Stanley Almodovar loved to sing and sent his mom a Snapchat video of himself crooning on his way to Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Juan Ramon Guerrero, who’d just come out as gay to his family, went to the club because he and his boyfriend loved salsa. Juan River was celebrating a friend’s birthday.
Today, they and 46 others are forever joined as victims of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
The fact that victims like these, and like Edward Sotomayor, Kimberly Morris, Eddie Justice and others, so quickly become numbers provides its own reason to mourn. Gun violence is so prevalent in America, we keep scorecards.
The slaughter in Orlando? Enough people were killed to displace the 32 who died at Virginia Tech in 2007, the previous “worst,” as well as the 14 killed in a San Bernardino office party last year, the 12 gunned down in a Colorado movie theater in 2012 and the 26 children and adults who died inside Sandy Hook Elementary School that year.
References to “worst” — in terms of numbers — drove news coverage around the world Sunday. But intense grief, family by family, isn’t about arithmetic; it suffers loss one by one by one by one.
This is a time to think less about tallies and more about what families must endure. Imagine being a parent, family member or friend of one of those who died in Orlando. Then try to grasp how you’d feel to hear their loss become fodder for yet another going-nowhere debate about gun violence in America.
It is also a time to reassure members of the LGBT community that their safety is paramount. And it is a time to reject reckless calls to blame all members of the Muslim faith for the act of a lone gunman who claimed to be aligned with the Islamic State.
Once proper respect is paid to victims and families, then yes. Then it is time not just to revive the debate about common-sense gun control but to fight for its enactment nationally, since state laws are ineffective.
The AR-15-style semiautomatic assault weapon that killed so many in Orlando is legal to buy in that state and many others. That makes it easy for someone of homicidal intent to unleash mass murder.
It could be otherwise. The assault-weapons ban that passed in Congress in 1994 saved lives, but it expired in 2004.
When President Obama spoke Sunday, pessimism seemed to shadow his terse statements about the Orlando killings, which struck 18 miles from a place Americans associate with fantasy, not nightmare.
The president, called upon 13 times now to console the nation after yet another mass shooting, couldn’t offer reassurance, not after Newtown and the failure of gun control reforms. But he did display resolve: “We will not give in to fear or turn against each other,” he said. “Instead, we will stand united as Americans to protect our people and defend our nation, and to take action against those who threaten us.”
The president mentioned shootings at a school, a movie theater, a church. He didn’t need to say where. We know those blood-soaked places.
And now we all must shoulder this unfinished business of preventing new tragedies by restoring the federal ban on assault weapons — and, in doing so, honor these latest victims.
We have a new “worst.” It is time for America’s best to answer by overcoming the NRA’s lobbying clout with a national movement to control access to weapons that belong only on a battlefield.
No new gun control measure can prevent someone like Omar Mateen from carrying out the kind of attack he unleashed early Sunday. But new measures can make it much more difficult and that is what’s now needed.
The president asked Americans to decide whether they want to live in a country where mass shootings are so routine. “To actively do nothing is a decision as well,” he said.
We asked the same question about the country we’d like to be after Newtown. The answer that came violated the memories of those 20 children: Charlotte Bacon, Daniel Barden, Olivia Engel, Josephine Gay, Ana M. Marquez-Greene, Dylan Hockley, Madeleine F. Hsu, Catherine V. Hubbard, Chase Kowalski, Jesse Lewis, James Mattioli , Grace McDonnell, Emilie Parker, Jack Pinto, Noah Pozner, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Avielle Richman, Benjamin Wheeler and Allison N. Wyatt.
A country that could not find common ground after the violent deaths of children is not likely to forge consensus after an attack on a gay nightclub.
Is this the country we want to be? the president asked. Certainly not.
But we risk remaining a country that accepts that innocent people will pay with their lives for the right of some to bear arms.