Subject: I just got back from the Seattle vigil
Author:
Posted on: 2016-06-13 06:02:00 UTC
It was amazing to see so many members of my community gathered in one place to mourn - and terrifying to see the police presence. We can't even gather on Capitol Hill in Seattle without being in danger.
As my friend Laurel would put it: Much love, and solidarity in all our struggles.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/orlando-nightclub-massacre/orlando-nightclub-shooting-emergency-services-respond-reports-gunman-n590446
At least 50 people were killed and more than 50 others wounded after a gunman opened fire and took hostages at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, early Sunday morning.
The shooter was identified by several law enforcement sources as Omar Mateen, 29.
The massacre — which is now the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States — began when the gunman stormed the Pulse Nightclub about 2 a.m., with an AR-15 type rifle and a handgun, officials said.
He was shot dead about three hours later when a SWAT team entered the club, police said. Eleven Orlando police officers and three Orange County sheriff's deputies exchanged fire with Mateen, authorities said. City officials said there were about 300 people inside the club at the time of the shooting.
The incident is being investigated as an act of terrorism.
Seddique Mir Mateen, Mateen's father, told NBC News, "this has nothing to do with religion." Mateen said his son got angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami a couple of months ago and thinks that may be related to the shooting.
[...]
Six of the 50 victims were identified Sunday afternoon as Edward Sotomayor Jr., Stanley Almodovar III, Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, Juan Ramon Guerrero, Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera and Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz. Officials said more names would be released as family members of the dead were notified.
Many Muslim groups swiftly rebuked the attack Sunday.
"We condemn this monstrous attack and offer our heartfelt condolences to the families and loved ones of all those killed or injured. The Muslim community joins our fellow Americans in repudiating anyone or any group that would claim to justify or excuse such an appalling act of violence," the Council on American-Islamic Relations Orlando Regional Coordinator Rasha Mubarak said in a statement.
President Barack Obama said Sunday afternoon that the "massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub."
[...]
The shooting at the nightclub comes during a series of national celebrations that mark LGBT pride month.
The owner of Pulse said in a statement Sunday that she was "devastated."
"Pulse, and the men and women who work there, have been my family for nearly 15 years," said Barbara Poma. "From the beginning, Pulse has served as a place of love and acceptance for the LGBTQ community. I want to express my profound sadness and condolences to all who have lost loved ones. Please know that my grief and heart are with you."
Individually, yes (I'm researching gun-violence-prevention organizations to volunteer with -- I need to do community service for school anyway), but also as a PPC community. World One needs protecting too, before it careens off into somewhere warped, somewhere we don't want to live.
The fantastic thing about the PPC is that we all listen to each other's perspectives and respond thoughtfully and respectfully. I propose we share our thoughtful, respectful responses with the world. Let's make a collection of our writing about the topic -- from hS's graphs, to Alleb's defense of guns as a safeguard against tyranny, to Plort stories about violence. Let's share it all over the web. Let's print out copies and leave them in coffee shops and community centers. (Or maybe we could sell copies, and give the money to a gun-violence prevention charity all the contributors can agree on.)
I think a multinational, multiple perspective collection could get people to realize that real debate and discussion is possible. Maybe if more and more people realized that, we would see some real change.
Would other people be interested in doing that? Does anyone else have an idea for a way we can take action?
I think it's an excellent idea, Key (that is your nickname, correct? I wanted to say "Cat," for some reason...). You have my--*realizes EPL already made that reference* er, you have--um, oh gosh, I didn't think I'd need to do improv--line, please!
-Alleb
... to clean up my two graph-posts for 'publication' (and Kaitlyn's response to Alleb too).
hS
But given that this is near the bottom of the page AND that the Plort thread is now up, I would suggest that you wait for the Plort thread to drop off of the front page and create a new post linking back to this one so that this can be given the attention and brainstorming it deserves.
(I'm glad you guys like the idea! I'm excited.)
Read and weep, folks...
Poland, along with Russia, Iran and several other Gulf states has formed an alliance. They managed to push one of the key points - blocking the decriminalization language from being included in a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on June 8 that called for ending the AIDS pandemic by 2030.
In layman's terms: Russia, Poland, and Iran went full-on conservatism and all those that say homosexuality is a punishable perversion. To add more to this "success", Russia - with a silent nod from Poland - was trying to push another "brilliant idea" - to allow countries that have anti-LGBT legislation to deny antiretroviral treatment to gay men. That's basic F[CENSORED]ING HEALTHCARE!
Luckily that last one didn't manage to succeed. For now.
And now my personal rant, so excuse me...
F[CENSORED]K YOU, POLAND! I am so sick of you treating people like crap just because of their believes, skin colour, or sexuality! The next opportunity I have, I am leaving this God forsaken primitive country, which reverted back to f[CENSORED]ing Middle Ages! I am done with hearing "death to fa[CENSORED]ts" as often as "good morning"! I am done with you, Poland! You are officially the worst European country for me!
(heavy breathing) Sorry... Sorry, I'm calm now.
Here's a letter from a Christian to the LGBT community that I would like to share. And here is part of a letter from one Christian to others. I'm not sure what to say, really. What can be said? May those touched by this tragedy find peace; that is all I know to say.
-Alleb
"What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead."
-- James 2: 14-17, The Holy Bible (New International Version)
Sign petitions. Vote for changes to these laws. Do something. Because while prayer might make you feel like you're doing something for the families and memories of those affected, nobody just prays for the families and memories of people ploughed into by drunk drivers; far-reaching laws were enacted and, surprise surprise, rates of drunk driving (and therefore the incidence of fatalities) dropped like a rock.
I remember when you people had Sandy Hook. I remember everyone who offered their prayers, who said "Never again". And guess what? The United States has had, at the last count, 998 mass shootings since then. Nearly a thousand. How many more people have to die before you people stop praying and start helping? Because I guarantee you that the only person you're actually helping when you sit in a dark room with your eyes closed wishing the bad things away is you.
I'm sorry. This one hit a nerve. I don't begrudge anybody their faith, and taking refuge in that faith after an atrocity is perfectly reasonable; it is not my intention to attack the faithful for their beliefs, and if that's what you're taking from this rant then I apologise. It's just that when it comes to the mass murders of innocent people with privately-owned automatic weaponry you can buy in seven bloody minutes, I get sick and tired of prayer being the only thing people try in order to prevent them.
I'm also sure your prayers are appreciated, but while the spiritual is important, we have to align those thoughts with the temporal world. Do more to prevent this. You have a voice. Pray with it, and shout with it, and use it to speak up for the dead so that more innocent souls don't join them. Please.
I'm just sick of people being killed en masse and even more so of people insisting that there's nothing that can be done about it.
I think you look at the tragedy, and you say: what if he hadn't been able to get a gun? There would have been no deaths. But I think: what if every designated driver inside and outside of Pulse had been armed?
I think that if laws are put into place restricting guns to the extent that many--I don't know how far you think it ought to go, but I know some people go pretty far--people want, it will only succeed in disarming law-abiding people. The mass murderers, the rapists, the thieves: they'll still have guns, because they don't care about laws. Sure, it may be a bit harder to get them, they'd be more expensive, but once they have them there's no chance that any citizen they decided to target will be able to fight back.
Anyway, let me put it this way. I'm in a strange part of town, alone. I'm walking home. A man steps out of the alley with a knife, tells me to follow him into the alley. Do I want to have a gun at that moment? Yes.
Well, those are my thoughts, FWTW. I'm not much for debate on the Board, but would you be willing to email more about this? I'm curious about your position.
Luke 22:36 (which, in all fairness, many take to be symbolic rather than literal. I'll have to ask someone about that.)
-Alleb
A bit of background: My family owns guns, many of which are heirlooms passed down through my dad's side. My dad has a special license to carry a concealed handgun on an airplane because he's a pilot, and his company doesn't want him unarmed should terrorists attempt to take over. Both my parents are ex-military and we often go to an outdoor shooting range when the weather is nice. I enjoy shooting guns—there's not really anything more satisfying than shooting a ping-pong ball off a golf tee at fifty yards.
