it’s hard to keep up with all these threads sometimes. sorry.

the taliban aren’t isis i don’t think.

now i’m reading that this florida bomber had connections to the nusra front whereas mateen pledged allegiance to isis which would seem to put them at odds with one another.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by InvaderRam.

interesting. wonder what his ceiling could be. wonder if he’s added any weight this offseason.

sounds like goff is on track.

not worried about the secondary. but i am worried about linebacker. maybe slightly worried about dl depth.

zn wrote:

Mateen was ‘searching,’ ‘curious,’ says transgender woman who met him at gay club

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mateen-searching-curious-says-transgender-000000002.html

ORLANDO — A transgender woman described Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen as being curious, searching, and uncomfortable when they met at a popular gay club late last year.

Daniele Tashner, 60, said she immediately recognized Mateen when he was identified as the gunman who killed 49 people and injured dozens more at the Pulse dance club in Orlando early Sunday morning.

“When they showed this guy on the news, my heart cringed and I almost broke out in tears. I saw this person about eight months ago. I actually realized that I spoke to this person for about 15 minutes sitting in a gazebo at the back of Parliament House,” she said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Parliament House is another popular gay club in Orlando that is about a 10-minute drive northwest of Pulse.

Yahoo News spoke to Tashner during a Monday night vigil, which attracted thousands of people, outside the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Orlando. Tashner is not an employee at Parliament House, but said she takes care of plants at the club and that customers often feel comfortable talking to her.

According to Tashner, Mateen, 29, arrived at Parliament House with a friend and introduced himself but then kept to himself and observed people in conversation. When he spoke up, she said, he had questions and was, “reaching out.”

“He was really searching. He wanted to talk. He was curious and everything. But he was real uncomfortable,” she said.

The interview about her chance encounter with Mateen comes amid reports from several outlets that the gunman had frequented Pulse and may have used gay dating apps. CNN reports that the FBI is investigating the possibility that he made surveillance trips to Pulse and Walt Disney World to stake them out as possible attack targets. NBC published a similar report saying he tried to communicate with Pulse customers on the Grindr dating app before the massacre.

Tashner said she is of Cherokee descent and identifies as “two-spirited,” which is a general term for gender nonconformists within Native American communities. Tashner was biologically male at birth but identified strongly with femininity and embraced this side of her gender identity as she grew older. She said she has known her gender identity since she was 10, but did not fully come out of the closet until age 47. Since then, she has lived “this way 24/7.”

“You need to know both of your spirits. Who is inside of you. What you are. I counsel too many people that are afraid of themselves,” she said.

Tashner said she thinks misunderstanding and ignorance too often lead to violence because anger is a natural reaction to fear and said she now wishes she could have helped educate Mateen in hopes that he might not have resorted to violence.

“I tried talking to him and I tried sharing with him. I probably didn’t get enough time to probably get the right questions that he wanted answered,” she said.

A worker at Parliament House named Christian, who asked to have his last name withheld, told Yahoo News that the Orlando LGBT community is close-knit and that many Parliament House employees and patrons are deeply hurt after Sunday’s loss of life.

“All I can say is it’s horrible what happened,” he said. “There are a lot of people that work here that have friends who were there.”

i don’t know how people will react to this but i really feel for this guy. he was surely mentally unstable and i wonder if his family gave him the right support system to deal with all the emotions he was going through. it’s sad because this could have been prevented. maybe possibly he thought his family would have rejected him if they knew who he was.

Billy_T wrote:

InvaderRam wrote:

billy. people do like to shoot weapons just for the sport and fun of it.

you may not understand it. but a lot of people do. i’ve never owned a gun. don’t plan on owning a gun. i have shot an ar-15 before and it’s an amazing piece of technology.

still don’t want a gun. i don’t believe i would be more safe owning a gun. don’t really care much for the right to bear arms.

but i understand why people like them.

so i feel for them. but you also make a good point. when is enough enough? why not sacrifice your own desires for the benefit of our society?

it’s tough.

I know people “like” to shoot guns. And I’m not talking about taking that away from them. I’m just talking about certain KINDS of weapons. In a sane society, we don’t let people have the capability of mowing down dozens of their fellow citizens with ease, and especially not so we can protect target shooters.

Society must constantly make decisions about competing interests and claims, and it should make those decisions with the general health and safety in mind. If it’s ever a choice between saving lives or keeping things people “like to do,” we should go with saving lives.

