Mass shooting at LGBT nightclub in Orlando.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

Shootings like this really, really hit home when it's your social community that is the victim of the attack.

I here you.  Way worse than corralling a six year old into a corner with their friends at school and shooting them in the face.

The Islamic state is now taking responsibility for this attack.

Wow.. not to get too political but this may swing the election.

Nothing like 50 dead homosexuals to motivate the fundies to turn out at the polls.

Possibly another self radicalized Muslim .  

One of the reasons I hate going to clubs is they insist on disarmament.  I never feel comfortable in these situations.

Yeah fewer Muslims and more guns would prevent something like this from happening every again... or at least greatly reduce the likelihood.

Guys these mass shootings are terrible.  It doesn't matter who the victims are nor who the shooter is.  The only common theme is America is awash in guns and innocents are dying left and right.  The one thing that is at every one of these crime scenes is a gun.  We can ignore the gun and pray for our own little community and attack whatever religion/race/ideology we don't like but that won't solve the problem.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

Shootings like this really, really hit home when it's your social community that is the victim of the attack.

I here you.  Way worse than corralling a six year old into a corner with their friends at school and shooting them in the face.

Would you shut up with your moron logic for once? I'd make a very serious personal attack here, but I don't want to get banned. People are dead. Twice as many as the situation you cite.

Take your own advice.

Free forum.  Doesn't matter to me whether someone is black, white, gay, Christian, Muslim, child, adult.  These incidents are horrific and I don't agree with what the previous poster said.  Difference from you is I don't need to use words like "moron" to express myself.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

What an utter tragedy.  And perhaps most tragic of all is how left and right ignore obvious facts to protect their ideology.

He was a bigoted religious fundie who shot 50 gays because he hates them for who they are.  This doesn't terrorize straight, homophobic Republicans....nor was his gun a threat to straight left wingers.

Then why is this only a problem of this magnitude in America?  Do we have the worst religious zealots?  The most Muslims?  The most homophobic people?

Time to stop the moderate hero routine and address the problem.  It's amazing how in America otherwise rational people stand up and say we absolutely cannot have an objective conversation about a giant problem staring us in the face.

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This guy was investigated twice by the fbi after making workplace statements about radical Islam.   Still was allowed to freely move about the country and obtain a permit and security gig.    Yet some of you in here want to burst down my door and take my weapons.

14th>>>2nd

[Taco Truck 🚚]

What an utter tragedy.  And perhaps most tragic of all is how left and right ignore obvious facts to protect their ideology.

He was a bigoted religious fundie who shot 50 gays because he hates them for who they are.  This doesn't terrorize straight, homophobic Republicans....nor was his gun a threat to straight left wingers.

Then why is this only a problem of this magnitude in America?  Do we have the worst religious zealots?  The most Muslims?  The most homophobic people?

Time to stop the moderate hero routine and address the problem.  It's amazing how in America otherwise rational people stand up and say we absolutely cannot have an objective conversation about a giant problem staring us in the face.

Err, it's NOT only a problem of this magnitude in the United States. Look at Europe, the Middle East, Africa. Radical Muslims are killing people everywhere they live.

I was referring to mass shootings in functional countries not at war.  As I told the other people in this thread I don't care about the identity politics of the shooters nor the victims.  An innocent being killed is an innocent being killed.  You simply don't see a single person just waking up one day and with minimal planning mowing down 10s of people on a whim the way the way you do in the US.  This is happening with an astonishing regularity.  What is different about the US and other first world countries?  Might want to look there to solve your problem.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/12/orlando-shooting-suspects-father-hosted-a-political-tv-show-and-even-tried-to-run-for-the-afghan-presidency/

Apparently, the shooter's father was a prominent Afghan public figure and a Taliban supporter.

Apparently they didn't bring him up to be very religious.

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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

He's been into guns for a long time though.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

Why did I expect anything good to come from this thread?

We've had decades of mass killings in this country with the situation getting worse and worse.  Is there somewhere where people are having "good" conversations about this topic?

