Last night, hundreds of people gathered at the Dallas LGBT Community Center to support the Pulse Nightclub shooting victims.
All of the important local politicians spoke – the mayor, the police chief, the county judge – and tried to reassure the Dallas gay community that we are safe. The crowd then marched the length of the gayborhood from the Resource Center to the Oak Lawn monument.
Cops and cameras were everywhere.
Mourners lay flowers and candles at the Oak Lawn Pulse memorial.
Police response in Oak Lawn in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shootings.
A march down Cedar Springs in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shootings.
Dallas residents marching after the Pulse nightclub shootings.
The police presence at Oak Lawn’s Pulse nightclub memorial march.
Dallas’s gayborhood coming together after the Pulse nightclub shootings.
The end of Pulse rally in Dallas.
Notifications
In addition to the rally, we monitored Facebook for news from Orlando – a surprising number of our friends knew victims. I am continually surprised how connected the gay community is.
All of my friends were safe, but many others were not so lucky.
The Dallas gay community rallying after the Pulse nightclub shootings.
The end of the Oak Lawn Pulse march.
The Oak Lawn rally in front of the Centrum Building.
Why we’ll never stop a crazy guy with a gun.
The depressing thing about the Orlando shootings and subsequent rallies is that nothing is going to substantively change.
The Orlando attack was not really about homophobia or violent Islamic extremism. It was just a crazy guy with a gun – and that is something that American society hasn’t figured out how to handle.
Although the gunman made statements about Islamic State, his fixation on the gay community was actually random – it could have easily been a church, movie theater, school or workplace.
Gun violence is simply a fact of American life – specifically, this is what you get when you live in a society with sub-par mental health care and an abundance of weapons. In Dallas we know this very well – we have an entire section of town that memorializes a president shot down by a crazy man.
Sometimes the gunmen get caught beforehand, but most of the time they succeed in carrying out their plans. Until we provide real mental healthcare services and actually support gun reform, mass shootings are going to keep happening.
This time it impacted the gay community. Who’s next?
Side note – many people here in Texas believe that the answer is “more guns” – but this is unhelpful in the nightclub context because you’re not supposed to have weapons in a bar. We know what happens when you do.
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