It was the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman and the deadliest terrorist attack in the U.S. since the September 11 attacks in 2001:
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American security guard, killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a terrorist attack — also considered a hate crime — inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, United States. (Also see The Orlando Massacre, Police Killings & Dark Subconscious Drives Of Aggression And Hatred )
People are looking for a complex answer to explain the motives of Omar Mateen, the shooter in the Orlando Massacre. The simplest answer is the real answer. This was a man who was gay and hated himself and hated his homosexuality so much because he had such deep shame and deep guilt that he therefore killed all the people around him who were gay. That’s it.
There’s nothing deeper to that. Yes, he may have scoured other potential targets such as Disney, but he didn’t go to Disney and kill at Disney, did he?
He went to a gay club, he was on a gay dating App, he’d been hitting on men before, he was known in the club scene, in the gay club scene. So this is no different than the person who cannot accept that he’s gay or has been persecuted or been bullied for being gay and therefore kills himself. This guy, this terrorist Mateen, hated himself so much and he couldn’t accept his homosexuality, so he took that hatred and instead of directing the hatred towards himself, he directed the hatred to others. There’s a part of him that knew that he was going to die too.
And he was willing to do that: he was wiling to die.
So that to me is really clear cut: here is the man who cannot admit to himself that he’s gay because he’s being raised to hate homosexuality, to recognize that it’s a sin, to recognize it as evil and as an abomination. He’s been raised to such an extreme extent that he cannot face the fact that he is gay, that he’s homosexual, so the only way to deal with his own self-loathing and his own shame and guilt is to kill the gay people around him. This is no different, minus the murders, of course, of what Josh Duggar did.
Josh Duggar hated pedophiles and hated people that were immoral, and yet he engaged in those same behaviors. So he projected – he did what we call projection, it’s not just hypocrisy.
Projection is, “I hate something in myself that I’m doing and I can’t face it, so therefore, I’ll talk about how bad it is and I’ll project that hatred onto other people even though I’m the one who’s doing it.”
The difference is Duggar didn’t go and kill anyone, this guy Omar Mateen did. And it makes it easier for him to justify the killings to himself when he has a religion that says that these people should be killed, or he has a background of a culture – even though he was born here in the US – he has a background of a culture where gay people are killed, thrown off buildings – they’re murdered. And if a father or a mother finds out that his/her child is gay, they’ll kill them. And this goes go back to the Old Testament.
There is a difference between Christianity and Islam in the sense that Christianity today isn’t taking literally the Old Testament anymore. It did once upon a time, it doesn’t now. So if you go back to Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, the teachings were that if your son disobeyed and was disobedient, you’d take him before the elders and they could stone him to death.
[Deuteronomy 21:18-21English Standard Version (ESV)
A Rebellious Son
18 “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, 20 and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”
Notice what the scripture says – it approves killing your own son.
For what reason?
For being disobedient.
So right there in the Old Testament, it states that yes, you have the right to kill someone just for being disobedient; if your child is disobedient, you can stone him to death. We can’t do that today because of the US laws. However, if your laws are different or your laws are guided and led by a religious code, then you can throw someone off the balcony for being gay.
You can throw someone to their death for being gay because your religion allows that. So what we see is that there were a lot of similarities in, say the Old Testament Christianity and in Islam. The difference is that Christianity today has evolved and therefore, it doesn’t follow literally the Old Testament, number (1).
Number (2) I think this is an interesting sidebar: we don’t see Christians going out and killing people like Islam does (we do have the Westboro Baptist church who promote killings, although they don’t actually do it and they celebrate the death although they don’t actually engage in the killing.) The difference in the religions is that if you insult Mohammed, these Islam followers believe that they have to defend Mohammed their prophet and therefore they should kill you. However, Christianity is actually built on a completely different paradigm, the paradigm is Jesus is a martyr, Jesus died for your sins. So therefore, when people are attacking Christianity, it reinforces their very foundation, ‘we are the victims, and Jesus died for us.’ Christians don’t believe that they need to defend Jesus and kill on his behalf because he already died on the behalf of the Christians. However, there are Christians who do promote death and killing.
Anointed “The Woman Expert” by WGN Chicago, Patrick Wanis PhD is a renowned Celebrity Life Coach, Human Behavior & Relationship Expert who developed SRTT therapy (Subconscious Rapid Transformation Technique) and is teaching it to other practitioners. Wanis’ clientele ranges from celebrities and CEOs to housewives and teenagers. CNN, BBC, FOX News, MSNBC & major news outlets worldwide consult Wanis for his expert insights and analysis on sexuality, human behavior and women’s issues. Wanis is the first person ever to do hypnotherapy on national TV – on the Montel Williams show.