A father of one of the Orlando victims penned a letter expressing the wish that his son had been armed at the gay nightclub where 49 people were killed and another 53 were injured last week.
In a letter published by The Detroit News, Mark Bando decried gun control policies for disarming people like his son, Christopher Andrew Leinonen, who was shot and killed by a terrorist last week at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
“The killer was armed and his helpless victims were not,” Bando wrote. “Yet the anti gun politicians still want to disarm the populace, enabling these scenarios. It is likely such attacks will continue, until the victims start shooting back. That’s the lesson I take from this, for what it’s worth. When the shooting started Saturday night, I’ll bet there wasn’t a person in the club who wouldn’t have traded everything he owned in the world, for a loaded gun.”
Bando, who was a police officer in Detroit, Michigan, for 25 years, lamented that no one in the nightclub that night was armed.
After seeing the Paris massacre last year, I thought, ‘If only one of the intended victims in that large crowd had been armed, many lives could have been saved.’ I also thought, this couldn’t happen in America, because surely, somebody in a large crowd like that would be armed, in the U.S. Wrong, history has repeated itself right here in the USA and my son and 51 others were slaughtered like helpless cattle, precisely because nobody in that club had a weapon to shoot back with.
Drew and his signifiant other Juan were both killed and I hope my son was taken quickly and without suffering. I hate to imagine some of the victims being terrorized for hours, because this armed killer was allowed to play God and exterminate them at will and in his own time schedule.
Leinonen was 32 years old.
