A man identified by authorities as Muslim, and identified by a coworker as hating many kinds of people unlike himself, including homosexuals, killed 49 people at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub Saturday night.

According to liberals including their president, Barack Obama, the massacre is the fault of legal gun ownership:

“This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub,” Obama said during an appearance at the White House. “We have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing — that’s a decision, too.”

Obama declared the overnight shooting “an act of terror and an act of hate,” but did not characterize the attack as Islamist terrorism.

“We are still learning all the facts,” Obama said. “This is an open investigation. We have reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer.” …

Omar Mateen is identified as the shooter. He was reportedly shouting “Allahu Akhbar” during the attack and reportedly had expressed allegiance to the Islamic State. Obama said that law enforcement is working to determine “what if any inspiration or association this killer may have had with terrorist groups.”

Claiming that more gun control is needed makes as much sense as claiming that because one radical Muslim committed an act of terror against innocent Americans, all Muslim mosques should be closed. Worship, as well as gun ownership, are constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Which apparently means nothing to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Daily Caller reports:

Several American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorneys took to Twitter to blame the “Christian Right” for Sunday’s deadly terrorist attack at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., which left 50 dead and 53 injured.

Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT and AIDS Project, claimed the social and political environment cultivated by Christian conservatives in recent months was to blame for the shooting at Pulse, a nightclub popular with Orlando’s LGBT community.

Strangio also called for solidarity between American Muslims and LGBT communities, arguing both are maligned and oppressed by the religious right.

Federal law enforcement officials have identified Omar Mateen, of Port St. Lucie, Fla., as the alleged shooter. Mateen’s father told NBC news his son harbored anti-gay sentiments, and said his son gave voice to those feelings recently during a trip to Miami, where he saw two men kissing.

Another ACLU attorney, Eunice Hyon Min Rho, who specializes in election and religious liberty law, impugned the motives of Republican lawmakers who expressed sympathy for the victims, by pointing out many were sponsors of the First Amendment Defense Act, legislation the ACLU considers anti-LGBT.

She further characterized expressions of solidarity as “useless,” as many of the victims could be people of color, who she contends are regularly stigmatized by Republican legislators. Little demographic data is currently available about the victims, as many have not yet been identified.

She went on to retweet a user who claimed many public officials would use the auspices of an LGBT tragedy to pursue an “anti-Muslim agenda.” …

Update: Rho appears to have deleted her Twitter account. Multiple attempts to locate her account on the social media platform were unsuccessful.

Nothing demonstrates sticking to your opinion guns like deleting your Twitter account after your poorly thought out thoughts hit the interwebs.

There is one group that doesn’t buy Obama’s train of thought. The group Pink Pistols, an LGBT self-defense organization, said through a representative:

“The Pink Pistols gives condolences to all family and friends of those killed and injured at Pulse. This is exactly the kind of heinous act that justifies our existence. At such a time of tragedy, let us not reach for the low-hanging fruit of blaming the killer’s guns. Let us stay focused on the fact that someone hated gay people so much they were ready to kill or injure so many. A human being did this. The human being’s tools are unimportant when compared to the bleakness of that person’s soul. I say again, *GUNS* did not do this. A human being did this, a dead human being. Our job now is not to demonize the man’s tools, but to demonize his acts and work to prevent such acts in the future. It is difficult to foresee such an event, but if such things cannot be prevented, then they must be stopped as fast as someone tries to start them.”

John Podhoretz adds:

Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murder in Orlando early Sunday. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.”

So I guess the president thinks Mateen didn’t mean it?

Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.

He called it “terror,” which it is. But using the word “terror” without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease “cancer” without making note of the affected area of the body — because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes, he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.

So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.

America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.

An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite.

The attack on the Pulse nightclub was an attack on us all, no less than the World Trade Center attack.

To suggest we must look inward to explain this is not only unseemly but practically an act of conscious misdirection on the president’ s part to direct out attention away from Omar Mateen’s phone call.

True to form, the president spoke more words about the scourge of guns than about the threat of terror. In doing so, he actually retards rather than advances the cause of gun control he so passionately advocates.

A president totally and credibly committed to the destruction of ISIS and other terror groups seeking to bring the war to us might earn the political and moral capital to seek more extensive limits on gun ownership.

A president who cannot name the enemy even as he anthropomorphizes the weapon the enemy uses is a president unable to bring anyone to his side who’s not already there.

Rich Galen adds:

My first thought when I turned on my TV Sunday morning and found that the Orlando shooting had occurred in a gay nightclub was: They’re dead because they were gay.

I have a lot of gay friends. I tried to come up with words that would express my feelings for what they must have been going through.

I couldn’t.

I assume they were going through the same feelings I had – and will have again, I fear – when Jews are attacked in shops and restaurants. Those attacks occurred not because they were in the wrong random place at the wrong random time, but because they were in a place that Jews were known to frequent.

It is clear that the people at the Pulse night club were targeted because it was a place where gays were known to frequent.

You don’t have to be a member of a targeted group to have feelings of shock and sadness when that group is attacked, but if you are a member of a targeted group it is that membership alone that sets you apart.

Christians have attacked Christians and Muslims have attacked Muslims because of differences in theocracy. Tribal atrocities in Africa have been well documented.

Tribal atrocities in Europe have led to two World Wars.

By noon Sunday the shooter, Omar Mateen, had been identified as the American-born son of Afghan parents. Mateen apparently called 9-1-1 to claim fidelity with ISIS just before he began shooting, perhaps to make certain he got appropriate credit for his crime. …

Meanwhile we can think about and thank the men and women of the police services who went into that nightclub not knowing what they would find. They didn’t know if there was one shooter or many. Didn’t know if the shooter was willing to die or would surrender. Didn’t know how many people had been injured or killed – but I’d bet a total of more than 100 would not have been their first guess.

Let’s also give thanks for those customers, friends, and others whom we’ve seen in video after video carrying the wounded to safety.

They, too, ran toward the danger. …

We will also learn more about the killer. We know that he worked for a security company for almost seven years and was qualified to carry a firearm even though he had been a minor player in at least two FBI investigations.

We will hear from his colleagues and friends. We will learn, perhaps, of his descent into fanaticism, and whether he shared that downward spiral with any of them.

The details will be filled in. Most questions will be answered. We may never know what pushed Mateen over the edge of accepted human behavior but we do know this: He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last.

But, you can’t say: It wasn’t my people. You can’t say I’m not Muslim so none of my people didn’t do the shooting and, I’m not gay, so none of my people were the victims.

Martin Niemöller famously wrote, as the Nazis took over control of Germany:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me.