We know thoughts and prayers, well-intentioned as they may be, won’t do anything, but here’s a brief list of things that could actually make a difference:
Donate blood.
OneBlood in Florida says they’re especially in need of O Negative, O Positive and AB Plasma donors. You can also donate through you local Red Cross.
While men who have had sex with men are still generally banned from donating blood, some locations may be lifting the ban temporarily. It’s not clear if that’s true. Check with your local clinic to find out if you’re able to donate.I’m hearing that some Orlando blood banks are filled to capacity, but you can always return in the coming days.
Contact your local representatives and urge them to take action on gun safety measures
It’s been said already, but if the Sandy Hook shootings weren’t enough to make Republicans budge on gun safety measures, dozens of dead gay people probably won’t grow their hearts and minds either. Still, it’s more important than ever before to enact sensible gun safety measures.
Even if they wouldn’t apply in this particular situation, they may prevent future acts of mass violence. We need better background checks, bans on sales to mentally ill individuals or criminals, bans on certain types of automatic weapons, a way to better track these weapons as they go from person to person, etc. There’s no limit to what we could do, but a tremendous lack of courage by elected officials to do anything.
Do anything you can to promote LGBT equality.
If the reports are correct that the shooter acted after seeing two gay men kissing each other, it’s a reminder of how much bigotry still exists against LGBT people. Seeing a straight couple kiss in the U.S. would likely never lead to a massacre.
It’s hard to imagine anyone who would condone the shooter’s actions, even conservative Christian bigots, but it’s easy to imagine that the same crowd will continue to treat LGBT people as second-class citizens, working to deny them the same rights and privileges as everyone else.
Don’t let them get away with it. It’s that kind of bigotry, that sort of mindset, that leads to acts of violence against those individuals.
Make a donation to help victims and their families.
Equality Florida has set up a GoFundMe page to collect money that will presumably go toward helping victims pay hospital bills and things of that nature.
The N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill declaredANY research on the subject to be “pushing an agenda.”
The prohibition is striking, firearms researchers say, because there are already regulations that bar the use of C.D.C. money for lobbying for or against legislation. No other field of inquiry is singled out in this way.
This was in direct response to a CDC-funded study published in peer-reviewed articles that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.
They also tried to eliminate the CDC’s injury center completely, declaring that its work reflected a political agenda.
When that failed they used the appropriations process, succeeding in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.
If you want to be technically correct, sure. Congress hasn’t banned that research. They’ve just ensured that the CDC’s budget for that research remains at zero. (There’s a tiny budget not for research, but for a very rough, annual estimate of the number of Americans injured by shootings.) There was an attempt to lift the “not a ban” ban in 2015, but it was killed by the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.
As a Republican senator recently demonstrated towards Obama, when he said “praying for” it may have been short for “praying for their death.” Considering the company they keep, it’s not so outlandish a thought.
Exactly. Congress can manipulate any department in to doing what it wants based on the budget they give the. You’re telling me the CDC also feared congress when the Democrats were in power?
Again, why is this just a CDC thing? Why wouldn’t the FBI and Justice Department keeping stats, studying crime trends, etc. Oh wait - they are.
That would be a hard thing to prove. Certainly many gun suicides stem from bona fide mental illness.
To be straightforward, I agree with you almost entirely when it comes to gun rights. But I’m not opposed to studies that could at least diminish gun violence, especially in cases like this one.
By all means, let’s derail to discuss black on black violence as a real topic on a thread on 50 (probably gay) people shot dead by a lone gunman in a nightclub.
Nope. That would just create an even bigger push for white ownership of guns and increased demands for police forces to crack down on “gang members” or whatever codeword will be used for the people of color.
There is probably literally no tragedy involving guns and violence that the conservatives wouldn’t try to spin in favor of one or more of their platforms, even if they directly contradict previous arguments.
The corpse of Ronald Reagan could arise from the grave and start killing unborn white Christian babies in the womb with a fully automatic bible gun and they’d find a way to spin it as an issue with mental illness, gun free zones, or people voting for Democrats and this is just god’s way of punishing them for abandoning the values of this once great Christian nation or some warped shit like that.
I think so - while the passages often cited to condemn gays hardly seem positive about them, the real condemnation seems to be of religious hypocrites who are full of hatred, selfishness and judgement of others.
Seriously? You’re not helping. It would lead to laws targeting them as gun control has a tradition of doing.
Many of the gun control laws fought to be repealed were specifically set up to keep them from “brown people”. Like having the Sheriff sign off on a pistol permit. Made sure only the “right” people got the permit.
In 1996 the Democrats were in power in the White House, but the House still controlled the purse strings. You know, just like now.
Why wouldn’t the FBI and Justice Department keeping stats, studying crime trends, etc. Oh wait - they are.
Keeping stats and updating trend lines is not the research that’s needed. The NRA simply points at it and says, “See, this is why we need more guns!”
(You can’t even misrepresent this to a ridiculous extreme that they haven’t reached before you. Their response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass murder was to demand loaded guns in every elementary school classroom.)
Real research would be, for example, a study into whether having a gun in the house made you safer, or less safe.
(That’s the CDC funded peer-reviewed study that found that having a gun in the house significantly increased your risk of homicide - the result being that NRA-backed members of Congress pulled all funding for gun violence research.)
A point for @japhroaig! I’ve read the Zombie Survival Guide and I’m pretty sure the author (Max Brooks) endorsed the shovel (or something similar) above all other weapons. [Edit: Just checked the guide and Brooks’ melee weapon of choice is actually the katana. Aluminum baseball bats and shovels were still considered pretty good though.] Firearms were way down the list—below even crossbows, if I recall correctly.
Bonus tidbit: for transportation, the bicycle was the top choice, no contest. Nothing else came close to its combination of mechanical simplicity, reliability, repairability, and mobility. I would add that this latter factor is tripled if your ride happens to be a Surly Moonlander:
