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World Reacts To The Worst Mass Shooting In U.S. History (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Fifty people were killed inside Pulse, a gay nightclub, Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other officials said Sunday morning, just hours after a shooter opened fire in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. At least 53 more people were injured, Mina said. Police have shot and killed the gunman, he told reporters.
The shooter is not from the Orlando area, Mina said. He has been identified as Omar Saddiqui Mateen, 29, of Fort Pierce, about 120 miles southeast of Orlando, two law enforcement officials tell CNN.
Orlando authorities said they consider the violence an act of domestic terror. The FBI is involved. While investigators are exploring all angles, they "have suggestions the individual has leanings towards (Islamic terrorism), but right now we can't say definitely..."
In the discussion on this submission, Slashdot readers reported that Reddit is among the sites that have removed some discussions about the shooter's identity, with one reader even reporting "Posts directing people where and how to give blood have been removed."
The shooter is not from the Orlando area, Mina said. He has been identified as Omar Saddiqui Mateen, 29, of Fort Pierce, about 120 miles southeast of Orlando, two law enforcement officials tell CNN.
Orlando authorities said they consider the violence an act of domestic terror. The FBI is involved. While investigators are exploring all angles, they "have suggestions the individual has leanings towards (Islamic terrorism), but right now we can't say definitely..."
In the discussion on this submission, Slashdot readers reported that Reddit is among the sites that have removed some discussions about the shooter's identity, with one reader even reporting "Posts directing people where and how to give blood have been removed."
Dylann Roof?? Buddhist?
I don't respond to AC's.
Doesn't matter. The guns did it. Only Guns kill people. At least that is the normal media narrative. God help us if anyone asks why someone on a watch list can pass a Federal Background check for a gun purchase... And nobody point out that "watch" does not mean he was on a "do anything" list. I mean, since we passed all these crappy surveillance laws to fight movie piracy, you think we could use them to stop mass murder occasionally?
Buddhist?
American(NY in fact) born citizen with from what I hear Afghani immigrant parents, working as an armed security guard for a courthouse in Florida. Oh, and was also investigated and cleared TWICEby the FBI for possible ties to Islamic extremism.
It is important to also remember that there are a lot of Christians in this country with not too dissimilar views towards homosexuality than what radical Islam does. In fact when I first saw "Shooting at gay nightclub" this morning my first assumption was that some anti-gay marriage person had gone off their rocker.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
He wasn't on a watch list, he was interviewed several times, but it was decided he wasn't a threat each time. In one instance, his go-workers reported him to the FBI for pledging his support of Isis, but somehow his employer (which helped him get a concealed carry permit) claims to have been completely surprised that he was possible if such an attack.
Now if it had been an abortion doctor OTOH......
I wonder if instead of banning guns, the US could instead ban ammunition? By the way I have a great deal of admiration for the US Constitution. It's one of the finest documents ever penned by man. But I do think there should be some control over who gets to own a firearm. Someone like me for example, who's been treated in the past for depression almost certainly shouldn't get a licence. In my country, the UK, I wouldn't be able to of course.
No matter what you think about the civil rights aspect of our surveillance state, it is increasingly clear that it does not not work.
However, instead of calls to disband it, I'm sure there will be calls to make it even more intrusive. And there is no limit to that. If another event happens, we must not be surveilling the population enough...
Like guns and the conservativeness of Republican presidential candidates, if they fail... it's because there wasn't enough.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
The background check that I had to undergo for my gun license was pathetic. It’s just not enough to search for criminal history, we need an invasive search for mental health issues. In these days of Google and ChoicePoint vacuuming up everything about us, it’s never been easier to gather information.
Why is it I need hundreds of dollars of insurance each year just to drive my car, but I don’t need ANY insurance for my handgun? They both can kill, and one of them is PRIMARILY for killing, so shouldn’t insurance be a requirement?
That would prevent a lot of poor gun owners from owning guns, but maybe this has gotten so out of hand that we need to restrict gun ownership.
I have deleted my Reddit account today for that precise reason.
I lived in a communist state and grew up with state television promoting Party propaganda daily. I don't need that here in a supposedly free society.
Point to the Christian mass shootings against gays in this country in the last 5-10 years.
You mean like the Christian terrorist who was thwarted in LA today from carrying out his attack on gays?
Of course there are the Christian terrorists shooting up abortion clinics.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think the point is that being on the terror watch list prevents you from doing other things, benign things like traveling by plane, but it doesn't prevent you from doing the most obvious thing: buying weapons.
