A day after the deadliest mass shooting in US history, questions are mounting over why the shooter Omar Mateen was legally able to buy an assault rifle and handgun despite having been investigated twice by the FBI for suspected terrorist sympathies.
Mateen, 29,
launched his attack on Pulse club, an LGBT venue in downtown Orlando celebrating its popular Latin dance night, at 2.02am on Sunday morning.
Twenty minutes into the spree he took the bizarre step of making a 911 call in which he reportedly referred both to Islamic State and the Tsarnaevs, the brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013.
Sunday’s attack - which left 50 people dead and 53 inured – was
launched by Mateen using a .223-caliber assault rifle and 9mm semi-automatic pistol with multiple rounds of ammunition that had been purchased quite lawfully in the week before the rampage using Mateen’s firearms license.
He also held a permit to work as a security guard, which he did at a courthouse in Port St Lucie, Florida, even though he was
interviewed three times by the FBI in 2013 and 2014 following separate reports of extremist behavior and connections to terrorism that were in the end deemed insubstantial.
The revelation that the bloodiest mass shooting in history had been carried out by an American-born individual on the FBI’s radar is likely to reignite the debate over the country’s lax gun laws with regard to people under investigation for terrorism.
New York City’s police commissioner, Bill Bratton, fiercely criticized the National Rifle Association, the most powerful gun lobby in the country, that has
campaigned to prevent people named on the US government no-fly list from being barred from purchasing guns.
“The idea we have a terror-watch list, a no-fly list, and someone on that list can buy a gun – that’s the highest level of insanity,” Bratton told CNN. He added that the probe into the Orlando shooter would have to take in whether “there was anything from the FBI investigations that might have stopped him being able to acquire a firearm. I don’t hold out much hope for that: obviously the United States is too afraid of the NRA at this time.”
It's all about the gun...not the radicalized Muslim behind it...!!