Where is there any evidence he worked at the club? Don’t believe that is accurate.
Latest report has the gunman encountered an off duty police officer who was working security at the club.
he was a security guard… not at the club
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/us/orlando-shooter-omar-mateen/index.html
he rented a car to get to orlando he was not from close by.
The president is scheduled to give a press conference in 45 minutes.
I don’t buy the father’s statement at all, to me that is just him trying to deflect from the root cause of this, which likely is Islamic teaching IMO.You don’t need to be religious to hate gays, but this kind of thing is not routine homophobia. The father claims his son was angry because he saw two men kissing, but usually when someone has that kind of anger, violence happens spontaneously, they might attack someone they think as gay, but in this case the guy planned this, he had to rent a car, he had his weapons with him, knew where to go, and went there, and then sat there and gunned down over 100 people in cold blood. My wife suggested maybe he was someone struggling with being gay himself, which wouldn’t be surprising, but to take it to this level, this level of hate, something beyond mere homophobia was at work. At the very least, he grew up in a culture and religion (Afghany/Moslem) that to this day is one of the most homophobic, that if he himself was gay, would heighten the self loathing and trigger this, but I don’t think this was just one person’s hate of gays, I don’t buy that, something amplified it. Religion is one of the biggest amplifiers of hate there is, along with politics and being a Jets fan (towards one own’s team), and I doubt this was just his own stuff alone.
Put it this way, I would bet that a lot of people who are saying this is horrible, who are making the right noises publicly, privately are saying things like the Lt. Governor, basically saying the victims are experiencing the wages of sin, a sick as that should make anyone with half a heart.
Sorry that was the news alert I got from CNN. I might have misread it, my apologies, but I could’ve sworn it said he was a security guard at the club. That doesn’t seem to be accurate.
I have some relatives who probably think what the gunman did was okay because the victims might have been gay. Antipathy toward people based on their sexual orientation was part of their upbringing.
I didn’t mean that all religious, all homophobes or all gun owners or all mentally ill are capeable of these actions.
However, no mentally stable person can take away lives of his own and others in this manner.
If he was so upset that his son’s mind could get corrupted by seeing homosexuals being intimate, wouldn’t leaving his son alone in world to face all that perceived danger be on his mind if he was thinking rationally?
This isn’t really my space because I’m a high school student, not a parent, but I’m gay and reading about what happened has been so, so scary. I’ve been lucky to grow up in a community (and in a time period) where there is a lot more acceptance, but last night is a reminder that homophobia and anti-gay violence are still painfully prevalent. I think it’s a mistake to focus on the shooter’s religion in lieu of looking critically at a culture which, in some places, condones the homophobic attitudes that lead to this kind of violence. I don’t think that’s happening on this site, but some people hear “terrorism” and don’t recognize the homophobia behind it as well.
Also re: using queer as an umbrella term: a lot of us younger gay folks tend to do that, but I’m personally not a fan of using queer to describe the community as a whole because that excludes anyone who isn’t comfortable being referred to that way and coercively labels them as such. It’s less common for people to be uncomfortable with queer now, but I know people my age who are.
ABC news says they interviewed his ex-wife, who is now engaged to someone else, who said he was violent and abusive, beating her during their brief marriage. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ex-wife-of-suspected-orlando-shooter-he-beat-me/2016/06/12/8a1963b4-30b8-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html
We’ll just have to disagree @WorryHurry411 . Sane people have fleeting moments of irrational thoughts in their lives, doesn’t make them mentally ill.
Temporary insanity falls under mental illness’s umbrella.
You could swap gay for urban, rural, religious, anti-religious, agnostic, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Kurd, Arab, Jewish, Republican, Democrat, Tory,or BNP and likely someone within two degrees separation of this thread would quietly go hmmm, and nod his/her head.
Baiting broadly on race or religion isn’t so different from what this latest shooter brought to all of us. It’s a less severe level of it, at least at first, but it amounts to the same thing, or at least ends the same way.
The people who died are a loss to us all, but their exceptionalism was in who each was as an individual, not in whose company they did or did not keep, how they worshipped or what they looked like.
@WorryHurry411 Temporary insanity is a legal term used to determine one’s ability to understand the events of the crime were wrong and their ability to participate in their defense. Not all mass murderers claim temporary insanity , so that doesn’t substantiate your claim.
Emilybee, I believe meets the definition of a terrorist act:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/terrorism/terrorism-definition:
“Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population”
I think it was intended to intimidate gays. I believe it also meets the definition of a hate crime. This act can be defined a hundred ways, and will be by those who wish to use it for their own agenda.
But right now, the best response is to support the victims, families and community as they grieve.
I’m not making any claims, just wondering if things are more complex than how we see them. Human mind is not a simple gadget.
A few sources have been saying he used an “AR-15 style ASSAULT RIFLE” to carry out the attack…if it’s a legitimate assault rifle that means this guy somehow got hands on a fully automatic machine gun to kill everyone…how in god’s name did an ISIS sympathizer on the FBI watch list get hands on a machine gun??? This is an outrage!!!
edit
And now this: http://www.latimes.com/la-me-ln-gay-pride-la-weapons-20160612-snap-story.html
I have been very excited at our plans to march in the SF Gay Pride parade on a few weeks, on the anniversary of 2 very significant Supreme Court rulings (striking down DOMA in 2013 and legalizing gay marriage in 2015). I am still looking forward to it… but now with trepidation.
Re the acronym: LGBTQIAP=lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender AND transsexual (including nonbinary individuals), queer AND questioning, intersex, asexual (including demi and grey), pansexual AND polysexual (and polyamorous, if you consider that to fall under the umbrella. Some do, some don’t.)
Some younger people do describe themselves as queer.
This is so horrifying. My thoughts go out to the families and friends, along with the doctors and law enforcement.