He purchased them legally

I wonder how the president manages to keep giving speeches on this topic every month or two without just slipping up and re-using one.

The facts then, last night at around 2 AM a man walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and began firing, by the end of the night fifty people were dead including the gunman and another fifty three injured, it is by a wide margin, the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States of America.

It was a hate crime first and foremost, Pulse is a nightclub catering to the LGBT community and the shooter did not target it by accident, it isn't known at the moment why he(It's always a he isn't it? Never a she.) targeted Pulse specifically, but he did go a hundred or so miles out of his way to do so. We do know a fair amount about him, I will not use his name in this article because screw that, but you can read a lot about him here if you so choose. We know he didn't care for gay people, as his father mentioned him becoming enraged upon seeing two men kiss in public some weeks ago. His ex-wife also claims he was mentally unstable and abusive, which I assume explains the "ex" part of that description.

It was an incident of domestic terrorism... sort of. Honestly the guy seemed sort of like a terrorist wannabe to me, the FBI interviewed him a couple times in the past based on statements he had made and found no verifiable links between him and any terrorist organization or individuals and as of now, ISIS has made no officially verifiable claim on his actions despite him declaring allegiance to the group via 911 call just before the shooting. No question he wanted to commit an act of terror in the name of ISIS, I am just not sure they knew about him or in fact cared at all either before, or after the act. He wasn't an immigrant, being native born here in the USA and at the moment it isn't known how he was radicalized, or even if he was, I personally lean towards not, for the above reasons.

How does a man decide to take up a weapon and murder as many people as possible? I want to talk about some possible causes, keep in mind that whatever the trigger, the ultimate responsibility is always on the person who decides to, you know, kill people. But that doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to look at our society and his life and see how the system failed him and those around him, which it clearly did, because if it hadn't fifty people would be alive today who aren't. This is going to be a lot of wild theorizing and should not be taken as fact.

We know that he was unstable, assuming we believe the ex-wife and there is no reason not to at this point, but assuming he didn't have a mental illness that leads to violent outbursts with weeks of advanced planning, and very few of them do, we can also assume that whatever was going wrong in his brain wasn't the primary motivator.
He was a Muslim and prone to the extremist part of the ideology, or at least talked a good game online and with coworkers, which led to a few interviews with federal agents who I assume were not filled with sweetness and light and very possibly said unkind things about his religious/racial background, all unprovable of course but I imagine that would give an increased sense of persecution to a man who clearly already is looking for reasons to fight.
He was a bigot who very obviously had a problem with homosexuals, I imagine we'll see more evidence of this in the coming days as his friends are talked to and social media accounts investigated further. In this kind of thing you hear a lot about how the shooter must have been in denial or closeted himself, as if only someone who is unable or unwilling to be who he is is capable of violence like this, I don't buy it usually, I mean by extension every closeted or in denial homosexual in the world is nothing more than a time bomb waiting to go off, and I am not sure that is giving millions of people the credit they deserve.
In the end it doesn't matter a lot I guess, he decided to kill people and then went through with it, which leads me to the one thing that we do know could have prevented it.

He purchased his firearms legally.

Think on this for a moment, he purchased an AR-15, a civilian version of the M-16 rifle used by the Army and one wildly popular among the mass shooting demographic for its large clip size, commonly available ammunition, and customization options. There is one word up there that I want to draw your attention to though, and that word is civilian, yes the AR-15 is designed specifically for the civilian market.

What I am trying to say is if the sale of weapons to civilians was banned, the AR-15 and others like it would not have been designed and sold to them, which means that, unlike what gun advocates would have you believe, there is no way they could legally or otherwise acquire one. True military hardware is rather more difficult to acquire even for our industrious criminals and it is unlikely the average shooter could get his hands on one. Pistols are another story of course, being somewhat more common but again, without the civilian market's voracious appetite for toys that can accidentally kill their loved ones, many, perhaps most, of the pistols out there today wouldn't exist at all, and even if some of the ones that did exist fell into the hands of criminals, the ability to cause a massacre like we saw this morning would be greatly reduced.

But we don't band gun, we barely restrict them, and god forbid we ever actually have a serious attempt at figuring out how to do that, or even researching it, the assholes who jerk off to the second amendment and the gun manufacturers who value profits over lives won't let us. And now fifty members of a vulnerable community are dead, fifty plus more are hurt, and innumerable people have had their lives changed for the worse because we as a nation are too in love with the ability to kill on demand to even think about stopping.

I can't imagine what it is like to be a member of the LGBT community right now, especially in Florida, I am not marginalized and don't really have a community as such in the first place, the idea that someone hates the idea of me enough to murder dozens is not something I have to live with very much and I know that if my specific demographic was singled out then something would probably get done very quickly. Other people do not have that security, and to lose so many in a single night isn't something I can really wrap my head around. For which I suppose I should be grateful.

I tell myself it isn't all bad, and that is sorta true, I mean politically in the USA yeah, it's pretty much all bad, but so far there has been a massive outpouring of support for the community and people affected by this tragedy, donations of money, blood, and other support have been massive, and even Glenn Beck, of all people, put out a very supportive statement, which is strange as hell. Pride parades are still going off, and police forces all over the country are promising additional security to keep them safe, and in Ukraine the first major Gay Pride parade in the country happened without a hitch. Which is encouraging in a lot of ways.

I don't know how to end this so I am just going to stop, be safe everyone.