© AP
The back of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on Sunday, June 12. Police say they used an APC to make these holes in the wall, through which many surviving hostages escaped. It's undisclosed who made the bullet holes around the larger holes.
Yet another appalling mass murder in the US, the bloodiest yet, has once again focused world media attention on the Indispensable Nation. 50 dead, 53 wounded, and all the work of one ISIS-sympathizing, rabidly homophobic (
though closet gay, apparently), Muslim-American, tax-paying, Mecca-visiting (yet non-religious), divorced, 'disturbed', 'gentle',
NYPD-loving, America-hating, father-of-one terrorist working a steady job for 9 years with the world's biggest private security firm.
An Everyman for our times then, it would seem.
The story goes that, at 2am on Sunday 12 June 2016, 29-year-old Omar Mateen walked into a dark nightclub packed with 320 people having a good time. Mateen is carrying an AR-15 rifle and 30 magazines of ammunition on his person. In the dark, beneath the flashing and strobing lights, he begins shooting and goes on to reload and empty his AR-15 rifle 30 times, firing nearly 1,000 rounds of .223 ammunition. In the process, he achieves the remarkable feat of killing or injuring one third of the people around him, the majority of his victims being shot multiple times, some as many as 12 times.
And he does all this in under 7 minutes. Alone.
That, dear readers, is the 'official story', aka, 'all the news that's fit to print'.
Comment: See also: