zn wrote:

REPORT: Orlando shooter was a regular at the gay nightclub he attacked, used multiple gay dating apps

Natasha Bertrand,Business Insider

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/report-orlando-nightclub-shooter-visited-222620444.html

The man police say killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning had visited the club at least a dozen times before carrying out his attack, a witness told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday.

The suspected shooter, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, may have also used several different gay dating apps, according to reports from MSNBC and the Los Angeles Times.

Three additional witnesses confirmed that they had seen Mateen at the gay nightclub more than once before.

“Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent,” one witness, Ty Smith, told the Sentinel.

“We didn’t really talk to him a lot,” he added. “But I remember him saying things about his dad at times. He told us he had a wife and child.”

Chris Callen, who performs at Pulse under the name Kristina McLaughlin, told The Canadian Press and CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Mateen had been going to the bar one or twice a month “for at least three years.”

Smith later told The Canadian Press that Mateen said that he “couldn’t drink when he was at home—around his wife, or family. His father was really strict.”

Smith and Callen say that they stopped talking to Mateen when he pulled a knife on them after they made a religious comment.

“He said if he ever messed with him again, you know how it’ll turn out,” Callen said.

Reports of Mateen’s flashes of anger and aggression align with what Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told CNN on Sunday night.

“In the beginning he was a normal being that cared about family, loved to joke, loved to have fun, but then a few months after we were married I saw his instability,” she said. “I saw that he was bipolar and he would get mad out of nowhere. That’s when I started worrying about my safety.”

She told reporters earlier on Sunday that Mateen had beat her and emotionally abused her while they were married between 2009 and 2011.

‘He was very creepy in his messages’

An Orlando man told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday that he had seen photos of Mateen on the gay dating apps Grindr, Adam4Adam, and Jack’d over the last several years. At least two of the man’s friends had been contacted by Mateen on the apps.

“He was very creepy in his messages, and I blocked him immediately,” the man said.

Kevin West, another regular at Pulse nightclub, told the Los Angeles Times that he chatted with Mateen on and off for a year on the gay dating app Jack’d, but had never met him in person. Incredibly, West said he met him for the first time as he was dropping a friend off at Pulse on Saturday night.

“He walked directly past me,” West said. “I said, ‘Hey,’ and he turned and said, ‘Hey,’” and nodded his head, West said. “I could tell by the eyes.”

A regular performer at Pulse told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he saw Mateen there a couple times a month, often with another man.

The reports come after Samuel King, a drag queen, told The Daily Beast that he had befriended Mateen while the two worked next door to each other in Fort Pierce. King said that Mateen had seemed generally accepting of the fact that he and his friends were openly gay. King said that he even recalls Mateen going at least once to the nightclub where King performed.

Pulse Nighclub Orlando Shooting
(REUTERS/Kevin Kolczynski)
Police lock down Orange Avenue around the Pulse nightclub, where people were killed by a gunman in a shooting rampage, in Orlando, Florida, on June 12.
Mateen, a US citizen born in New York in 1986 to two Afghan immigrants, was living in Fort Pierce, Florida, when he rented a car and drove to Orlando to carry out the attack on Sunday morning. An FBI representative said that he “was organized and well prepared” for the attack, and the ATF confirmed that he was armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle and a handgun that he had legally bought a few days before.

Mateen was a security guard and had a Florida firearms license that allowed him to carry concealed weapons. He called 911 during his rampage at Pulse and pledged allegiance to ISIS, while also expressing sympathy for the Boston Marathon bombers and an American suicide bomber who died fighting for Al Qaeda in Syria.

The overnight shooting at the gay nightclub is the deadliest shooting in US history, with more fatalities than the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 dead) and the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 (27 dead).

Mateen was the subject of two separate FBI investigations in 2013 and 2014 — the first after he made inflammatory and contradictory statements about terrorism that raised concern with his coworkers, and the second after a source close to the FBI indicated that he may have had ties to the American suicide bomber who prayed at his mosque in Fort Pierce.

The director of the FBI, James Comey, said on Monday that Mateen had mentioned having links to Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the ISIS in the past three years, but that the FBI investigations were closed because of a lack of evidence.

i’m not surprised.

zn wrote:

from: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/the-extraordinarily-common-violence-against-lgbt-people-in-america/486722/

In a 2011 analysis of FBI hate-crime statistics, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that “LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be the target of a violent hate-crime than Jews or black people,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the center. Because the population of LGBT Americans is relatively small, and the number of hate crimes against that group is significant, LGBT individuals face a higher risk than other groups of being the victim of an attack. “They are more than four times as likely as Muslims, and almost 14 times as likely as Latinos,” Potok added. Sexual orientation motivated roughly 20 percent of hate crimes in 2013, according to the FBI; the only factor that accounted for more was race.

The vast majority of those crimes are not carried out by Muslim extremists, Potok said. “It’s a mix of white supremacists and their ilk and people who would be considered relatively normal members of society,” Potok said. “The majority of attacks on gay people do not come from people who are members of organized hate groups.”

but in the middle east you better believe there are a multitude of muslim extremists who carry out hate crimes.

goff getting more first team reps. good to hear.

i like what i read about jill stein.

i don’t know if she’ll make a damn bit of difference but i like what she stands for.

it’s either that or get off this planet.

humans cannot treat other humans with any kind of compassion. we are too absorbed with our own self interests to be reasonable and kind to our fellow humans. hopefully a planet ender will put human existence out of its misery.

my heart goes out to all the people in orlando.

just so fucking tragic.

nfl.com compares him to danny amendola. i already like the sound of that.

6’1″ 200 pounds. big soft hands. tough over the middle. that sounds like the ideal target for a young qb.

wr competition is gonna be fascinating.

i do agree with you however on how difficult it is to be a teacher. i have several friends who teach grade school. very hard and challenging job.

i can’t stop laughing i’m so happy.

first thing. and not that it matters or anything. but he seems like a better interview than sam bradford.

also the best possible thing that could happen is for keenum and mannion to keep pushing goff to get better. so far there seems to be a good relationship there between the qbs.

well fisher has said that the plan is for goff to start week 1. he said almost those exact words, so i believe that’s the plan.

of course. goff could really stink. and then he doesn’t start week 1. but everything is geared toward starting the first game.

yeah. even fisher has gone on record as saying that everything is planned with the expectation that goff will start week 1 of the regular season so unless something goes really wrong, i expect goff to enter the regular season as the starter. but until then the rams will be slowly bringing him up to speed rather than dumping everything on him all at once.

yeah. that looks good. i’d make one change at lg, but that’d be nit picking.

but there’s a good mix of experience and youth there. looks a whole lot better than just a year ago.

other smaller question marks for me are ogletree. can he replace laurinaitis as the qb of the defense.

free safety. who steps in for mcleod? one of the smaller questions for me cuz they seem to be so good at developing defensive backs. gaines too. how does he come back from injury.

one of the receivers needs to step up.

and then how quick can goff be a starting qb? or can he even be a starting qb period.

if they can answer all those questions i see a winning record but they easily go the other way and have a losing record.

huh. didn’t realize barron was recruited in high school as a linebacker. wonder if they’ve asked him to put any weight on.

i loved the robinson pick when it happened. i just hope he can realize his potential and be the long-term solution at left tackle.

maybe the toe injury would account for the poor first half of the season? i know his preparation was a problem early on and even admitted it. he’s also had a full offseason to prepare. so a healthy more focused robinson with a full offseason to work on his technique? and two years under his belt?