy theories are typically the dumbest people around.
I think this was a case of a man filled with rage and self-loathing who chose to direct that towards jihadist causes as a way to make sense out of these emotions and because of the exposure he received as a child and online. It seems like a situation of suicide by cop (where someone who wants to die threatens to shoot an officer to provoke the officer to shoot him), except in this case it was suicide by terrorism. I know that he tried to buy armor, but he had to realize that ultimately he would end up dead. I think the armor was just to extend his ability to kill. (My understanding of the report on his intended purchase was that the store didn’t have his name so it probably would have been difficult for the police or FBI to track him down). His various calls to the media and Facebook post seem a bit like someone who doth protest too much. I think he wanted to kill, he wanted to die, and he wanted to end up in heaven despite his homosexual desires.
We will never eradicate the world of hate. We will never eradicate the world of radical religious terrorism. We can obliterate ISIS, but before ISIS there were other groups and after ISIS there will be others. And although we need to address ISIS for a whole host of reasons, radical Islamists have been the cause of very very few of our mass shootings. Solving our country’s problem with mass shooting casualties is a different problem that requires a different solution. Unfortunately, we have such paranoia among our own American born citizens that some are unwilling to give up their right to an assault weapon and others are too much in the financial pocket of the NRA to do what they must know is right.
I read an article somewhere in which the shooter apparently texted his wife to tell her that he loved her.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/orlando-nightclub-massacre/orlando-gunman-omar-mateen-wife-exchanged-texts-during-rampage-n594011
I don’t think he was necessarily gay, honestly. I think it’s perfectly conceivable that a hateful piece of trash like himself was scoping or just infiltrating the community.
Regardless, I’m so over the notion that all homophobes are closet gay people. It’s an easy way to excuse and redirect the very major contributions to homophobia made by straight people. If he was or he wasn’t, **** him.
Who is saying anything of the sort?
All we’re saying is that some homophobes hate LGBTQ+ people so much because they have misplaced self-hatred for their own sexuality.
Other homophobes are just bigots and haters.
^^ indeed!
I have never met an intolerant and just plain old mean miscreant in my life who was personally happy. To paraphrase the famous words of John Boehner, they are the most miserable SOBs you’ll ever meet. Omar Mateen fits that description.
You aren’t saying that, but I think it is a preconceived belief that I think is dangerous. Even before any of this info was coming out, people were saying he’s got to be gay. YMMV
He probably did love his wife. He probably loved his first wife too. There is a fine line between gay and bi. It is easy to say the killer was a bad person or some other negative word. That makes him fit neatly into one’s preconceived notions. We can then just hope there aren’t more “bad people” out there and all of those neat little labels (gay, bi, self-hating, self-loathing, miscreant, bad person) fail to understand that he may have had sane reasons for what he did.
I’m not in any way defending him.
I’m just repeating what I said earlier in the thread. We, the USA, kill people too. We do it as an act of war and we target people engaging us in war. Not everyone appreciates or agrees with US policy on these matters. Is it then crazy to try to seek revenge?
Again, I am not defending the killer.
I’m saying that actions like his are not the random acts of bad people. They are not the actions of necessarily evil people either. There are lots of things many of us would rather not talk about. That’s why we try so hard to fit things into easy to manage labels and preconceived notions.
It is clear, though, that he had trouble in school and anger issues and beat his first wife, etc., etc. The one gun dealer that would not sell him body armor did report the incident to the police but that doesn’t mean the FBI got that information or had time to act on it.
The about-to-be-signed California budget for next year contains $5 million to fund a UC research center on gun violence. Federal funding for this type of research has been prohibited by Congress. The UC center will “focus on both the causes and consequences of gun violence as well as the effectiveness of existing laws.”