Yes the list is extra-judicial and shouldn't exist at all, fine, but that's some pretty twisted legislation which allows arbitrary prevention of travel but not the purchase of firearms.
That is a lot of happy horseshit. Most "professional" accounts owned by politicians are not "scheduled days in advance".
If you go, right now, and read Lt Gov Patrick's Twitter timeline, you'll see he's posted in real time on breaking news and political stories. His tweets are not "scheduled days in advance" and the staffer who said that is just trying to blow smoke up your ass and protect her boss from embarrassment.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Fun fact: if you're on the terror watch list you can still buy weapons. Thank God the 2nd amendment is more prescious than lives huh?
This is because a person on the terror watch list often do not know they are being watched and the terror watch list is completely arbitrary in that anyone can be placed on it for any reason. To deny someone a constitutional right because they are placed on a list would be a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights to not be deprived of; life, liberty or property without due process of law. In essence to deny someone rights because they are arbitrary placed on a list without being informed and no way to appeal being placed on such a list that deprives one of their life, liberty or property would be presuming them guilty of a crime without an indictment and trial which the Fifth and Sixth Amendments also prohibit.
Wife beater.
I think of the mass shootings the way I think of domestic abuse... not that much political thought going into it, it's mostly just anger and power displays. Islam has a particular problem with beaten women - sisters, mothers, daughters, wives. But that's actually more of an Arab issue, there really isn't the same wife-beating in muslim Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. It's worse in those countries than in the USA or EU, it's not that different from India, Nepal, China, etc.
I suspect most violence is committed by men that most women don't like. Timothy McVeigh couldn't get a date. Many muslims are losers with women, but it is being a loser with women, not the religion, which predicts the behavior. If you want a society which condemns mass violence, find one that successfully integrates women. If you want a serious boiling over incident, put a male authority mindset into a powerless position in a female-positive society. People are looking for commonalities "assault weapons" and "Islam". I think weakened males and empowered females creates a recipe for hopeless angry meaningless violence.
Timothy McVeigh was a dickless loser who fawned over Waco's Koresh. Dylann Roof was clearly dickless. The Boston marathon bombers had no dicks. And Syria is absent women, men only get women by committing war crimes and being awarded kidnapped Kurds. Society is getting better because women are more empowered, and the losers are the guys who thought "at least I'm not a woman" who suddenly find they are not only the bottom of the male gene pool, they are totally bottom. Even guys wouldn't kiss that asshole.
Gently reply
I've read that homosexual relationships between Afghani men and boys are surprisingly common in Afghanistan, although forbidden and not entirely consensual.
Maybe this guy was in the category of less than consensual youth participant at some point and is having trouble with the cognitive dissonance of that experience.
Combine that with kind of a loser lifestyle and maybe the purifying mission of ISIS became appealing, offering an opportunity to get in on a little jihad, punish "those men" who made him perform homosexual sex acts, and purify his own tainted soul by demonstrating he's not one of them.
He chose gays to kill on purpose and it was a pretty deep and personal hostility. You can argue the strategic merits of a nightclub (limited egress, lots of people in a small space, etc) but dozens of places meet that criteria -- movies, malls, sporting events, and all of them filled with degenerate, gluttonous and heretical Westerners, all of them much higher value targets than Hispanic homosexuals.
He picked gays to kill because of his own psychological issues, ISIS propaganda was just a catalyst that set off the reaction.
What I really worry about now, though, is that every fringe nutjob with a personal axe to grind now using ISIS as an excuse to start killing people. I worry it will become a meme for lunatics that will take on a self-perpetuating dynamic.
Satanism is Christian. Satan is Christian. Satan is a Biblical angel. He fell, then decided to "break" man by educating him. Satanism is belif in God, but reversal of the "good" and "bad" sides. Satan wants to educate and improve humanity. God wants to be worshipped. God is the selfish entity in Satanism, and Satan is the benevolent and loving one. Same Bible. Same God. Different interpretation.
One must believe in Satan to worship him, thus Satanism is a form of Christianity.
Learn to love Alaska
That's just stupid! I'm 62 years old and been in a few situations that were life-threatening and involved guns. Universally, more guns by people in a given situation == more stupid shit! Listen, I'm no pussy Liberal and own 3 guns (Charter Arms 1911-clone; Ruger 10-22 and Ruger Blackhawk .357 magnum, with a 5" barrel) but our country is fucking insane when it comes to guns! Guns have become our new God! Why would I say that? Simple: when you regularly, willingly sacrifice your children and others on a regular basis, you are worshipping your God!