However, my parents instilled in me from a very young age that guns are deadly weapons that you always handle as if loaded, and you never, ever point it at anything you don't intend to shoot. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for everyone; I can't help but think of those stories you hear on the news about toddlers accidentally shooting themselves because a parent left a loaded handgun unattended somewhere a small child could easily reach, instead of unloaded and locked away in a safe.
I knew gun laws were lax in America, but I didn't really know how lax they were until I took a look at my own state's laws.
"No state permit is required for the possession of a rifle, shotgun, or handgun."
I'm sorry, what? What? Are you kidding me?
Seriously, just look at that chart at the top of the page. It's quite honestly terrifying.
I can't wait to move to England.
Again, I'm not much for debate on the Board. My opinions are basically the polar opposite of everyone on here, I think, and there's only one of me and many of you, so any defense I try to make will probably be rather rough and frazzled.
Also, who knows? Maybe more gunmen at Pulse wouldn't have helped at all. Maybe the crossfire would have killed as many as it saved; we'll never know. I think more would have helped, but I'm not an expert.
In any case, I'm one of the ultra-right wingers ST mentioned down below. Guns are a very nice safeguard against tyranny. Molon labe.
-Alleb
P.S. You guys can keep talking about it--obviously--but this is the last I'll say on this thread.
I mean, if the US of A's government decides to one-eighty (for some reason) and go full Big Brother, they won't send in cops to get the people with guns. They'll send attack helicopters. If they'll really go evil, they'll just level the block. You know about the Dahiya Doctrine? A hypothetical Evil Gubmint would do that. And a gun does diddly squat against that.
First off, to Alleb: Don't feel like it's you against the world (or in this case, the Board):
a) you're not the only conservative here the Board, and
b) from what I've seen so far, everyone who has responded has been reasonable in their responses—though some are clearly passionate as well. Such reasoned discussion is, sadly, a rarity on the Internet. I'm not one for on-Board debate myself, but don't be afraid to mix it up here, as long as you can be respectful about it.
Which leads me to the second thing I want to say, this time to everyone: having heard the gun-control arguments through the lens of conservative talk radio, I had no idea that there might actually be something to the pro-gun-control argument; I thought that it was all naïve idealism. However, the stats that hS compiled, as well as the arguments from Des (illegal guns aren't easy to get), Neshomeh (more guns don't necessarily make communities safer), and Kaitlyn (criminals may not care about laws, but small-time criminals do care about feasibility) are making me take a closer look at what I thought was the obviously right answer.
If only politicians were as concerned with actual debate as they are with getting their sound bites heard by their respective echo chambers. The citizenry might actually—gasp!—starting think for themselves! And a legislature might—oh, the horror!—actually get meaningful things done!
Or any weapon, for that matter.
Guns are not a safeguard against tyranny. If everyone is armed, then everyone is afraid of his or her fellow human— for taking a life now becomes as effortless as pulling a trigger.
This is not how things should be.
"Molon labe"? No. If you truly want people to live in peace, lay down your weapons by your own choice.
Ductus exemplo.
But... well... there's that one phrase that Spider-Man constantly brings up: with great power comes great responsibility.
Firearms are a great power. But not everyone is responsible enough to handle that kind of power. People are prone to fits of passion, or darkest despair, and easy access to firearms makes those moments disastrous.
Unfortunately... I think that wanting to do anything about it is just wishful thinking. America's government is never going to take guns away from civilians, and we'll never have the world peace necessary to make guns obsolete.
As someone who has worked around large numbers of U.S. public for years now, I would not trust nearly ALL of my zoo guests I've interacted with with a gun. In my experience, people are thoughtless, lazy, and easily get angry. Being around someone like that in a moment of actual danger sounds much more frightening than being in an aggressive animal's yard alone, even if the gun weilder is "on my side." At least I know the animal will attack me; I have no clue what the armed human is going to do.
