Orlando Pulse Nightclub Shooting: Largest Mass Shooting in US History

[WTF-AKUMA-HAX]

Reports: Ex-Wife and Classmate Say Orlando Killer Was Gay

Mateen also reportedly chatted with gay man online. One man, Kevin West, tells the Los Angeles Times he talked with Mateen over the gay dating app Jack’d on and off for about a year. He says he never

Jack’d
on and off
for about a year

Good thing this was relevant, was going to post it anyway

[Necrotrophic]

3 guns at once with no waiting period is a little ridiculous. That should probably set off a flag somewhere at least, that may connect it with something else.

buying presents for multiple family members in the same store should be looked at as a crime: AKA Renegade’s war on Christmas

There is absolutely 0 reason for a civilian to own any sort of assault rifle
These are weapons of war. They are accurate at long ranges, can penetrate multiple surfaces, and have high capacity/rate of fire for warfare.
You can hunt ANY animal with a bolt action which can be outfitted with ANY caliber available on the market. There is absolutely 0 instances where an assault rifle is NEEDED for a hunt
You’re an idiot if you think civilians NEED assault rifles

cmon now

ok, look y’allz i was being slightly facetious in some of my responses, but i’ll clear up some of the discussion a bit. the “AR” in AR-15 does not stand for “assault rifle.” it stands for Armalite, the original manufacturer of that type of rifle. “assault rifles” are fully automatic rifles. civilians and military cannot legally own fully automatic rifles without jumping through serious hoops to get them. some of those hoops include:

-TELLING LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT YOU ARE CONSIDERING PURCHASING A FULLY AUTOMATIC WEAPON AND HAVING THEM INTERVIEW YOU TO SIGN OFF ON THE APPROVAL

-PAYING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR IT

also i’d argue a bolt action rifle wouldn’t be ideal if a group of 300lb hogs rushed you.

or wolves.

or a bear.

or a large dog

these animals exist, guys.

Rednecks aren’t exactly gonna make guns from raw materials without blowing their own hands up.

“Cleetus, i need to make a device that sticks a dull needle into the back of a bullet.”

“that’s impossible, Jethro. my hands will blow up.”

ok

You’re pretty dumb if you think making a safe gun from raw materials is trivial

[crotchpuncha]

I just dont understand why its harder to get a drivers license then a gun.

I just dont.

[Renegade]

[quote=“Xvideos, post:331, topic:180032”]

[/quote]

This video is total bullshit.

The left IS blaming “Systemic Homophobia”.

And yes, Islam codifies bigotry against homosexuality. That’s a problem.

So does Catholicism. That’s a problem.

So does Protestantism. That’s a problem.

So does Judaism. That’s a problem.

ALL RELIGIONS HAVE THIS PROBLEM.

When the Westboro Baptist Church applauds this dude, you know the problem isn’t just Islam.

Uganda passed the 2014 Anti Homosexuality Act
Uganda is 85% christian.

The state AG of Florida KEPT ON FIGHTING AGAINST MARRIAGE EQUALITY and still says its not her job to uphold “a supreme court decision”

The right is basically trying to lump him entirely into “Radical Islamic Terrorist” category, while completely ignoring that the victims were gay, and at a gay club, because it better fits their narrative.

[jimmy1200]

I just dont understand why its harder to get a drivers license then a gun.

I just dont.

But, you also need a drivers license to get a gun.lol

[odin]

[quote=“Renegade, post:344, topic:180032”]

[/quote]

This video is total bullshit.

The left IS blaming “Systemic Homophobia”.

And yes, Islam codifies bigotry against homosexuality. That’s a problem.

So does Catholicism. That’s a problem.

So does Protestantism. That’s a problem.

So does Judaism. That’s a problem.

ALL RELIGIONS HAVE THIS PROBLEM.

When the Westboro Baptist Church applauds this dude, you know the problem isn’t just Islam.

Uganda passed the 2014 Anti Homosexuality Act
Uganda is 85% christian.

The state AG of Florida KEPT ON FIGHTING AGAINST MARRIAGE EQUALITY and still says its not her job to uphold “a supreme court decision”

The right is basically trying to lump him entirely into “Radical Islamic Terrorist” category, while completely ignoring that the victims were gay, and at a gay club, because it better fits their narrative.

Hinduism is pretty cool with homosexuality.

It’s mainly the Abrahamic religions, since they come from the same place where people haven’t really evolved as a society for 2000 years.

[Renegade]

[quote=“odin, post:346, topic:180032”]

[/quote]

Hinduism is pretty cool with homosexuality.

It’s mainly the Abrahamic religions, since they come from the same place where people haven’t really evolved as a society for 2000 years.

You’re right. Of the Indian and Far Eastern religions, they can be at worst described as “neutral/conflicted”, as is the case of conservative Buddhists.

Damn my judeo christian centric worldview.

[Taiki]

Hinduism is pretty cool with homosexuality.

It’s mainly the Abrahamic religions, since they come from the same place where people haven’t really evolved as a society for 2000 years.

As of this year, it was/is(depending on how the case shakes out) illegal to be gay in India though

Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation’s day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps, not even He.

Hindu’s mainstream creation story starts off with, “So listen to this shit I heard.” To say Hindu defies a lot of convention is an understatement. It’s neither a loosely bound set of beliefs like some animism beliefs, nor is it a really organized religion. At best you could say it is a disorganized religion. Which means really, anything goes and anything is nearly justifiable.

[pedoviejo]

I just dont understand why its harder to get a drivers license then a gun.

I just dont.

Maybe in Arizona, but in Cali it’s the same process except you need to get a near perfect on your handgun safety course.

[crotchpuncha]

I just dont understand why its harder to get a drivers license then a gun.

I just dont.

Maybe in Arizona, but in Cali it’s the same process except you need to get a near perfect on your handgun safety course.

Good! Need more of that.

[dab00g]

But most shooting deaths in california are from unregistered hand guns in urban areas due to gang related violence

[BB_Hoody]

I’ve noticed that the gun debate largely revolves around people admitting (either implicitly or explicitly) that America is fucked. Just deeply, deeply fucked on a cultural level and the actual debate is whether or not anything can be done to actually fix it.
**
I mean, most people (aside from the really nutty people who believe this is just a random act of capital E “Evil”), believe a massive shift in culture is needed, to make people care for other people in the most basic capacity (and not do them grievous bodily harm), provide better resources to those who desperately need it, adequately police those that will not play nice and generally not treat people like a meat grinder…but everyone seems to agree that will never happen and efforts should be focused on relatively easily attainable things that may or may not work.
Its like half are saying, “well…we are pretty fucked, but maybe if we fuck over all the gun owners, we can unfuck ourselves a little bit” and the other half is like “well, we are pretty fucked, we can’t unfuck ourselves, so we might as well go whole hog and just arm ourselves to the teeth to deter futher fuckery”

THIS! People need to just admit it, that America just isn’t the tight nit unit it use to be. We are more divided than ever. People just really don’t give a fuck about one another anymore.

[Zero]

When it comes to responses to problems, I look at it the way a economist looks at it. There are no “solutions”, only trade-offs.

So when looking at the suggestion that we should ban assault rifles, lets look at the trade-off with stats and historical data. This is easy because the US had a ban on assault rifles from 1994 - 2004. Here is a report on the impact of this ban release by the US Department of Justice:

204431.pdf

Its a long read, but basically, gun violence with assault rifles steadily decreased, as the grandfathered weapon became more rare. But gun violence as a whole remained steady for 2 major reasons: 1. Assault rifles were involved in less than 2% of violent crimes before the ban, and 2. More semi-automatic guns equipped with long-capacity magazines were used instead.

In addition, the report suggests that if that ban was extended to all semi-automatics, there could eventually be small reductions in some of the most serious and costly gun crimes. However, since only 4-5% of gun victims are caused by crimes where 10 or more shots are fired (at the time of the report), and that percentage includes ALL gun types, that reduction would be again small, or even offset.

So the trade off from banning assault rifles would be:

[list]
[] More government spending on enforcement
[] Lack of consumer choice
[/list]

for

[list]
[] No change in overall gun violence
[] Increase in semi-auto gun sales
[*] Slight decrease in AR gun violence
[/list]

Seems to me that the only winner is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

[Renegade]

**]I’ve noticed that the gun debate largely revolves around people admitting (either implicitly or explicitly) that America is fucked. Just deeply, deeply fucked on a cultural level and the actual debate is whether or not anything can be done to actually fix it.
**
I mean, most people (aside from the really nutty people who believe this is just a random act of capital E “Evil”), believe a massive shift in culture is needed, to make people care for other people in the most basic capacity (and not do them grievous bodily harm), provide better resources to those who desperately need it, adequately police those that will not play nice and generally not treat people like a meat grinder…but everyone seems to agree that will never happen and efforts should be focused on relatively easily attainable things that may or may not work.
Its like half are saying, “well…we are pretty fucked, but maybe if we fuck over all the gun owners, we can unfuck ourselves a little bit” and the other half is like “well, we are pretty fucked, we can’t unfuck ourselves, so we might as well go whole hog and just arm ourselves to the teeth to deter futher fuckery”

THIS! People need to just admit it, that America just isn’t the tight nit unit it use to be. We are more divided than ever. People just really don’t give a fuck about one another anymore.

