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What follows is a brief reflection that originally arose from a post I made on Facebook in response to a former colleague’s concern that, by being described as a terrorist attack in the media, the gay and Latino aspects of the Orlando shooting (though certainly mentioned in news outlets) have been obscured.
GAY BAR SHOOTING 2016 SERIES
Like with Boston, the Newtown shooting, the Aurora shooting, or the San Bernardino shooting, this weekend’s Orlando shooting evokes a series of scripts. It can be depressing to teach a course where we study how and why people murder other people. One thing I hate about this course is that whenever I go to the news I keep finding fresh data for the course. That bombing became data for my student to theorize, almost as a type of grief processing. The first time I taught this course, the Boston Marathon Bombing occurred. Although we deal with various aspects of violence, a central topic is religious terrorism (largely working through the theoretical contributions by Mark Juergensmeyer, Bruce Lincoln, and William Cavanaugh among others). Over the past few years I have designed and taught a course on Theorizing Religion and Violence. When faced with acts of such brutality, people often turn to the media – or, more often these days, social media – in order to make some sense of what strikes us as senseless violence. With 50 people murdered and over 50 more injured, the nightmare has only begun for many who were there, or who personally knew people at the club, or who, like myself, read about this horrific event through various media channels on Sunday morning. when police killed Omar Mateen, the alleged shooter who had been holding hostages from the club for nearly three hours. The nightmare that they experienced did not end until 5 a.m. on Sunday June 12th in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida gunshots were heard by patrons.