—doctorlit really hates people, in case that wasn't clear yet
Putting them into terms I can actually test for, I see two hypotheses in your post:
1/ After a certain point, increased number of guns decreases the number of firearm-related homicides, and possibly the total number of homicides.
2/ (After a certain point,) increased number of guns decreases the number of rapes.
Here's how I propose to test them:
I will plot graphs of countries for which these data are available. I will sanitise the dataset by removing Africa and South America entirely - a lot of those countries, the large numbers of guns are in the hands of paramilitary groups.
I know Wikipedia has the data for hypothesis one (I used it in this post). I don't know whether it has rape data, but I'm guessing I can find it (which is why I chose rape over thefts-in-dark-alleys). I don't know what the numbers will say.
Do you agree with the hypotheses as stated? I don't want to misrepresent you or the data. I'll wait on your response before looking at/for it.
hS
I don't think it will be conclusive. There are too many variables, and no two countries are alike. You can try it if you want, though. I might do something similar with the states.
-Alleb
I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Since the US has the highest gun ownership per head in the world, it's always going to be the point on the far-right of the graphs.
#1: Firearm Homicides against Gun Ownership
The following countries have a firearms homicide rate greater than 4, and are thus excluded from the large graph:
Honduras, Jamaica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Philippines, Mexico, Costa Rica.
Along with Nicaragua, these are the only countries in the dataset with lower gun-ownership and higher firearms-homicide rates than the United States.
#2: Firearm Suicides against Gun Ownership
There's... not a whole lot to say about that; it's a straight-line graph. Also a fairly obvious fact.
#3: Total Homicides against Gun Ownership
The US is the single point out at the far right, again. The following countries have a higher homicide rate than the US:
Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, Belize, Guatemala, Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, Panama, Mexico, Turkmenistan, Bolivia, Uganda, Mauritania, Papua New Guinea, Haiti, Costa Rica, Philippines, Russia, Barbados, Tanzania, Senegal, Iraq, Comoros, Kazakhstan, Eritrea, Pakistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Laos, Lithuania, Yemen, Lebanon, Ukraine, Solomon Islands, Cuba, Albania, Burundi, Fiji.
I'm including these lists, by the way, because these are the countries our hypothesis says we should be looking at to see whether their lower gun-ownership is the cause of their higher homicide rates.
#4: Total Suicides against Gun Ownership
Again, the US is out on the far right (which is really useful!). The following countries have a higher suicide rate than the US:
South Korea, Sri Lanka, Lithuania, Tanzania, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Burundi, India, Turkmenistan, Russia, Uganda, Hungary, Japan, Belarus, Bhutan, Comoros, Ukraine, Poland, Eritrea, Latvia, Montenegro, Finland, Belgium, Iceland, Moldova, Estonia, El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago, Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Papua New Guinea, France, Bolivia
#5: Total Reported Rapes against Gun Ownership
(Where 'reported' means 'reported by the country to the surveyors')
And here are the countries with higher reported rape stats than the US:
Sweden, Costa Rica, Pakistan, Australia, Panama, Belgium
Having gotten past my initial 'dear sweet mercy America' reaction, I'm going to be generous and assume this is mostly down to reporting differences, rather than America being a hideous festering pit of evil or something.
But seriously. There's 90 countries in my dataset. What.
#6: Gun Ownership, Firearms Homicides, and Homicides Over Time (UK, Australia, USA)
The main conclusion I draw from this is that the UK really sucked in the early 2000s. We reached nearly a third of the homicide rate of the US!
#7: One Final Number
The average total number of 'legal-intervention gun homicides' (AKA justifiable homicides, usually AKA self-defence) in the US, per year, is about 600. The average number of gun homicides total is around 12,000.
hS
In 1996 Britain saw the Dunblane massacre, when 16 schoolchildren were shot dead by a man who walked in with his legal handgun. In response, we outlawed handguns.
If I can find them, I'll compare stats on a) gun counts, b) firearms deaths, and c) homicide (and suicide) rates before and after 1996. It's the closest I can come to an actual example.
