Unfortunately, I’ve heard that several of the victims were shot by SWAT. Seems to me this’d be an easy thing to confirm by ballistics tests on the bullets, but the scenario ain’t off-the-wall: in a crowded, prolonged frenzy it’s reasonable that some would get shot by mistake or caught in crossfire.
Someone has to hold the record, and there is no evidence to suggest the most murderous mass shooters are especially bright. Nothing else about Mateen says “intelligent.” It’s not logical to assume that whomever happens to have killed the most people is the smartest.
If there is a connection to be shown, it’s that if you want to murder a great many people, kill them in a nightclub. Mateen came nowhere near the body count of Julio Gonzalez, who murdered 79 people in a nightclub in New York with a can of gasoline. Night clubs are death traps. James Huberty, who murdered 21 people in a McDonald’s, was no less smart than Mateen, but his target of opportunity made it impossible to kill 49 people; there weren’t that many people around and a McDonald’s is much more easily escaped.
The early evidence would suggest Mateen targeted Pulse not because he really thought this out in terms of body count probability, but because he was projecting fury over his own homosexual desires.
I would argue that the fact that we are even discussing this shows that he was smart enough to accomplish his goal of terror and divisiveness. Posting on Facebook, texting his wife, giving shout outs to other terrorist and pledging allegiance to ISIL were calculated smart moves on his part that other terrorist have not done. Calling him smart is not a compliment, why do people get hung up on that? No one is calling him a genius, but his goal was more than just killing the people, it was getting his message out. The genius terrorist are the ones over in the middle east that got him to do it by just posting there jihad online and calling for martyrs. We have to recognise that those people are not stupid.
He chose a very densely packed environment and overwhelmed security with firepower and surprise.
I don’t believe the security personel that first resisted him had long guns at the ready?
Pistols vs. long guns = pistols lose. And the getting caught by suprised when the shooting is already happening is a huge disadvantage. Someone would likely take a few seconds to process what’s going on, stuff like this don’t happen every day.
3 hours shooting at mostly defenseless people in such a sardine can does not take much skill.
His hate for homosexuals and targeting the club environment does not take much smarts either. None of his reported actions showed anything extraordinary at all imo.
“The Germans killed six million Jews.”
“Of course I know that, and record are made to be broken!”
Paraphrase from memory, Woody Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Just a side note; why does anyone thing the 50-50 split of killed to wounded is unusual?
Killeen, TX: 23 dead, 27 wounded
San Ysidro, CA: 21 dead, 19 wounded
Sandy Hook: 26 dead (plus one at another location) 0 wounded
Charselton: 9 dead, 1 injured
Edmond, OK: 14 dead, 6 injured
Virginia Tech: 32 dead, 17 injured
I could go on, but there is nothing at all unusual about the ratio. Where people are getting the idea the wounded should outnumber the injured I cannot imagine.
It is rather easy, and does not require high intelligence, to become famous by engaging in a mass shooting.
Again, I will point to the fact that there have been many very famous mass shootings perpetrated by people who, to every appearance, are of no great shakes in the brains department. In Canada, every December 6 people remember the massacre at Ecole Polytechnique. It’s a very famous, politically charged event, and the names of the murderer and victims are still remembered. Yet the murderer was, by all accounts, a dullard.
George Hennard, who committed with massacre in Killeen, was not an especially bright man.
Its not at all clear what his “message” was, so in fact in that regard I don’t know what his success was. One of the first things noted about his messages was that they were contradictory and incoherent; he claimed allegiance to organizations that are virulently opposed to one another. It is now coming out, no pun intended, that his rage might have been more that he was a self-loathing homosexual than acting out of any sport of coherent political philosophy. If he wanted to be remembered as a gay man who couldn’t deal with it and combined that with psychopathy to commit pointless, politically meaningless murders, well, mission accomplished, but I doubt that was his intent.
In modern warfare, there are usually many more wounded than killed. However, this is probably mostly before forces are not engaged at close quarters and are less able to target individuals. In mass shootings the perpetrator is often only a few feet from victims and able to take a lethal shot.
Military weapons wound more than kill; you can’t hunt deer with them in most states.
A wounded guy needs folks to take care of him, so there are less bad guys to shoot at you.
Isn’t that because soldiers wear helmets and body armor?
Where did you hear that? It is possible. Maybe more than possible. But the way it seems this played out the chance of friendly fire would be less than other situations. The way it seems is that most of the casualties happened before the SWAT team showed up. By that time he was barricaded in the bathroom.
Please cite. The .223 or 5.56mm round used by “military weapons” is identical to rounds used for hunting. All of these use those rounds.
ETA on the page I linked to there are rifles listed as .223 Remington and 5.56 NATO. The difference can be complicated. In general .223 Remington rifles are able to handle higher pressure in the weapon’s chamber. Some manufacturers say you can use either with no ill effect. Some state you should use one or the other. But either is used as a hunting round.
Maybe partly but I think it has much more to do with the fact that only a small percentage of the casualties are from close up rifle wounds. Shrapnel, concussion, broken bones, all manner of wounds are in the stats for casualties.
Don’t hunters tend to use softpoint/hollowpoint bullets?
There are a lot of factors involved, but as Loach says it’s mostly because most casualties aren’t from being shot at close range.
The Oklahoma City Bombing killed 168 people but injured 680 others. This is the kind of ratio you might expect in bombings and other explosions.
I probably worded my answer wrong. There are a lot different hunting rounds. Military weapons use the same exact rounds that hunting rifles use on the range. While hunting hunters have a wider variety of bullets within the same sized round, military rounds are metal jacketed only. Military weapons don’t do different damage because they are labeled military weapons instead of hunting weapons. The same type of round does the same damage if it is from an AR-15 or a Mossberg bolt action.
There is a lot of marketing so it comes down to preference and who’s claims you want to believe. I’ve heard hunters debate this back and forth. Some like solid some like expansion. It depends on how much damage they want to do to the meat. It’s not an issue in my state since all rifle hunting is banned due to population density.
The military uses solid metal jacketed rounds because the Hague Conventions state they have to and consider frangible or hollow bullets to be inhumane.
Police use hollow points because they stop when they hit something although that’s in handguns. The SWAT teams I know of use jacketed rounds in rifles.
The military does not use certain rounds because they wound instead of kill. There is no strategy that was behind it. It’s because of the Hague Conventions.
ETA: Despite what Michael Moore likes to tweet, 5.56 NATO rounds are not designed to explode in a body.
The caliber limit in Arkansas is nothing smaller than .22, and you are right. .223 is larger than .22.
A deer hunter and Popular Science magazine lied to me about this! 
One may not, however us a full metal jacket for deer, presumably because it is less likely to kill the animal.
I’m assuming because they don’t want wounded deer running around?
The width of a .22 and a .223 maybe be pretty much identical but they are much different rounds.
I believe that the intent is that kids don’t take off deer hunting with a pocketful of .22 long rifle.
Fortunately, the regs links prohibit rimfire cartridges.