Orlando

[ToddStarnes]

[jimmyz]

[ToddStarnes]

Are we including graduates and (hopefully not) children thereof?

[John Galt]

Cut the shit Jimmy

[John Galt]

[ToddStarnes]

But, to Exploited's point, also includes a conflicting narrative that both sides are doing their best to downplay.

The shooter (and I'll agree with Trump here in not naming him) yelled about Islamist shit a lot during the shootings, suggesting Islamism as the primary motivation. But then he would if he were a closeted gay who also had Islamist leanings despite not being ready to go full jihadi without that extra gay kick.

Some combination of both makes sense.

[Philly]

Total armchair psychologist/profiler theory: Guy was a non-radical Muslim born, raised, and living in America. But being a moderate Muslim is still not like being a secular Jew or anything. There are some pretty strict personal codes of conduct for you yourself to follow if you are Muslim. While there are some liberal Muslims in the west who feel ok to drink and f**k like everyone else, there are a large number of Muslims who, while not interested in imposing their norms upon others, do uphold pretty fundamentalist rules for themselves. I figure that was this guy's life, or the facade that he presented for his life. Problem is that he liked to drink and he liked to f**k guys. He stayed in the closet and kept the drinking out of the home, so he was able to continue with the farce of being a devout Muslim while unleashing his true desires in a secret life he sometimes escaped to.

Now begins a cycle of shame, self-loathing, coarsening, and unraveling. Giving into his bodily urges would cause regret and shame, and the inability to stop giving into these urges created self-loathing. Since he had to keep all of this a secret, he channeled his self-loathing into loathing for gays, and because he had to compensate for the serious sins he had committed in the eyes of his religion, he coarsened his attitude, and began intertwining his increasing hatred with increased religious fervor. "Why do I hate gays so much? Because they're an abomination to my faith."

Now suddenly, there's a war within, cause he knows what he truly desires, and can't stand that he's gay, and his faith seems to be the answer, the force that will cure his ills. Be becomes more and more zealous. But we've seen it plenty with Christianity as well -- no amount of religious devotion can make a gay person stop feeling homosexual desires. So now he's probably getting desperate. He's trying to hitch his wagon to any extremist group. Hezbollah, cool. Al Qaeda, awesome. ISIS, great. Whatever. And there's his answer: if he can't make himself stop being gay, he must instead sacrifice his own life to the holy war, going out in a blaze of Jihadi glory and taking out dozens of gay people with him. He lacked the power to "fix" himself, but he wanted to make up for it as best he could while simultaneously eliminating the perpetually miserable existence that was his lie of a life. He'd be remembered as a monster by his fellow Americans, but at least not as a deviant infidel by his faith.

I wonder, if he knew the world would immediately discover that he was gay, would he still have done it?

[The Comrade]

he also beat his wife and seemed like he didn't have a lot of contact with his family. i mean his dad seemed like he barely knew what he was up to leading up to the attack. sounds a lot like a guy filed with shame.

[Philly]

Certainly a man with demons. I tend to think that guys who go off to die in a blaze of glory choose to do so in a way that reflects something they are running way from.

The classic narrative cliche of the heartbroken young man who enlists to serve on the front lines of dangerous war zone. He fears life without love and romance, so he goes off to die heroically on the battlefield which he thinks is a romantic way to die.

In this guy's case, he was running from his homosexuality, and needed a cause to go out with. The cause he chose was killing gays in the name of Allah, because in life he was a closeted gay man, but in death, he could be the holy warrior who killed abominable gays.

Of course that now backfired and more people than he could ever have imagined know he was gay.

[micfranklin]

So if I have this right: the guy seemed like a decent person until we found out he was a wife beater, who was distant from his family, frequented the gay club but got thrown out a couple of times, might've been secretly gay since he had an app, was probably ashamed of it so he took it out on everyone else and turned radical.