Gosh..

Well, someone was bound to speak about this sooner or later. I'll go ahead and start. The situation makes me cringe and fully upset.

Around 2:00 AM Sunday Morning, Omar Mateen went into a LGBT club called Pulse, and killed 50 people. Injuring 53 others. What worries me, is that he was flagged twice by the FBI about buying weapons. But he obtained them anyways.

What i would like to discuss, is how do you all think we can avoid horrible things like this in the future? What measures should we take and what should be banned or changed? I believe that guns are too easily obtained and we need to strengthen gun laws. People will gain them illegally regardless, but it still can't hurt to help the cause. I will provide some links below for you to read more on. But if this doesn't have all the info you desire, just google it yourself. It's everywhere.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/50-...ory/ar-AAgW3Wb

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...do-killer.html

http://www.news.com.au/world/north-a...02f6f83ebfa3cc

Muh 'Religion of Peace'.

I think what could be done legally was done by the authorities this time. He was under surveillance already. Too bad they didn't act on their suspicion.
I don't think gun laws were that important this time around. When you are connected to a well-funded terrorist organization, they'll get you what you need no matter the legality of those things. Perhaps it would have been harder for him to waltz into that club armed to the teeth if it was illegal to carry firearms, but then again if he was stopped I'm sure the coppers would have asked him a few questions.

Trump can't be elected fast enough. He'll round up all the mudslimes for you, then all you have to worry about are unstable teenagers with access to assault rifles.

Of course gun laws were important, he bought the guns legally and easily, it would have been a lot harder and almost impossible had gun laws been stringent in the US. The reason that more mass shootings occur in the US than any other country, and than the whole of the EU combined isnt because they have more muslims or more immigrants - its because of the unbelievably relaxed gun laws.

In addition he was not connected to IS at all. He pledged allegiance when he committed the atrocity, that isnt the same thing as having had connections with the group at all.


The prospect of Trump being elected is pretty scary, and people seriously considering him is scarier.

I haven't read up on it further, but the articles where it says he pledged allegiance afterwards say he did so in a 911 call, which makes no sense.



I think it's more about time. Strict gun laws would require more effort from the terrorist organizations to carry out attacks like this. Grand scale attacks happen even in more developed countries - see France, but I suspect those are grand in scale because of the preparations required, and those are not worth it for a smaller scale operation. It's kind of like an entry barrier in the civilian massacring business.



The other alternative is supporting nepotism, corruption and amoral values. Who cares about the lives of undercover US agents abroad when you could finally join the cool kids club with the black and now female presidents on your resumé?
Bernie has no chance to win. He and Trump are the only candidates who stand for something.

He entered the nightclub and called 911 himself so that he could pledge allegiance to IS as I understand it.

Contacting someone regularly is not the same as being provided guns by them. Al-Qaeda is also separate to IS, it also doesnt change the fact that smuggling guns into a country is a lot harder than providing someone with money so they can legally buy guns and ammunition.



When you compare the frequency and impacts of attacks throughout the entirety of the EU against the US from 2000, both frequency and death tolls are larger in the US, despite having a population of just under half. This is very difficult to accredit to anything other than gun laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror...d_States#2000s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror...European_Union



Although I agree Hillary is also terrible she is far less horrendous. I would rather have someone who would do very little with the power they have than a genuine racist who wants to force an entire religion to carry ID cards stating their religion.

Bernie Sanders, although still not fantastic, was in my opinion by far the best candidate.

This discussion doesnt fit in this thread anyway, so ill drop it

I don't feel as if gun control is really the issue here at all. Well no, that's not accurate. I don't think suppressing the rights of the good men and women of our country to self-defense is a good practice. No matter how much we restrict guns, bad guys will still get guns. Just because it's illegal doesn't mean someone who wants a gun can't get one. In fact, gun control in effect does the opposite of protect our people. It takes away their ability to properly defend themselves from maniacs like this.

Just look at states who have incredibly high gun restrictions. Notice how they have incredibly high amounts of gun related crimes compared to states with less restrictions? I think that alone says plenty about how much good gun control does. Am I saying gun control caused the Orlando shooting? No, but it was probably a contributing factor to the size of this tragedy.

If everyone in a room has a gun, do you think anyone would pull theirs on another person? Not likely, because they know that they'd have a barrel pointed right at them. If they're still crazy enough to pull the trigger, they wouldn't get very many shots off before they themselves are put down.

tl;dr gun control sucks and hurts our nation overall.

Nothing suppresses those rights if there's gun control. Gun control is just various measures in place to make sure that people who purchase guns are people of decent standing within the community. A background check against a law-abiding citizen will not prevent that person from obtaining a gun. A background check being mandatory for all gun sales will not prevent "good men and women of our country" from buying a gun. What it will do is make it harder for "bad guys" to get guns.

If I used your exact same logic of "No matter how much we restrict x, bad guys will still get x", then it should also stand that we should not restrict the acquisition of drugs, child pornography, or nuclear armaments because "bad guys will still get them". Which is ridiculous. The point of gun control is not to stop all gun violence, that is literally impossible short of eliminating all guns and all knowledge about guns from existence, but to reduce gun violence. And one of the easiest ways to reduce gun violence would be to make it harder for somebody who might commit a crime from acquiring a gun. The United States does not require background checks on purchases made at gun shows, so any recently released violent offender from prison could just walk into a gun show and buy a gun with no questions asked. The United States Congress also has staunch opposition to a measure that would make anybody on the Terrorist Watch List be unable to purchase a gun. Both of these are very obvious situations where it's not a "good man or woman" purchasing a gun, but a "bad guy" purchasing a gun, and yet they still receive vigorous opposition.