(If anyone knows of a country that had legal assault weapons and then banned them, recently but long enough ago that there's enough data to look through, I'd love to hear it.)
hS
See the Port Arthur massacre.
From what I've heard, Australia used to have gun legislation similar to that of the US. Now? There's been practically nothing since the strict controls implemented following the above incident.
Gun deaths initially declined slowly, but as of a few years ago, gun homicides had dropped to 1 death per hundred thousand.
Source.
I *am safer* -- my children *are safer* -- living in a country where we cannot buy guns to defend ourselves.
Partly because: owning a firearm doesn't make you a *competent* marksman. It can't teach you to deal with the panic of an ambush situation. It doesn't replace drilling and training that people receive in the military or law enforcement. It doesn't grant you the protective equipment that they need to survive the standoff. Civvy good guys with guns are a VERY POOR line of defence.
Partly because: a lot of good guys with guns use them to kill their families in the heat of an angry moment.
Partly because: a lot of good guys with guns use them to kill *themselves* in a moment of despair.
Partly because: humans are massively accident-prone, and if you have an accident with a gun, you stand a good chance of doing severe or fatal damage. I knew somebody whose 12-year-old grandson accidentally shot and killed his best friend while hunting squirrels. Worth the thrill of the sport?
Partly because: criminals appear to be essentially lazy (gosh, really?). Most are not mob bosses plugged into the black market. If they can't pick up a gun with their weekly shop, they'll use a knife instead . . . and while that's obviously terrible, I'll take my chances with a knife over a gun any day.
Wild horses could not drag me back to the US. The stats are pretty clear. Increased numbers of people-killing-machines => increased numbers of dead people.
I find it curious that you cast your hypothetical alleyway attacker with a knife and not a gun. What happens if you both have guns? What happens if he has an automatic weapon and you have a single-action?
Is the situation not far less deadly-dangerous, both for you and any innocents within firing range, if he DOES only have a knife, and you perhaps also have a knife and some self-defense skills, and resort first to screaming as loud as you can and running away without the danger of being shot at?
~Neshomeh
To wit, that it's really hard to get illegal guns, not to mention, y'know, illegal. You can run afoul of the black market; you can fall for a police sting; etc etc. Disarming the general populace would also reduce the amount of criminals with guns simply because it will be harder for them to get guns. You can see the effects of such an environment right here in Israel — there's a reason the recent terrorism wave is a knife-and-car wave and not a shooting wave. Even the Sarona attack last week was performed with an improvised weapon. If Israel would've been like the States, we wouldn't be looking at four dead, six wounded and two wounded terrorists; we've been looking at ten times those numbers.
Toes over the line, but I do also understand where you're coming from with that.
This country has got a weapons problem, and t needs Congressman ready to lose their seat to stop this duckery Right. Ducking. Now.
I don't even want to think about how the attentats in France could have gone if getting guns was so easy there too.
...is that they have an incredibly powerful gun lobby that essentially has the government by the throat. The National Rifle Association is backed by the USA's gun culture and is incredibly difficult to ignore. They are the ones pushing the rhetoric where a safe America is an armed America-- a statement that is about as inane as saying "if you stab everyone you meet, you'll never have to worry about getting stabbed yourself". After all, a little bit of mass paranoia never hurt anyone, eh? Furthermore, what could possibly go wrong when you have a bunch of angry people and some easily-accessible weapons?
I find it interesting that there's such a vehement defence of easy access to guns after every mass shooting -- it's quite telling of what the real priorities are here: who cares about the dead people? They're going to take away my guns and my rights!
Etc, etc.
(All figures are per 100,000 population and per year, unless otherwise stated)
I wouldn't live here, even if I got paid for this.
Some politicians really need to have got the guts of going against RNA. A country cannot be going well with something like this.
A summary:
-Shooting happens.
-/r/news is revealed to have been censoring posts about the event that aren't gun control dogma, and is also removing posts about how desperately blood donations are needed.