If we ever wake up and decide to do something sensible, I'd happily qualify, license or surrender my guns. No problem. Again, I like my guns a lot, but I do NOT love/worship them to the extent that I'm willing to be complicit in the worship of a false God.
Your citation of isolated anti-gay incidents over the course of the past century (from... where? Wikipedia, Mother Jones, and The Nation? Good job, there, Mr. Murrow...) just proves my point.
Meanwhile, the number of (Muslim) districts and (Muslim) nations which are *EXPANDING* their adoption of the strictest code of Sharia is GROWING. Yeah, you know, the strict kind: where gays and women with children out of wedlock are executed... Kind of what Christian nations did... IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Pray that Islam has a Reformation in the 21st century at least half as comprehensive as Christianity did in the 16th century.
>>pinning all violence carried out by people who might be Muslim on Islam
I'm not pinning it on Islam, you fool, the shooter called 911 before his crime and did that himself!
Many atheists treat the non-existence of god(s) like a fact just like the religious treat the existence as fact, that their belief is the only right belief and all other beliefs are wrong. Sure, atheists have no religious practices but they can be just as insistent on spreading their belief, shutting down alternate beliefs and intolerant of those who believe differently than themselves. As much as it'd probably be more scientifically correct to be an agnostic I have problems respecting people who believe in adult fairy tales just like superstition and astrology or that there's goblins and gremlins. I can't prove it, but yeah... I'm going to act like this is all a bunch of mumbo-jumbo with no basis in reality.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Some atheists are spiritual and believe in magic. Lack of deism isn't lack of supernatural.
I know some cool atheists who are training their minds to conjure small hallucinations while they're awake (as opposed to the ones when you're asleep, it's just using the sleep mode while waking). These small hallucinatory familiars can be sent on tasks. A properly magician can summon a small demon, tell it to find where the keys are lost, and then follow the apparition to the source of the keys -- And this works because his subconcious mind knows where he left his keys even if his conscious mind has a problem accessing it. When you're trying to remember an actor's name but forget what's on the tip of your tongue you can ask the spectral being and they can tell you what it was you were thinking, rather than waiting for a "refrigerator moment" where you remember it out of the blue (proving that your subconscious mind was working on).
Magic is simply building an API to your subconscious mind which uses the aspects of dreams to display results instead of a console. You can be 100% atheist and believe in all sorts of magic, not just the practical rational side of the occult.
Police were there and exchanged fire with the man before he even went into the club.
But keep pushing your sordid agenda.
Atheist behave just like any other religious extremists.
As a non-Theist I have to point out that Atheists are disgruntled Theists, and should be expected to continue the same behavior patterns and group structures that they grew up with.
People who were never Theists don't become Atheists, they just stay agnostic. A bad question that has no answer isn't improved by insisting that the answer is "no." The only solution is to not ask the question because is based on faulty premises.
Wen I sold firearms in the local grocery store in Wyoming in the late 70's you could not hunt big game with a .223 round. Big game means any thing larger than a Pronghorn. The smallest caliber legal rifle round was a .243 Winchester. The one .223 rifle I sold was a Remington BDL with a Bull barrel, sold it to a guy who shot Prairie Dogs at least 200m per shot. Gave him a deal on the gun, he used the discount to buy a 15x Burris scope. He told me a few months later that he was getting quarter sized groups of 5 rounds at 200m. (He hand loaded his own ammunition using Nosler Partition bullets)
None of which matters, though, as it relates to the 2nd Amendment. That amendment says that despite the need for a standing military at some scale, that doesn't mean the government can infringe on the individual right to keep and bear arms. That's the whole point of the amendment - to prevent those who would run a military (from the local militia types up to a federal army) from becoming the same sort of overbearing, tyrannical force that they saw in the Crown's military presence prior to the revolution. The founders considered the individual's right to keep and bear arms to be every bit as important as the individual's right to free speech and assembly - and the first two amendments prohibit the government from interfering with either of those rights.