OK, let's look at these states. The state with the strictest gun control is California. According to the CDC http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/Firearm.htm in 2014, California was the 8th lowest in per capita gun related deaths, meaning less people per 100,000 people died to guns in California than 42 other states. However, you're probably looking at the total number of gun related deaths, which does put it at the highest number of gun related deaths. However, California is also the most populated state in America. If we also look at these stats, Texas is the second highest for most gun-related deaths in 2014, and they have pretty relaxed gun control laws. Obviously, population of the state has a great effect on the number of gun deaths that will occur, so a per capita ratio is a better reflection of how often gun related deaths actually occur.

And using a per capita measurement, the 5 highest states for gun mortality rates are, in order from highest to lowest: Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas. All of these states have incredibly relaxed gun control laws. Admittedly, the only reason Alaska is up there is because they have a ridiculously high suicide rate, and guns are the preferred way to commit suicide.

In fact, according to the Brady Campaign http://www.bradycampaign.org/sites/d...ads-points.pdf, 7 of the 10 states with the strictest gun control laws are among the 10 states with the lowest gun related death rates. So there's more evidence pointing towards a correlation towards gun control reducing gun related deaths than increasing it.

By the way, Florida has very little in the ways of gun control. In fact, Florida had recently expanded the use of "self-defense" with their Stand Your Ground laws, as was made very clear a couple years ago when Zimmerman shot Martin and cited the Stand Your Ground law to avoid his initial arrest. So your claim that "it [gun control] was probably a contributing factor to the size of the tragedy" doesn't hold much water, unless you believe everybody should be allowed to carry machine guns and sawed off-shotguns, which are the only guns Florida has an outright ban on.


If you haven't noticed, most people who have committed these high profile mass shootings don't survive them. Most of them expect to die already, the knowledge that somebody might shoot back is not the greatest of their concerns.

Second, even police officers could hardly be considered accurate, let alone civilians. As the New York Times reported http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/we...aker.html?_r=0 in 2005, the New York police department fired their guns a total of 472 times, and only hit their target 82 times. That's an accuracy of 17.4%. And if you only include all shots that were made from under 6 feet away, they only had a 43% accuracy.

These are people who are supposed to be trained to respond to high stress environments, so what do you think will happen when an untrained civilian, or a room full of untrained civilians, opens fire on a single target that's firing upon them? What's likely to happen is they're going to miss, and they're going to hit another innocent civilian in the process, possibly making the number of deaths rise. And not everybody is going to know who the actual perpetrator is if everybody draws their gun to fire at them, so who's to say that somebody won't panic and start shooting at other civilians because they don't know if they're trying to kill them? People will panic, and there will almost certainly be extra casualties because of this panic.


tl;dr the easiest way to stop gun crimes is to have less guns, gun control works, people are idiots, people with guns are dangerous idiots, the police might as well have learned to shoot at stormtrooper academy, civilians would make stormtroopers look like crackshots.

Not immediately relevant to the discussion of this thread, but I found this article to be an interesting bit of information for you all to chew on:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/report...222620444.html

There are a lot of angles to consider here, and I don't pretend to know the shooter's motives or even how to fix the problem for the future. As a bisexual man, I can relate to how this man had an inner conflict between family, social obligations, religion, and sexual orientation that led to a bad mental state and thus to horrible actions. I think this proves that lgbt issues are not over with yet, similar to how racial issues are not even close to completely resolved at this point.

I don't want to try to convince you of anything, because I'm not convinced of anything and I'm stupid and basically all of us have no idea what we're talking about. I just think this is important to consider.

Reports said that he called 911, and told them that he was pledging to Allah, and that he understood why people that have done these things before, like the Boston Marathon Bombing, 9/11, Sandy Hook, Columbine, etc. Even though not all of these were done by Islamic Extremists, it is very unsettling.

Thank you for sharing that Larfen, my aunt spoke with me about that this morning, but didn't get to finding an article until now.

Now, I am one for making guns, preferably semi automatics, or just weapons like the AR-15. There is no reason to have guns like those to be held by citizens. Unless they've served in the military and it's theirs, but still, no need really.

When I speak of Gun Control, I don't mean the restriction of weapons all over, just the ability to gain them legally and what kinds of guns are allowed needs to be changed.


I've been away for a bit, so I didn't get to reading everything. So I apologize if any of this has been spoken of already or not part of anything.

If someone had a gun in that night club they could have saved 50 lives.

No, I don't expect people to carry """"assault weapons"""" with them in their every day lives, but you can imagine a situation where it is necessary to have something more powerful than a handgun.

(And actually just so you know, in the US handguns kill 20x more people than rifles do - and that's even ignoring that an """"assault weapon"""" is just one type of rifle. What's more there is 0 evidence that a gun ban would actually reduce gun crime at all in the first place, in Australia it did absolutely nothing, in the UK gun crime actually doubled after the ban whilst in the same period gun crime in the US decreased!)