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Notes -
Haven't seen a thread yet on the gay bar shooting last weekend so I figured I would start it.
Sticking to facts in this post, opinion will go in reply.
The shooter killed 5 and injured 25
The shooter is a 22 year old, Anderson Lee Aldrich
The shooter previously was charged after he threatened his mother with homemade explosives and kidnapped her, but the charges were dropped
The shooter is the grandson of a prominent local Republican
The shooter was stopped by a drag queen combat veteran, who used his high heels to stomp him
Now for the opinion:
I believe that speech is powerful. Words are a means we use to convince other minds of beliefs about the world. Minds act upon those beliefs.
At present, there is a powerful right wing-meme that many people, some LGBT and some not, mostly democrats, are attempting to sexually confuse children for nefarious purposes. This is often described as "grooming" in order to equivocate with sexual abuse children.
Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.
You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?
You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children. If you really believe this, you should act the same as if they proposed legalizing Cannabalism. There is no debate with barbarians, only the sword.
What a monumentally cynical take by you. First off, do you have any solid evidence of the specific motives of the shooter? Please recall the coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting, which received massive and nonstop worldwide news coverage as the sine qua nom of anti-gay hate crimes. Well, it turns out that, as @Iconochasm notes below, the Pulse shooting had absolutely nothing to do with gay people, and the shooter literally picked it at random after he arrived at his planned target, the Disney entertainment complex in Orlando, realized that the security was too strong and that he stood no chance, and then searched “Orlando night clubs” in Google Maps and went to the closest one. We know this for a fact because it all came out in the trial of his widow. Still, to this day, Pulse is such a load-bearing part of the narrative that LGBT+ advocates continue to wield it totemically, either genuinely unaware of the truth or calculating in their dishonesty.
So, I think I’ll wait to render any judgment of the shooting (other than, of course, to unequivocally condemn it and its perpetrator) and hold off on assigning any blame to anybody.
That’s not even touching the obvious double standard which countless other commenters are noting, wherein catastrophizing about the perpetual threat posed by the very public existence of right-wing speech - let alone right-wing policies or actions - is routine, constant, and amplified daily and hourly by the most powerful people in the world. I don’t need or expect you to apologize for any of that - you have, as far as I’m aware, no power nor any significant public platform beyond this forum - but I find it profoundly cringeworthy that you would stoop to something like this.
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