Nightclub Task Force Panel Has First Conference Since Pulse Killings
The Orlando area-based Nightclub Task Force held its first meeting on July 26, 2016, which was several weeks after mass killer, terrorist and wannabe-radical Omar Mateen barbarically opened fire with an AR-15 assault rifle into the crowd-packed confines of the Pulse gay nightclub.
49 people were massacred. 53 people were injured. It is the worst targeted mass-killing of LGBT people in the history of the country.
The Orlando based Nightclub Task Force comprises a consortium of club owners, night life business owners, community activist organizations as well as the city’s downtown development board of city officials.
The Nightclub Task Force usually meets to discuss matters related to progressively improving security issues in clubs. However, after the Pulse nightclub mass killings, the Nightclub Task Force now has a renewed focus to strategize solutions to prevent such horrors from happening again.
Club owners and officials openly discussed, with dozens of public citizen audience members, safety ideas that would help to keep weapons, especially high capacity weapons of war, out of clubs and night life establishments.
Ideas, like clearly labeling all non-exit doors with their function, like closet, so that in the future people will not become trapped with or hostages of a mass killer in another such atrocity, were discussed.
Another idea proposed was to start a roving bike paramedic rider program, so that pre-emergency aid can be offered in a crisis before first responders arrive.
Before the Pulse nightclub massacre, the Nightclub Task Force met annually in an ad hoc manner. However, because of the threat posed by mass-killing incidents, and the degree of targeted hate that was obviously directed towards LGBT people in the Pulse nightclub killings, the Nightclub Task Force will meet four times a year, every season, to propose and discuss how to improve night life safety procedures.
Orlando Fire Marshal Tammy Hughes, an openly lesbian woman, spoke at the conference and stated that her department is brainstorming funding strategies for the bike paramedic initiative.
The Nightclub Task Force will formally issue their ideas and proposals on public night life and establishment safety to Orlando city officials by late October.
The hope is that sometime in the future, new procedures and rule would be initiated to prevent such mass killings in the future.
During the Pulse nightclub killings, Mateen held hostages, indiscriminately shot into bathrooms and closets where club-goers were hiding and negotiated with police for three hours during the killings.
The Nightclub Task Force wants to brainstorm and develop new emergency procedures that the public can follow in the event of another mass killing so that the cruel killings and high death count committed at Pulse never occurs again.