It's a mass shooting.  If you say anything other than, "this is unfortunate" it is going to offend someone.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

What's sad about this thing media wise is that yet again something actually affecting LGBT people now about everyone and everything else.

Same thing happens with every mass shooting... because mass shootings aren't about gay people, or little kids, or black people, or Islam.  Their frequency and magnitude are a uniquely American phenomenon that has one common and unique theme.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

Why did I expect anything good to come from this thread?

What good could it bring?

All these shootings do is give people an excuse to politicize tragedy and demand more or less gun control.

Agreed, with a mass shooting happening every few weeks the one thing we should never do is talk about guns.

Imagine if that is what we said about seat belts or cigarettes or leaded gasoline.

Governments dissect the corpses of victims of cigarette smoking, take pictures of their organs, and use them for ad campaigns.  But in America we can't talk about guns because it would be "inappropriate".  Guns aren't religious artifacts.  I don't have to wait for them to stop killing people to discuss them.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

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http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/politics/orlando-shooting-gun-control-islamic-terrorism/

Amazing.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

I do think the left needs to address the hatred of women, gays, Western values in general, etc. that is allowed to breed within fundamentalist Islam. They certainly have no problem (correctly) calling out the Christians who do the same. Plugging your ears and singing "lalala I can't hear you!" isn't going to fix the problem. And using the "who are we to judge their culture?!" excuse is even worse.

That said, obviously banning an entire religion from entering the country would be an extremely stupid solution.

White male Christians are most responsible for rape and the glass ceiling in this country.  Why would we expend what few resources we have to go after a minority group that clearly isn't the driver behind the awful statistics?  That just doesn't make any sense.  Unless you just don't like Muslims.

Most women are raped by someone they know.  With Muslims as a tiny percentage of the population they frankly just don't know enough women to be a major driver.  The probability of a nonmuslim woman picked at random getting raped by a Muslim is virtually zero in the US.

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http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/08/us/muslims-in-america-shattering-misperception/

If we eliminated all the violent, sexist, homophobic acts perpetrated by Muslims in America... the place would still be a gigantic cease pool.  Now if we eliminated all the violent, sexist, homophobic acts perpetrated by Christians... this place would be heaven.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

Why did I expect anything good to come from this thread?

What good could it bring?

All these shootings do is give people an excuse to politicize tragedy and demand more or less gun control.

Agreed, with a mass shooting happening every few weeks the one thing we should never do is talk about guns.

Imagine if that is what we said about seat belts or cigarettes or leaded gasoline.

Governments dissect the corpses of victims of cigarette smoking, take pictures of their organs, and use them for ad campaigns.  But in America we can't talk about guns because it would be "inappropriate".  Guns aren't religious artifacts.  I don't have to wait for them to stop killing people to discuss them.

Is that why you want us to ban both guns and cigarettes?

Also, as far as I'm aware, nobody's ever started a campaign against cigarettes because it killed about fifty people in a mass murder. Using the dead as a rally cry is morally wrong and utterly reprehensible.

That's kind of the sad thing.  I never said I want to ban all guns.  I was just defending starting a conversation.  That's my point.  It's ludicrous.  People want to ban talking.

And FYI cigarettes killed way more people than guns today.  And their geographic distribution is of little relevance to me.  They are still dead... and we can still talk about what killed them without people calling for a ban on conversation.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

To use tragedy as an attempt to push for something is bad, whether you like it or not. You won't change my mind about that.

There are numerous examples of parents asking for tighter gun controls on the very same day their child is gunned down.  Do you think those people are "bad"?

You are allowed to have your opinion.  I and billions of other people happen to disagree with it.

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Well obviously white male Christians are responsible for the most rape, considering they're the second largest group in the country after white female Christians. It's a question of proportion. And I was referring more to fundamentalist Islam in general, not a specific attack on American Muslims, which I'm sure you knew already.

Muslims make up less than 1% of the US population and fundamentalists Muslims make up a tiny percentage of that population.

There is already a disproportionate amount of media and political attention paid to them given how little sexism and homophobia they are responsible for here in the US.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

Nathan,

I understand your argument, and no he isn't legally 'mentally ill'.