-/r/The_Donald finds out, goes ballistic, and hijacks /r/all for our own good, pointing out how cruel the mods of /r/news are being during a time like this.
-/r/news begins losing subscribers, a la Fine Bros at a rate of ~500 per minute.
My god.
/r/news delivered an "apology," however, there's a reason the post is about to hit the negatives. Several, actually:
-Their lack of judgement lead them to delaying the removal of a moderator so toxic it almost killed me way too long.
-The mods claimed that all of the crap going down was related to brigades and hate speech. This is entirely false. All posts removed were removed for, as said earlier, mentioning Radical Islam (note the capital "R") and blood donations.
-All in all, they have failed a majority of Reddit's collective population as a whole, and are refusing to acknowledge this, instead blaming it on the "troll" scapegoat whose mere existence is tenuous at best and occupying negative space at worst in times like this.
-The admins aren't helping either. It's strongly implied their statement they made and the actions they took following the controversy were really just an attempt to kick /r/The_Donald off of /r/all. I don't support Trump, but suppressing a non-hate sub, period is unacceptable on Reddit. At this rate, Spez (the admin behind this part of the controversy) will become the next Ellen Pao despite being her replacement specifically to fix everything wrong with her position.
Where's a giant bucket of popcorn when you need one? On second thought, not even that will help you endure this drama...
I went and dug around in /r/The_Donald. I found that they share two mods with /r/TheRedPill, which kinda made me lose any respect I had for them (which wasn't a lot to begin with).
I can completely understand removing posts about radical Islam as that'a a red herring being used to detract from the actual motive behind the attack, and I imagine, based on what i've seen elsewhere the posts were rather Islamiphobic. On the other hand the rest of that is pretty messed up, yo. At the same time this is reddit. It's basically the bastard lovechild of 4chan and Something Awful with all the worst qualities of both. You can't expect much.
I mean it doesn't help that I've been losing my mind for various reasons but holy balls tumblr is in two camps right now. "This was 1000% Islamic terrorism and if you try to even discuss gun control I will literally kill you" and everyone sane who is slowly going mad with grief.
Blaming the massacre on "toxic masculinity" and everybody's favourite bugbear, "The Patriarchy(TM)".
It's "Horseshoe Theory" filtered through my idiolect.
Last night our community gathered in the center of town - it's a small town, the organizer of Pride notes that all together, we numbered about the same as the total of people wounded or killed. It was pretty sobering. I had two friends in Orlando that night, nearby, but they skipped the club to go shopping, because their wedding is this weekend.
What do we do about this?
Working in an academic institution, I have nightmares about this constantly. My friends and loved ones seem so vulnerable. I've never thought of a gay nightclub as the target zone. It makes me heartsick.
for that one moment, when the world realizes that love is love and gender has no role in it.
I wish I knew what words, what phrases, would act as the best salve for this new wound in our collective psyche. But I don't. All I have are my thoughts, confused and muddled as they are.
As I read through the accounts of what happened in Orlando, I thought back to the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. I lived in Colorado (where Columbine is) and was about to enter middle school myself at the time. I just remember being plagued by questions and fear. How could such a thing happen? Why? Was my own school safe?
Now, 17 years later, I'm a bisexual adult well out of school. And yet I feel like a confused child again. The questions have changed—Why has nothing been done to curtail this violence? Why do people feel the need to respond to differences with hate?—but the fears are still the same.
I guess all I can say is this: hold your loved ones close, reach out to those hurting, and keep on moving forward. I hope that helps a little.
It was amazing to see so many members of my community gathered in one place to mourn - and terrifying to see the police presence. We can't even gather on Capitol Hill in Seattle without being in danger.
As my friend Laurel would put it: Much love, and solidarity in all our struggles.
It's terrifying.
I had no idea I could feel so empty and so horrified all at once.
As a member of the LGBT community (I'm bisexual) this hurts particularly for me. Pulse was supposed to be a safe place. I can't believe some people would think mass murder is a better idea than two men (or women) kissing.
