Florida Night Club Shooting - at least 20 dead - impact on US elections?

It's really not different. In one event you had a competent police officer that was able to keep both shooters outside by wounding them seriously enough to halt their progress, in the nightclub you didn't have any competent armed security so the terrorist got a shooting gallery. With the nightclub shooting, the terrorist didn't even have body armor, any center mass hit with just about any handgun an armed guard would carry stops him outside the club and few if any others die.

Guns are a fact of life, not just in America, but damn near the entire world. People who wish to harm other people are a fact of life, not just in America, but everywhere in the world. You either prepare for that, or you are a sitting duck when it happens. Any place that has a large gathering of unarmed civilians should have well trained and armed security in order to protect those people.

 

Correct, one location expected trouble due to the nature of the event; the other location did not see it coming.

 

Gun homicides in France are 0.21 per 100,000 people.
Gun homicides in the US are 3.43 per 100,000 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

Obviously they still happen but France's rate is substantially lower so something must be working.

From reading your own article too the issue is illegal firearms, not firearms in general, which yes France has a problem. As your own link shows France needs to better crack down on that. In the US though there isn't a legal alternative to stopping these people from getting guns legally in the first place. The San Bernadino and Orlando attackers obtained there weapons legally and couldn't be prevented from doing so. In France at least they could legally have been prevented from getting their weapons in the first place.

 

And they should have, that's my point. Any large gathering of unarmed people is a target and should be protected by competent armed guards. The people at a nightclub or bar can't protect themselves because you don't really want drunk people carrying, so you have to have someone do it for them. I mean, you had something like 350 people in that club with inadequate security, it was a perfect soft target.

People need to realize these things. I mean, it's not like he snuck in a couple handguns and then just opened up (something that is MUCH harder to stop), he walked up with a rifle and started shooting before he was even inside. One competent armed guard could have prevented the whole thing.

 

Unless I'm mistaken or initial reports were inaccurate the security guard who engaged the shooter was an in uniform off-duty police officer.

 

Mateen had the opportunity to survey the situation prior to when he returned from his vehicle with the assault rifle. He didn't just walk up with the weapons at 2:00 AM and start shooting (see below).

 

Yes, Office Adam Gruler.

Orlando Sentinel: Cops give harrowing account of rescues during nightclub shooting

 

Yeah the problem is you need someone better than this



If you don't have someone competent, you basically don't have anyone at all.

 

Sounds like he wasn't even in the club and certainly not near the door. WTF was he doing in the parking lot?

 

That thing said he was chasing down someone who got in with a fake ID, so I guess he was looking for an underage drunk kid. Either way, one halfway accurate shot is all he needed to be able to make in order to stop the rampage, he wasn't capable of that and IMO that's not acceptable.

It sounds like he shot a few times in the gunman's general direction before running away and allowing the gunman to wound or kill over 100 people. If you can't do better than that, you shouldn't be working as an armed guard.

 

Why can't he be in the parking lot? Trouble happens there to. Drunk people get into fights with each other. Thieves break into cars. It's good to make the security presence felt all over the property, including the parking lot.

Sounds to me like he did the right thing -- called for back-up. If he went all-in for the kill despite being outgunned, he's likely to die and to needlessly delay police response. Dumb to play Monday morning quarterback on what this police officer should have done.

 

Reminder that the shooter was a registered democrat. Can you imagine the uproar from the media a Trump supporter had done something like this.

 

His job was to protect those people, he didn't do it. By running away and leaving those 350 unarmed civilians to die he made it a hell of a lot easier for the gunman. I don't really think him calling it in as opposed to just everyone else in a 5 block radius calling it in changed the response time whatsoever and if he made even 1 halfway accurate shot he'd have saved dozens.

Also, if you aren't willing to potentially die in order to save all of those people, you shouldn't be a cop and you shouldn't be an armed guard. If he was competent in his job, the gunman would have never made it all the way in the club.

That said, there should have been more than one cop/armed guard protecting 350 people so it's not completely on him for being a coward and allowing mass slaughter to continue while he ran away.

 

Sam Harris. Only Liberal I like

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You mean the only liberal you like other than Trump.

 

Neither one of you have any clue as to what makes a liberal a liberal if you think that guy and Trump are liberals.

 

That guy is a liberal, he just happens to be a liberal that is more anti-religious than anything else and that's why he speaks out against radical Islam.....and I guess that's why you think he's not a liberal.

As to Trump, he was a liberal his entire life before putting on this charade. Hillary Clinton was a Republican a lot longer in her life than Trump has pretended to be one.

 

Honestly we re blaming the security guard for not dying in the line of duty. I'm not an expert but I've shot pistols and rifles before. You're expecting the security guard to be able to land a lethal shot on a target that is moving and firing at him. Armed with with a pistol while the suspect is armed with a semi automatic rifle that can fire as fast as the pistol and more accurately.

 

Imagining the uproar... yup, about the same. Maybe if he called the police to pledge his allegiance to Donald Trump while shooting up the place it would matter.