A gunman opened fire in a Fort Myers, Florida nightclub early Monday morning, killing two and wounding at least 16 others. Many of the victims were teenagers.
According to local reports, an unidentified person started shooting at Club Blu around midnight, when the venue was shutting down. Police arrived at the scene shortly after. Sixteen people, aged 12 to 27, were brought to the Lee Memorial Hospital, where at least one person perished.
A woman who watched the shooting unfold and tried to help the victims told ABC News that the venue was full of young people.
“It was a young teen event. There were kids. The kid I was holding in my lap, he was 14 years old that got shot,” Tatianna Nouhaioi said. “And then there was a little girl who also got shot and she was 13. One of the security guard’s daughter got shot, so I mean there was kids 13, 14, 15, 16. It was a young kids event.”
A second woman who lives in the area of the night club reported that she heard multiple guns fired at once.
Club Blu responded to the shooting on Facebook, saying the gunman was not a young person at the event.
“We are deeply sorry for all involved. We tried to give the teens WHAT WE THOUGHT WAS A SAFE PLACE TO HAVE A GOOD TIME. Ages 12-17. There was armed security as well as full security, inside and out,” the club said. “As the club was closing and parents were picking their children up…..that’s when all this took place. There was nothing more we could of done az you see it was not kids at the party that did this despicable act.”
Most of the victims have been released from the hospital, but two remain in critical condition. No arrests have been made, however police detained three people of interest.
More despair. How much more has to happen before people in this country wake the fuck up? Another awful thing? I find myself assuming the two young people who died were persons of colour, because they are being described as men, not teenagers, not young men, not kids.
Via ThinkProgress.
Gun proliferation is fake empowerment, a divide-and-conquer method.
My thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones*. The perpetrators deserve no fame, just a fair trial and sentence.
__
* = Still, any measures to prevent this from happening again are by necessity political.
Ice Swimmer:
It’s working really well here, too.
Correct. I’ve googled their names.
Are there any leads or suspects or motives or anything?
Alexander @ 4:
Their names hadn’t been released when I posted. I know now my assumption was right. Stef’an, 18, and Sean, 14. Kids, out having fun.
All I’ve heard is that 3 people have been detained, and the cops think it’s part of a wider shooting, going on a two other locations. No idea what the hell it’s about. I’ve already seen a whole bunch of white people saying it’s just gang violence, niggers killing niggers, who cares? Such a nice world we live in, when people can see two dead children, and that’s what they come up with.
Mass murder, Japanese style
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/26/national/crime-legal/man-arrested-fatally-stabbing-15-people-wounding-45-kanagawa-facility-disabled-nhk/#.V5aRapDOerX
Caine #5
The response to the shooting is almost as bad as the shooting itself :(
Chigau:
Going after disabled people. There’s a way to guarantee yourself victims.
Alexander:
It is. Symptomatic of a society increasingly without empathy.
Chigau: Yes, the Sagamihara stabbings are utterly awful. It seems to have targetted the profoundly disabled.
I had a conversation with an American colleague this morning on the lines of “see, knives can be used as well as guns for mass murder”
I had to call on all my self restraint and then point out that yes, knives can be used to kill people but in this case the victims were incapable of either resisting or running away. It is far harder to kill people that can resist you when you are weilding a knife rather than a gun. Also, generally knives have a variety of uses -- guns are made to kill things. Normally my colleague seems to be a rational sort of person… what is it with Guns and your Constitution that turns otherwise normal people into rabid firarms fetishists?