Video from the scene.
I'm not going to go into depth here but I thought I could at least give a round up of last nights events for everyone waking up to the news. Most of this information was pulled from watching the press conference by the FBI and Orlando police this morning and watching CNN. Keep in mind this information is very preliminary, so there may be errors. Amazingly enough there don't seem to be any live feeds for this terrorist attack other then the UK paper The Mirror. We aren't likely to get anymore information until 9:30 eastern today, and I won't be able to wait that long to get out something detailed. Right now, I am going to avoid speculation and just post the facts that I heard in the news conference. A more detailed post will likely be posted tonight. Here's what I know:
-The attack occurred at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida. It is a gay nightclub, so that is probably a factor. It happened at around 0200. The shooter got involved with a shootout with a plainclothes off-duty police officer during the shooting and then took hostages. Police stormed the building later using a dynamic explosive breach involving a Bearcat vehicle and shot the suspect. One officer was shot in the head but appears to have been saved because of his helmet.
-The attacker had a long rifle (described as an assault rifle, but my guess is that it was a semi-auto. It will be very interesting and odd if this was a fully automatic true assault rifle), handgun and a "device". The "device" hasn't been confirmed to be a bomb but it either was one or was a fake made to look like one.
-Around 20 people have been confirmed to be dead with another 42 wounded. The suspect was killed by the police. 30 hostages were still in the club when the raid went down and were rescued.
-The attack has been described as terrorism. No ideology has been ascribed to the attack but and FBI agent said that the suspect may have radical Islamic leanings. It is completely unknown at this time if there are any links to any terrorist groups and nobody is sure what the ideology is. It has been confirmed that the suspect isn't from the Orlando area, but nobody would say if the person was a US citizen.
-The attack was very obviously planned.
-The situation seems to be over. There doesn't seem to be any further threats and no shooters are at large. Contrary to early reports (as always) there was only one attacker.
-As always, the attack has already been politicized. I've been following the story on Twitter for hours now and people are already trying to score political points. I'm going to try and take the high road and not join the circle jerk.
And that's all I know for now. I would love to engage into some groundless speculation but I won't. There is a circumstantial case for what happened here but I don't want to be the guy that was proven wrong once we get more information. Again, I hope to have another post up tonight about this attack when we know more about what happened. Until then, it's stupid to speculate.
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