Sarah Schumaker, 23, leads a group of mourning Orlando residents and visitors in lighting candles at the vigil held at Lake Eola Park on Sunday.
Twenty first-graders attending school in Newtown, Connecticut. Then, it was a family and pedestrians in Santa Monica, California. Twelve more at a Washington, District of Columbia, naval yard. Three at Fort Hood, Texas. A long-planned mass-murder at Isla Vista, California.
Then, it was churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Marines and a navy officer in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Innocent college students in Roseburg, Oregon. It was three at a clinic in Colorado. Fourteen in San Bernardino, California. All this just in the past three-and-a-half years. And now: Pulse.
Many of us Gators are from Orlando or have a few friends from the area. A likely few of you even know an individual, or the family of an individual, murdered or injured Saturday night. We are so, so sorry. We want to tell you this is the end of senseless — we really do. But it isn’t.
It would be disingenuous to say another Pulse won’t happen again. It will. It already did. Sunday morning, in Roswell, New Mexico, authorities said a father shot and killed his four children and their mother.
Before a time when our political atmosphere reinvigorated its patriotism and manufactured a newfound national allegiance to a vague sense of freedom symbolized by the firearm, by defending the homefront against a non-existent tyranny and routine threat to family safety — before this fabricated conversation we’ve lost ourselves in, there were cars.
Automotive deaths were the gun deaths of the last century. In 1924, auto accidents killed 23,600 people and injured more than 700,000. But we matured. We constructed crosswalks, implemented speed limits, designed seat belts and airbags. There wasn’t any taking away of everyone’s cars; we simply did what we had to do to ensure the majority’s safety amidst widespread violence.
After all these years, with all of the needlessly dead, nobody is blameless. Even if the Islamic State is responsible for inspiring Omar Mateen, he was born and raised here, he bought an assault rifle by our law and he committed an American-style domestic terrorist attack: a mass shooting. Mateen, his attack and the catalog of domestic mass shootings are our responsibility.
Past the point of our leadership taking action, we are left to care for one another. And in many beautiful, indescribable and heartfelt ways, we are: from the long lines of people ready to donate blood to those injured in the attack; to our very own Tyler Richards, a 19-year-old UF industrial systems and engineering major who orchestrated a pizza-donating campaign through Venmo for blood donors; to the countless vigils across the country; and to the venues like Tampa’s Sacred Grounds Coffee House that raise funds to support the families of victims.
These attacks will continue to happen. The best we can do is embody the heroism of so many ordinary people doing the extraordinary, and in so doing, making the extraordinary ordinary. This is how we overcome.