In church, from my gay minister, no less. The news itself is horrific enough. Watching his face and hearing his voice as he struggled to keep his composure made it personal.
How dare that guy; and how dare this government refuse to do anything to make it more difficult for others to commit similar atrocities; and while I'm at it, assuming I'm not imagining it, how dare the NBC try to spin it into anti-Muslim sentiment and engender more fear and hatred.
We may be justly outraged at acts of hatred, but may we never allow the hatred of others to spread and grow into hatred in ourselves.
~Neshomeh
There always seems to be some poor excuse for a human who thinks that hurting innocent Muslims counts as revenge against ISIS.
They're using Muslims (especially ISIS) as a scapegoat to not have to deal with LGBT.
I can't be the only one getting a start-of-WWII vibe, right?
This is nothing new; it's just a difference of scale. Shooting sprees are nothing new in the US (you guys have waaaaay too many guns and not enough regulation), murder of gays because they're gay isn't new, and ISIS-inspired terrorism isn't new either (example 1, example 2 — there are more but I'm too tired to hunt for the examples right now).
Seems like these mass murderers are actually learning from each others' mistakes. Their entire plans, everything that happened, is in the news.
If anything gives me a WWII vibe, it's Trump. And that's all I'm going to say about that.
That attitudes like this still exist...
I don't get sad when I hear news like this.
I get angry.
REALLY angry.
I have nothing but loathing for people like this, who hurt other people for no other reason than being different.
Pulse was hosting its Upscale Latin Night at the time of the shooting. The main acts were trans.
The shooter was on an active watch list and was known to the FBI. Despite this, he was able to purchase an assault rifle and plan the attack in less than a week.
Personal note: if I lived in Orlando? I'd probably have gone. I might not have enjoyed it very much, but I would have gone. Because it was somewhere a transwoman like me could be themselves.
The United States of America is not safe for me and mine.
...when the pro-gun groups say that they should have the right to bear arms in order to— and I quote from a real American I met— "defend themselves against a tyrannical government" because the government should fear the people, said people should overthrow (with violence) an oppressive government, and all of that ultra-right-wing stuff.
I'd really like to see that merry band of patriots face off against professional US Army soldiers or heck, a single Infantry Fighting Vehicle. I'm sure those small arms wouldn't do much good against some heavy armour.
"You can have my gun... when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."
"Your terms are acceptable." *crunchy alien noises*
Too many people hold on to the second ammendment, which is honestly more out-dated than the 21st, and it's probably about time to get rid of it, but that's not gonna happen because people think it's what gives them the right to own guns, when in reality it just gives the right to form a well-armed militia. Which we basically traded in for our police force more than a hundred years ago.
The NRA has the GOP by the balls. Not gonna happen.
...does something like this have to happen before people realize what we have now isn't working? :(
Either that or when the NRA gets their mind out of the muzzle
Not everybody to the right of, say, Corbyn is a Tory shill.
Scapegrace is right. Our right is gorram terrifying, but our left is still pretty awful with only a few minor exceptions.
Jeremy Corbyn is the hardline-left leader of the British Labour Party. I really don't like him, he's the guy thinking Hizballah are his friends. The Tories are the British Conservative Party. They also have their share of weirdos like the current Prime Minister Honest Dave and BoJo the Racist Clown.
That the US of A has the same rate of gun-related crimes as Somalia. Don't have a source on that, though.
Couldn't believe it until I saw for myself. Why people feel the urge to do something so horrific, I'll never understand...
Understand? That's far more up in the air, I think.
Choose your words carefully, Granz. Fifty people are dead because a man found their love "disgusting." Many of my friends and loved ones could easily have been among their number.