Think about driving. I used to race cars on the street when I was a teen. We went waaay over the speed limit to do this, and, though we didn’t think of it at the time, we were endangering lives. Should society get rid of all speed limits because there are people who “like to drive fast”? Should they have accommodated us because we really loved driving extremely fast?

Why are guns considered by some as being beyond all common sense laws, regulations and restrictions? Of all the things to exempt, exempting deadly pieces of metal, DESIGNED to kill, is easily the most insane thing about America.

i agree with you, billy. you wish for the sake of safety people would give up some luxuries.

i’m really just presenting the other side.

and there’s a difference between shooting a pistol and an assault rifle. the precision and power of an assault rifle really is amazing to me.

it’s also what makes it extremely scary to me. i mean a 12 year old could easily learn how to use this thing it’s so easy to shoot. as much power that’s contained in this rifle there’s no kick back and you can just keep firing off rounds one after another.

the thing is insanely precise and destructive. i could hit targets several hundred meters away with accuracy and i had never shot a gun before.

but yeah. what you say is very true. at what point do you say these weapons are becoming to efficient at killing and take them out of the public’s hands?

maybe we need to sacrifice some of our own wants for the needs of the whole.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by InvaderRam.

As do you…but what you describe possibly happening (ripple effects) will be (I guess) due to fear, and to not understanding something. I mean yes this horrible mass murder may become a symbol, for some, of the (false of course) idea that the USA is just at war with all of Islam. If we act on that false belief, it could be awful.

for sure. and that’s just what some people will want us to think. that’s part of what is so horrible about this. along with the attack on a community which had been making significant progress.

i am under no false belief that we are at war with all of islam but i do believe that trump and extremists would have us believe that. this plays right into their hands.

i hear what you’re saying. and i don’t think this guy was a terrorist.

but i do think that it was an act of terrorism and could have an affect on government policy. whether that was his intention or not.

i mean the more i read. he seems like just a mentally unstable person who acted out.

but again. the ripple effect of this could be huge. i mean i would hope not. but i could see it happening. and then does it really matter if it was intentional or not?

bnw. do you really think you’re keeping the government in check with your right to bear arms? or that taking away that right will slowly erode any rights you have as a human?

Billy_T wrote:

InvaderRam wrote:

more than gun control i think there has to be a shift in the way we treat one another. there’s this general contempt for people who are not like us. not this board but people in general. whether they be christian or muslim straight or queer white or black. it’s disgusting.

get rid of guns. fine. but when are we going to treat each other with love and compassion and understanding?

Agreed. But we can do both at the same time. And the gun thing is something we actually have control over. We can’t control the way people think and feel about others. But we can control the availability of weapons of mass destruction.

So while we work on the peace, love and understanding part — which I’m a thousand percent in favor of — we should radically reduce the availability of things that haters can use to slaughter others.

To me, this is just common sense.

well yes. just because things were one way doesn’t mean they can’t be another way in the future.

regardless. people are going to find a way to hurt others. look at what happened in paris. gun control isn’t necessarily going to solve anything.

more than gun control i think there has to be a shift in the way we treat one another. there’s this general contempt for people who are not like us. not this board but people in general. whether they be christian or muslim straight or queer white or black. it’s disgusting.

get rid of guns. fine. but when are we going to treat each other with love and compassion and understanding?

it is a form of terrorism. isis spreading it’s message of hatred and taking advantage of poor individuals like this guy. almost as if they lit a fuse on a ticking time bomb waiting for him to go off. it didn’t matter that he didn’t have direct ties to them. but they spread their message knowing that there are those who will latch onto that message and act almost as a weapon on their behalf.

a guy with mental issues who wasn’t given proper treatment and reared by a father who hates homosexuals. his father said that all homosexuals will perish in hell. how can it not be a hate crime?

it’s a hate crime. it’s terrorism. it’s mental illness. it’s all those things.

and i don’t know if anybody has seen but his father is a piece of work himself.

i just wonder why we always have to classify something as just one thing.

well it’s tricky. yes as it stands now we have the right to bear arms. now does that mean we have the right to bear a nuclear warhead? well no. selling nuclear warheads at your local walmart might not be a sound idea. so where does one draw the line? i do know this. the ar-15. it’s an easy way to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time.

as far as the black market argument i don’t know the validity of that either way.