Actually, we’re not.

Believe it or not, the world is the best place it’s ever been… RIGHT NOW.

Homicide as a whole in the US is around the lowest it’s EVER BEEN. The only years lower than 2013 and 2014’s 4.5per 100k are 1951, 54, 55, 56, and 57. Even then, The all time low is 4.0 per 100k.

4.0 is still the highest rate of any developed nation by far, however. Even nations with similar urban poor/minority problems as the USA.

Then, you have that the world is a relatively peaceful place. There have been less war deaths in EVERY WAR ON THE PLANET from 1946-2015 than occurred in World War 2.

The standard of living in the US is among the highest in the world. Our biggest problems on this front are (no surprise) health care, crime, and inequality.

The world in general is rising dramatically.
**
Then why is everyone making it seem like it’s so bad?**

Because on the entire planet, the only people whose lives are getting significantly worse since the 70’s are those of uneducated white men in america.

If you’re in a race, and everyone starts catching up to you, it’s easy to think that you’re going slower.

[Matriarch]

People usually don’t do a 120 mph in a residential on a sunday night, usually. Most of us will do maybe 80 or 90 on 65mph stretch of highway. Maybe we’ll do 100 or even 120. I don’t have a drawer full of weed right now because it’s illegal(I live at home; w/e, I don’t have to pay rent).

Point being, people break the law all the time. A law doesn’t really have the preventative effect that we like to think it does.

Furthermore, the kind of person who is going to be following the laws probably isn’t going to go shoot up a place. When you tighten up your laws all you really do is make things more difficult for people who are doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

The reason why we should be restricting gun sales is to make it harder, not impossible, but harder to get guns. Trevor Noah pointed out something kind of fucked up. Obama has held 14 speeches commenting on the semiregular national tragedy of gun violence. Obama has held 11 state dinners. Not to mention that the ever perennial Onion headline, “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”.

So we have to do something.

The idea here isn’t to go to absolute zero for gun deaths. France has tough gun regulations but they still got shot up last year and the year before that. But that was two incidents. By people with serious ties to major terrorist groups.

Personally, I think the issues that underlie the increase in mass shootings are much more complicated. It speaks of frustrated people who are lashing out at others. I think the problem is more cultural than anything, and making it harder for people to legally obtain guns isn’t going to address any of the real causes.

And because it’s a cultural problem, you have to be careful about comparing other nations to the US.

Mass shootings are a symptom of a greater problem.

It is interesting though that gun violence in general has greatly declined. Overall, less people per capita are dying to guns. In some ways, you could make the argument that a culture that has a problem with mass shootings but still overall has less gun deaths is a better place to be than one who has less mass shootings and more gun deaths overall.

He bought his guns legally. If he wanted to wound or kill 103 people without the gun, he’d either have to set the place on fire(which, frankly, was a thing that happened to gay bars for a time), or use explosives. Both of which require an incredible amount of risk and are much harder to do than just opening fire. We all want to laugh at the guy who blew his nuts off by trying to smuggle explosives in his undies, but he was a pro. The guy who set up his bomb was a pro. It was TATP. It’s not easy to make and it’s not easy to use. Timothy McVeigh was kind of an outlier here. Not only that, but he had Terry Nichols help too to build the damned thing.

By far most people who buy guns legally never do anything even approaching this situation. His actions are atypical. He is an outlier.

Again, he bought his guns legally. Plus it’s easy to bootleg whisky, beer, heroin, weed, pills, etc. It’s harder to smuggle pistols and rifles.

Making abortions illegal has lead a to a boom in both back alley abortions but also unwanted children. It’s easier to try to self terminate a pregnancy than it is to smuggle a gun, too, btw.

I think you underestimate how many people make and mod their own guns. My dad, who is a veteran, does it as a hobby. My uncle, who is a constable, also does it. Hell, they have guns that you can make on your 3d printer now.

Guns aren’t really very complicated.

