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.

Gun control feels quite irrelevant this time around. Sure I feel like gun control is a good thing in general, living in Finland and all, but I think that's quite besides the point here. As someone said earlier, people will get guns if they really want to. We can make it harder, as I believe we should, but gun control isn't what caused this attack.

This attack was different from Paris, 911 or lets say Boko Harams Chibok attacks. Why? Because all these previous attacks could be somewhat explained through geopolitical and socioeconomic reasons, this time, it was nothing more than islam twisting a sick individual. I of course don't think every muslim is a mass murderer ready to start a kiling spree, if I did, I would believe there are a billion terrorists in this world. Of course no mentally stable person will commit mass murder. But I do believe in the corrupting force that this "religion of peace" has. Surely, no religion or extremist ideology is without its faults. Just looking back a few hundred years at the crusades or even still into hindu nationalist terrorism in India.

We can argue for hours and hours why islam is or isn't the religion of violence and bigotry I personally think it is. But the underlying and sad fact is that most of the terror attacks in the world are inspired by islamic rhetoric. Especially in these cases where it was only an individual following the teachings of his mildly extremist father and inspired by his religion. I do find it increasingly infuriating that we keep protecting an ideology that inflicts such pain and misery onto so many people around the world, not only through unspeakable acts of terror but also through the systematic oppression of women, sexual minorities and other religions in islamic countries and communities.

The worst part, almost nothing can be done. Trump rallying for the persecution of muslims in the US will only support the us vs them mentality that all foul ideologies posses. USA or the EU attacking yet another country will only create more extremism, we have seen this. And in the end, it's every individuals human right to hold the beliefs and ideals he chooses to hold. I believe the only way to combat the atrocity that is islamic extremism world wide, is through education and socioeconomic change. Sadly, not something an individual can really achieve. The only thing I believe an individual like me or you can do is laugh at anyone stupid or evil enough to hold islamic values and beliefs. At this point, to me at least, saying you are a moderate muslim is basically saying "I'm a moderate KKK member". I laugh at everyone who thinks vaccines cause autism, and I laugh the same way when someone thinks a child raping, bloodthirsty warlord from the 6th century knew the absolute truth.

So yeah, fighting extremism of any kind in my mind is the right way to go about it. Not protecting those who hold foul ideals and not silencing those who believe in the rights of everyone. Surely gun control is a step in the right direction in my opinion, but that wont remove attacks like these, nor will everyone having guns. Guns are just the means, not the end goal.

as cowmeat says this has nothing to do with gun laws whatsoever
it has somewhat to do with the unfortunate fact that the FBI should have kept more of an eye on this guy and his family
i truly believe that if monitoring was done properly, or more thoroughly, this might not have happened
sure he could still get guns if he wanted, but the real problem was the huge amount of ammunition this guy was packing along side a very powerful weapon
if this guy was flagged, he should've had his rights to guns revoked
once again he could've gotten a gun, but it would've had to have been something smaller and with maybe less ammunition, which might not have given him an idea to attack such a large number or anyone in the first place
the only way to fight outliers like this situation is for gun control to be more heavily on those with mental problems, terror relations and other extremists

Of course it has something to do with gun control, he did not have any connections with IS as far as anyone is aware. In addition, as I said before, it is a lot harder to smuggle guns than it is it transfer money to someone so they can buy guns. If guns were not so available he would not have been able to acquire them so casually and he would not have been able to walk into a gay nightclub without much preplanning armed like he was able to.

Also @cowmeat, he was corrupted by Islam fundamentalists not simply Islam, I think its very important to make the distiction. IS is not a group of regular muslims.

Islamic fundamentalists (extrimist =/= fundamentalist) follow quran fundamentally as the absolute truth from god, so to say that he wasn't corrupted by islam is pretty thick. Just because most muslims don't believe in killing gays (alltho many muslim majority countries have a punishment or even the death penalty for homosexual acts) doesn't mean its not islamic. That's like saying a neo nazism isn't influenced by nationalism but instead fundamental nationalism, makes very little sense.

I keep saying it time and time again... just because a person is not evil (like most people aren't), it doesn't mean the ideology he supports cannot be inherently abhorrent. So the whole "most muslims are good, so this guy wasn't a true muslim" doesn't really work.

Also I did not bring IS, into this discussion at all, so I don't understand why you brought that up in the context of my post? IS doesn't have the monopoly on islamic extrimism.
Wether he did the attack in the name of IS, Boko Haram, Al qaeda or just allah in general is mostly irrelevant to me.