The Gun country, USA, has witnessed another mass shooting !
LGBTQ community attacked again by homophobic theists!
Liberal Democracy attacked again by Islamist terror !
Many will project only one of the above reasons for Orlando massacre that saw deaths of 50 people in LGBTQ night club.
In reality all the above reasons have more or less equal roles in the massacre.
Where there is so much hatred generated by religions and right-wing propaganda,
where there is so many personal weapons of mass destruction readily and legally available
it is not surprising that such massacres happen.
If you address only one of the reasons for these killings , you won’t come anywhere near to stopping its recurrence.
The UK has an LGBTQ community, homophobic theists aplenty and a liberal democracy.
There’ve been a total of three spree shootings in my lifetime (nearly 50 years) none of them religiously motivated, and two of them led to major changes in the gun laws. The last one was almost exactly six years ago.
The reasons you give do NOT have “more or less equal roles”. It is the easy, legal availability of guns that makes this kind of thing a rare event elsewhere and a daily routine in the USA.
Has there ever been such a massacre of LGBTQ people in USA ? Gun violence and mass shooting of random strangers are everyday occurrences but not such homophobic killings. So guns+homophobia+Islamist ideology combined here.
Perhaps you misunderstood. Yes, those three things combined. I do not take issue with that observation.
What I take issue with is this, that you said:
That’s just false. We have homophobia in the UK. We have violence. We have theists. We even have theists committing homophobic violence.
What we don’t have is ready, legal access to high quality firearms.
To pretend that this wasn’t the major contributory factor here is, frankly, deluded. I expect this sort of delusion from people in the USA – as a nation they decided after Sandy Hook that the spree shooting of children was acceptable, and that no change in the law on guns was needed. But I would expect people not steeped in that kind of sick mentality to be able to see through it.
I agree that free access to guns is the primary reason for so many deaths.
The human mind (or most of them at least) finds it difficult to conceive that multiple factors may create a single event.
@sonofrojblake, the UK still has terrorist attacks so it’s not like stopping mass shootings solves everything. That said, it’s obscene that the murderer purchased everything he needed for his massacre the week of the attack and could have done it the day of the attack. You’d think we could put some more obstacles between evil intentions and evil actions.
Seriously? You’re going with that?