Author: craigcrawford

Surely there is a way to prevent someone known to the FBI as a terrorist sympathizer from buying assault weapons solely built to murder as many humans as possible.

Video by the company that made the Orlando shooter’s weapon.

Mother Jones: The killer “legally purchased the weapon, similar to an AR-15, on June 4 in Port St. Lucie, Florida, near where he lived. (He legally purchased a Glock 17 handgun the following day, which he also carried during the attack.)”

Employees of Disney, Universal, SeaWorld and other Central Florida theme parks took to social media with photos from various show casts, performers and characters as they formed heart signs with their hands and arms.

I don’t want to make this about me, but simply stress how this craziness can hit any of us close to home.

From age 3 to high school, when we moved further out, I grew up in a house exactly 2.5 miles from the site of this massacre. Our dog’s veterinarian and kennel was almost literally across the street. The modest restaurants nearby were some of our favorites, for everything from fried catfish to Cuban food.

In those days it was a typically American middle class neighborhood where we didn’t just watch “Leave It To Beaver” – it was our way of life.

As a grown-up gay man many years later, and long ago, I went to Pulse a few times with friends. It was a fun and welcoming place for an evolving neighborhood that came to fully accept such diversity without complaint.

My heart aches for my hometown I love so much. Since Disney World transformed us in the early 1970’s from a place only known for orange trees, cows and mosquitoes it became our nation’s most visited tourist destination – more than 60 million a year, besting New York City, Vegas and all the rest.

I always feared we could be a target. And now it has happened.

Hopefully the nation will now see that Orlando is so much more than theme parks. It is little known what more we are, from our hundreds of gorgeous lakes, laid-back and fun people, an amazingly advanced center for state-of-the-art health care (the best doctors flock there for the golf courses) — and, thanks to the entertainment Goliath Orlando is, a huge, vibrant and yet very tightly-knit gay community that I know will rise above this with dignity.

Trail Mixers,

I almost forgot. This month marks 11 years since we launched our little corner of the Internets. So many iterations over the years I’ve lost track which one this is, but we’re still here and so many of you have been here since the beginning.

What to say? For starters, I’m amazed. Even after I took a year off to play politics, when our previous installment was shut down by despicable unknown unfriendlies, you all came back and picked up right where we left off.

Like I never have had, no idea what makes this work, but I do know it’s all about you.

Craig

In a new wave of TV ad attacks Hillary Clinton’s Super Pac focuses on Donald Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter. This one will run in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire and Colorado. Before the GOP convention in Cleveland starts in six weeks, Priorities USA says will have spent $26 million on ads attacking Trump’s character.

Take that, Harry and Louise.