So then things like background checks shouldn’t be a problem and ammo registration shouldn’t be a problem. Granted, ideally, we could have a total rewrite of the 2nd Amendment. We can stop all our arguing about the founders intent on the 2nd Amendment when we also realize that they gave us the mechanism to clear up what something in the constitution means. But I don’t think we’ll ever actually do that.

I’m fine for background checks. Ammo registration would be a logistical nightmare. I’d hate to see what that would even cost. I think it would be hard to justify the spending such a prospect would cost, considering we have children who will go without dinner tonight.

Again, statistically, guns aren’t as dangerous as people like to make them out to be. But guns can often be very fear invoking when they do take lives.

It’s a lot like when a passenger plane crashes. Statistically speaking, flying is incredibly safe compared to other modes of travel. But it’s very scary when things go wrong on a flight.

Emotionally speaking, it might feel like guns are this huge problem. But the numbers tell a different story.

As a queer person, I’d rather not have to pack heat myself or have to keep an eye out for people who want me killed because I really don’t care about what’s in someone’s pants before I have sex with them.

I’m a lesbian, and I’m quite careful about who I let know that information. I know there is a lot of irrational hate out there. And as much as it would be nice to just go out and not have to worry about that kind of stuff, the world is far from being ideal.

We live in a free country. And some people choose to use that freedom to hate and spread their hate. But the same laws that protect them also protect us. You don’t have to like what they say, and you’re free to speak out against it. But the moment you try and stifle them be prepared to have your expressions stifled too.

Part of living in a free society is accepting the fact that some people will make poor choices with their freedom.

People died. It’s already a social justice issue. People died, conspicuously, in a place where being part of a suspect classification(that is, the nature of the selection is suspicious, not the group themselves) meets. Guy was reportedly a regular, and was sending creepy shit on Tinder. So while correlation does not imply causation, it does scream, “HEY GO LOOK AT THAT THING.”

It was terrorism. He killed a bunch of people and wounded nearly as many as he killed. Terrorism just doesn’t mean brown people in turbans misreading the Quran or the IRA carbombing some Northern Irish WASPs. It means any time terror is used to shape the political landscape. Sometimes terrorism and freedom fighting are two phrases for the same thing. Life is tough sometimes.

Also, he did reportedly make a statement declaring his allegiance to the Islamic State. But he also supposedly supported Hezbollah. Hezbollah is Shi’a. IS is Sunni. So he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. IS is one way with it’s communication outreach. He can sit on twitter and facebook and read all he wants about the new Caliphate and think, “gee, that sounds like a great way to vent my internalized homophobia.”

My point was we shouldn’t be labeling the event to fit some political agenda. Pointing blame at specific things when the problem is much more complicated is dangerous reductionist thinking.

Let’s not. Let’s fix a problem that is largely unique to America.

Sometimes 103 people get shot. Difference is, forest fires happen on nearly every other land mass too, and without this stark regularity. Well with global climate change, that too might change.

Again, every country has unique and contextual problems. No society is perfect, and each will have their own unique pros and cons.

My point was is that if the US is a forest, a forest has certain problems because of its nature. Another country might not be a forest, it might be desert, which has its own host of problems.

No other country is the US, and there are massive cultural differences between the US and France. So be careful about equivocating the cultural realities of the two.

[Renegade]

So, if murders are down, and guns are up? Why restrict guns?

People have no concept of probability or statistics.

Mass murders have exponentially more impact on society than the same number of individual murders.

Despite our living in the safest times since the 50’s, fear is pushing people to buy more guns, try to ban guns, and elect people like Trump.

“Don’t you support gun legislation Robin?”

Yeah, for the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.

If we can replicate Australia’s “no mass shootings since Port Arthur”, despite the statistics, we can win a battle on fear.

[drunkards_walk]

I don’t think the battle is against “fear”; it is against a religion that is stuck in the Stone Age

[dab00g]

Legally we aren’t supposed to brandish weapons

But these people don’t care

These people have a mission in their minds to take people out so they won’t be alone

How this guy slipped through the cracks of a very tight restrictive gun control climate is the issue

Mental health is still stigmatized by religion, society, and by our own minds

This has more to do with crazies than homophobes or gun control

They also have a couple of mass shooters in prision like the joker kid and they are studying him.

[Renegade]

I don’t think the battle is against “fear”; it is against religions that are stuck in the Stone Age

fixed it for you.

[drunkards_walk]

I don’t think the battle is against “fear”; it is against religions that are stuck in the Stone Age

fixed it for you.

And why is it plural?