Is that I won't say what he did was right. It's wrong to just discriminate against people like that, and it's worse to kill because of that discrimination. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to understand. Everybody has motivations. Even the most hateful or most insane of people have their reasons for doing things, and even if we don't agree with what they're doing or why they're doing it, it's important to understand why they're doing it, if only to keep it from happening again. It's wrong for something like this to happen. It's worse to let it blind us to the fact that this was a human being, with thoughts and feelings and reasons for doing everything he did who did this. It's worse to allow this to cause us to hate someone without even trying to comprehend who they are, even if they are dead. When something like this happens, it's easy to put yourself in the shoes of the victims. It's a lot harder to put yourself in the shoes of the perpetrator, but it's something that must be done. After all, the reason this happened could be said to be because this person didn't understand that just because love is between two people of the same sex, that doesn't change the fact that it is love. If we allow ourselves to give up our understanding, then we become monsters. We won't condone what he did, because it was wrong. We will understand him, because to not do so would be to become him.
That's very true, and very well said.
I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions - there are a lot of people whose reactions to this have surprised and dismayed me.
I think this is a very important message. I would add that only by understanding the individual do we recognize that a shooter is not all Muslim people, or all Christian people, or all people with mental health problems, or all any group. Nor is any group made up of identical drones who all think and act alike, and can be dismissed as them, not us; as non-people.
(Granz, you're not a Unitarian Universalist by any chance, are you? Your sentiment is very much in line with our seven principles and my own feelings, so I can't help but wonder. {= ) )
~Neshomeh
The shooter certainly isn't all of any of the groups mentioned. He isn't part of any of the groups mentioned to begin with.
Also I feel pretty safe saying he is a good representation of all homophobes. They might not all commit acts of violence, but they do certainly celebrate when it happens, or say the shooter didn't go far enough. You just have to look to Twitter for proof of that.
This, along with some personal stuff, has been bringing out the cynic in me. I have had to correct several family members on the shooter's identity in the last couple of days so I just kinda jumped to conclusions, which was wrong of me.
To wit: I find the idea of male-on-male sex disgusting. I think that makes me a homophobe, no? However, I also think that what two consenting adults do with each other is none of my business — or the state's, for that matter — and gods forbid violence against people because of who they decide to bonk. You can be disgusted by something without wanting to make the people practising it disappear, you know.
Despite its etymology, "homophobia" isn't normally interpreted in the same way as, "triskaidekaphobia". It doesn't mean 'I don't want to be around this thing'; it is used to mean 'I think this thing should not exist and that people who disagree are disgusting and/or evil'.
What I'm saying is that wandering around saying "I'm a homophobe because I don't want to have gay sex!" isn't... the best idea in the world.
hS
But people here certainly called me homophobic after I explained my position.
It's a strong word, and is sometimes used to refer to moral outrage as well as just being grossed out (e.g. "I'm disgusted by your behaviour! How dare you scream scatological profanities at your six-year old cousin!") Perhaps a better way to put it would be to say that you're grossed out, repulsed*, or squicked** by gay sex, or you think it's icky, or you don't like to think about the details. (And be mindful of the context when you bring it up -- in the context of gay rights, your personal likes and dislikes aren't what's at stake, so unless someone else is using the "gay sex is gross so gay people are repugnant" argument, there's no need to mention it; while if the conversation is about slash, you might want to explain why you haven't read any. )
*Mostly heard this one used by my ace/aro friends, some of whom describe themselves as sex-repulsed or romance-repulsed.
**I think this one is associated with and most recognisable within the BDSM community.
--Key has been the token allosexual friend and also likes words.
Because the connotations are different in Hebrew.
Does that make me . . . everyone-not-asexual-a-phobic? I don't think it does.
. . . Is there a word for that? It feels like there should be a word for "all non-asexuals."
—doctorlit isn't a fan of the whole touching thing
No offense to all my allosexual friends!
—doctorlit has nothing against allosexuals; he happens to have a lot of allosexual friends, honest!
... much better than I did. ^_^ Yes, there's a difference between 'I don't like this thing' and 'I don't like people who do like this thing'. In social contexts, '-phobia' is used for the latter.
hS
You say it very well, too.
And no, I'm not. It's a coincidence, I guess. Unless there aren't any, in which case, it's a carefully planned move on the cosmic chessboard that probably cannot be comprehended by mortal minds.
My heart is with them.
monsters.