So regardless of the history of the militia, the amendment isn't about establishing some requirement about being in one in order to keep and bear arms. It's about protecting the right to keep and bear arms even if there is a local (or bigger) militia that might want to reserve that power for itself. The founders had had enough of that behavior from the British.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Some of us actually listened to the famous 2002 Dawkins speech about militant atheism. And the reason we are fighting religion is the same that black people fight racism - because it does hurt society even when it isn't hanging people up on trees. The special rights of churches everywhere, they don't come for free. The special significance that is put on religious morals (over, say, humanist morals) inhibits the evolution of ethics. The pressure on public figures to be religious spreads the disease and makes it more difficult for people who want out to do so. The fact that small children get indoctrinated, I could get on but I would only get angry.
I'm very happy to ignore all the thousand religions on this planet that don't affect me. But to claim that the major religions in the place where you live don't affect you would be delusional. If something bothers me (in the active sense, to bother someone), then I have every right to tell it to fuck off.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There is a very simple counter-point to the whole religion = morality thing, at least to the not-entirely-rabid proponents.
Animals do not, generally, behave as amoral rapists, murderers and child molesters. Ergo animals either have religion or they can figure out how to behave in a way that keeps their groups functional. If base animals can figure that out surely humans with our vastly superior intellects can too.
Still waiting, though. .
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I know, and I hope that you know, that if you walk into Wal-Mart, and ask for a box of .22 bullets, the sales clerk will reach for a box of bullets with a lable that says .22 He or she may ask if you want .22 Long Rifle, but probably not, because almost all .22 ammo sold these days is Long Rifle.
Now, if you purchase that box of .22 ammo, carry it home, and load your AR with it, you'll probably not be able to fire the damned thing at all. The .22 cartridges are going to rattle around in the magazine, and never make it into the chamber. Even if you stuff a .22LR into the chamber, close the breech, and pull the trigger, it probably isn't going to fire - it's a rimfire, vs the center fire firing pin.
Let us dismiss the common .22LR for now.
I know, and I certainly hope that you know, that chambering the wrong center fire round into your center fire rifle is quite likely to result in your serious injury or death. You can play cute with terminology here, but not all ".22 caliber rifles" are the same. As you point out, the chamber isn't .22 caliber at all - the damned chamber MIGHT BE as much as an inch in diameter. The chamber tells you what size the cartridge needs to be to fit the chamber.
So far, you've not made any points that aren't obvious to anyone who knows his weapons.
Perhaps in your state, the law says that you must use bullets that are .30 or greater - I don't know what your law actually says. But I find that hard to believe. I've taken big game with .243 and .270. My dad has taken big game with a .22 Hornet - that was the only rifle he could afford to buy all those years ago before WW2. That Hornet is a sweet little gun - but it wouldn't be legal to use for big game today in either my home state, or my adopted state. It is, indeed, a .22 The .222 and the .223 are legal. The weight of the bullet, the powder charge, and even the diameter of the bullet sets them all apart from the .22.
Just give it up - you mis-spoke, and now you're trying to justify what you said. You simply cannot push all those rounds you've mentioned through the barrel of a .22 rifle. Each of them will damage the barrel, if not the chamber. Eventually, the damned rifle might even blow apart in your hands.
There's a reason why shooters are taught to always check their weapon and their ammunition to see that they match.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
To be fair, atheists have science on their side : it's trivially easy to prove that many bible/torah/kuran "facts" are utter bullshit, while no god is needed to explain anything happening in our universe. Occam's razor, baby!
We have an after-the-fact claim that he was an "agent" - which experts are saying does not appear to have been written by ISIS as it does not use their usual vocabulary and even that doesn't claim to have directed his actions. In fact, it reads more like an endorsement of an independent actor whose actions they nevertheless approved off.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>To some, the word God means essentially "nature", or "natural laws", which makes the atheist's position untenable.
Nope, that kind of Spinozan view is, in fact, a form of atheism (and one I find quite appealing myself). It's not a worship - merely a wonderment at something bigger than yourself, many notable atheists regularly express Spinozan views. De Grasse Tyson for example frequently speaks of the sense of wonder he feels when studying the cosmos - that's Spinozan thought.
It differs from religion in being devoid of worship - it does not personify those forces. Recognizing a real universe greater than ourselves and our small part in that universe with a sense of wonder and astonishment is beautiful and a driving motivation for science - but it is fundamentally NOT religion and does not require any believe in things that aren't there. You could call it spirituality without the need for spirits.
And a key aspect is this: because there is no personification of these forces, they cannot be given authority - and thus nobody can claim to act in the name of that authority. People who do the latter always and without exception abuse the power that they thus acquire.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That's why I love Penn Jillette as an advocate for atheists. He really has a way of explaining things well:
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?