Current Events

What does it all mean ?

Yakima Canutt wrote:
there was a bad shooting at The Florida Pulse Club early Sunday morning

remember, if you start wanting to kill strangers, don't do it - how would you like it if someone you didn't even know decided to kill you?

Back in November, we had been watching a couple of movies together when my boyfriend checked his smartphone one last time as we went to bed. The Bataclan-massacre in Paris. A concert venue in Paris, that could have been me - I remember thinking.

Brussels brought things even closer physically - I live in Antwerp, a 35-minute train ride from Brussels.

Physically Orlando is a lot further of course. But the fact that it was a gay bar under attack brought it actually very close.
In a way, it really feels like an all open attack on 'my people'. And it tells me that not only do I risk to become the random victim of some terrorist attack, me & the ones I love might also become the selected targets of an attack.

I've lived as an openly gay man for so long that it's a subject I actually rarely every think about. It's just a fact about me, just like the fact that I have brown eyes or that I tend to like jazz music. But events such as Orlando suddenly make me very 'gay' again. In the sense that I have to realize, once more, that being a homosexual man means that I could become the target of some murderous lunatic.

pinhedz wrote:I remember there was a holocaust survivor that said "The Nazis made me Jewish, a never really was before."

A feeling I can easily identify with, certainly in the light of recent events.

Yakima Canutt wrote:

shrink on the television - "from what we've learned so far, I would conjecture that Omar wasn't a psychopath, but a narcissist with mood disorder"  

I'll leave it to the experts who have access to the necessary case-files to come up with a profile of what type of figure he was.

There's obviously the whole 'gun control' part of the event as well.
It's not up to me to tell Americans how they should organize things in their country - that is strictly up to their political process.
But it's still quite unreal to me that you can basically buy a very heavy assault weapon while you're busy shopping for breakfast cereals.

Yakima Canutt wrote:

basically this is saying USA gun violence levels won't go down much unless the USA is prepared to do like what Aussies did, taking guns away and giving people BBQ gear in exchange

What an idea

It was a buy-back scheme in Australia. Our Medicare levy went from 1.5% to 1.7% for a year to fund the $500 million dollars it cost. Human nature being what it is not everything was handed in and a lot of munitions went underground... Literally, in buried shipping containers. Every now and then one is unearthed

After the World and Korean wars our soldiers just brought their rifles home. The sons of those men were reluctant about handing those firearms in.
It's not difficult to get a gun license.

I think the gun-laws keep the guns out of public view. Not a bad thing. The thought of gun-toting students gives me chills, although that sort of wild-west swagger would seem alien here. In my opinion.