I am just saying he's a few french fries short of a happy meal with room temperature IQ.

It looks as though he was not treated or prosecuted for domestic battery which would have helped to prevent this massacre.

You have to actually report a crime for it to be known.

Not just report it.  It has to go through a full blown trial, a conviction, and be upheld on appeal and then it is officially a crime.  Anything short of that is just idle gossip.

I'm all for women's rights but saying disgruntled exwives are the final arbiters of the Constitutional rights for men is going a bit far.  I've had the displeasure of witnessing some divorces up close and the malicious lies told in court under oath were breathtaking.  Thank God there was a judge there to put the brakes on other party.

[Taco Truck 🚚]

The response from the President and progressives in general to what happened in both San Bernardino and Orlando shows that they are totally out to lunch on how to fight terrorism.

Afterall what did "gun control" and the "insidious NRA boogeyman" have to do wth ether the Paris Attacks or the 7/7 bombings for instance?

Belgium historically has had weaker gun laws which is why when it comes to criminality and terrorism guns can be traced back to Belgium.  And as far as the NRA is concerned they are a mouth piece for gun manufactures.  Belgium didn't have liberal gun laws because its citizens love freedom.  Belgium had lax gun laws because of its local gun manufacturers.... that's the parallel with the NRA's lobbying.

It's the same reason we can have stricter gun laws in Chicago and still have violence.  Think of Mississippi as America's Belgium.

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http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/29/us/where-50000-guns-in-chicago-came-from.html

Do you understand the analogy now?

Also you do realize that this guy literally spent about a week planning this, if that, and managed to single handedly kill 50 people.  The Paris attacks involved international teams of people and months if not years of planning and preparation.  If you have a situation where things are so locked down you need years of planning and an international team of operators to launch your attack that gives law enforcement a lot more opportunities to disrupt the plot.  If all someone has to do when they are having a bad day is go to a gun show and buy an AR-15 on a whim then mow people down you simply cannot defend against that.

You are never going to have perfection in anything.  But that isn't a reason not to try.  If the number of mass killings was cut in half and the number of people at those killings was cut in half that would be a ton of lives saved.

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Whats happening within Islam right now is like the 1930s with Hitler. Failure to acknowledge a evil before it gets out of control. 

What specifically would you like done?  I mean how many Muslim countries would you like the Democratic president to unilaterally bomb without Congressional approval?  How many Muslims would you like the Democratic president to unilaterally kill without a trial?  How many German cities did we lay to waste prior to WWII?  How many of Hitler's lieutenants did we assassinate prior to WWII?

I'm fairly sure if Obama launched a missile into your car on your way home from church killing you and your son your family wouldn't say Obama was "ignoring" you.

We could change tactics or add a bit more resources here and there but to claim that we are just sitting here passive like the lead up to WWII is ridiculous.

WWII didn't happen because we "ignored" Hitler.  WWII happened because of reckless violence and callous disregard for human life.  If we and our allies behaved properly after WWI Hitler would have died as a complete nobody.  Obama's wars and assassinations are deeply unpopular in many parts of the world.  He has an explosive situation on his hands.  He is trying to do the Teddy Roosevelt, "speak softly and carry a big stick."

[Taco Truck 🚚]

As I posted on AAD, I'm really wondering why these mass shootings really took off in the 80s and especially the 90s. It's not like guns weren't previously easily available...

The country wasn't flooded with AR-15s in the 80s.  The actual rate of gun ownership in America has declined.  But the number of guns gun nuts own has skyrocketed.  The average gunning owning household has over 8 guns!  That's DOUBLE the number from the mid 90s.  And remember that is an average.  So there are plenty of households where the number of guns lying around is in the double digits.  Paranoia and hoarding are going up.

Also no Youtube celeberties in the 80s and 90s.
No people making millions by being famous for being famous.
No or very little internet.  The internet has expanded knowledge both good and bad.  Want to make a bomb?  Google it.  Want to self radicalize?  Google it.  Want to see what all the racists and bigots are saying?  Log in to Atlas.