title:  WATCH: FL Governor Refuses To Acknowledge Mass Shooting As Anti-Gay Hate Crime (VIDEO)
text: During a telephone interview with CNN s Jake Tapper, Florida Governor Rick Scott carefully avoided any acknowledgement that the gay community had been targeted in the June 12 mass shooting, which left 50 people dead and 53 more injured in Orlando.During the interview, Tapper pointed out that the gay community  appears to have been directly targeted in the attack.  He went on to acknowledge the impact the shooting has had on Florida s LGBT community, saying: There are a lot of members of that community and supporting friends and family who are very worried. Obviously if this was radical Islam, which the special agent in charge of the FBI suggested it may have been, that is a community that has been under siege from radical Islam. Tapper asked Scott what steps are being taken to protect Florida s gay and lesbian community from further threats.Scott refused to acknowledge the gay community, instead providing a generic, barely coherent statement in response to the question, saying: We don t want anybody in our state to ever be targeted. We don t want anybody to be discriminated against. And so in every case, when we believe there is somebody doing the wrong thing, we work hard to make sure we take care of them. He went on to explain: And so what we ll   you know, as we go through this process, what we ll learn through this, is we ll learn what we can do to hopefully to never, never, ever to let this happen again. Tapper pressed the issue, apparently hoping that Florida s right-wing governor was capable of giving a response that addressed the needs of the LGBT community in his state. But, I guess my point is,  Tapper responded,  you ve declared a state of emergency in Orange County, but there are areas of the state of Florida   South Beach, for example   where there may be a large and thriving LGBT community that might be very, very afraid this morning. He again asked Scott about the precautions his administration is taking to protect members of the gay community, and specifically asked whether there would be additional law enforcement presence to protect against possible copycat attacks or on the off chance that the shooter wasn t acting alone.While it seems clear from the interview that Tapper was hoping to get Scott to reach out to members of the LGBT community in his own state following the deadliest mass shooting in history, Scott never did that.Instead he offered more generic assurances about how the state responds  when something like this happens.  Scott said,  one of the first things you do on top of dealing with the issue you have at hand, is say,  Who else could this impact and what can we do to make sure that does not happen? When asked what people can do to help, Scott responded by saying  They can pray. This is what a truly incompetent leader sounds like.Watch the interview below, courtesy of Raw Story on YouTube. Featured imae via video screen capture via Raw Story on YouTube