November 7th will mark 6 years since my son, Telemachus Orfanos, was killed in a mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. That very sentence is still surreal and unfathomable to me, yet at the same time the trauma that I have endured has been seared into my brain. It is an event frozen in time.
The morning of November 7, 2018, as my son left for work, I told him, as I always did, that I loved him and would see him later that evening. It was, however, three days before I saw him again. His dead body lay on a table in a funeral parlor covered by a sheet. It was pulled up to his chin, hiding the five bullet holes that had perforated his torso. That was the last time I saw my son. The image of his cold lifeless body, and the nightmare that it represents, has haunted me relentlessly ever since. It perpetually brings to mind the last few seconds of his life where bullets rapidly ripped through his body sending him collapsing to the floor, gasping for air, and bleeding to death.
The killer had used a semi-automatic Glock equipped with an extended magazine. It was a very efficient killing machine and had been acquired with remarkable ease. The gun was bought at a local gun store and the extended magazines were bought through the mail. It allowed the killer to shoot a couple dozen bullets in a matter of seconds without reloading. Eleven other people were killed that night, their bodies also shredded by a barrage of bullets. The attack was quick, brutal and bloody. It was, and still is, a very common occurrence in the United States.
After the massacre the usual thoughts and prayers were administered by certain people in public life. Okay, let’s not mince words: it was mostly Republican legislators, who do nothing to prevent gun violence, that mouthed the words “thoughts and prayers.” These were the same people that had, just a few months prior, regurgitated similar sentiments in response to the massacre at Parkland, Florida. They had also offered the same formulaic remarks after the horrendous slaughter in Las Vegas, just the year before. It was, in fact, the same contrived muttering that had been offered after every mass shooting for the previous twenty years.
What became painfully clear to me was not what they did offer, but rather what they did not offer. They did not offer any rational proposition for stopping the epidemic of gun violence that has decimated the United States. They did not then, nor do they now, demonstrate any resolve to prevent the ongoing carnage. There has been no concern for the damage done to a human body when it is shot. There has been no acknowledgement of the horrendous damage done to society in general. No talk of the 45,000 people a year that are killed by gun violence, or the 100,000 a year that are wounded. No talk about the trauma inflicted upon the people who have to endure the brutal deaths of their loved ones. No talk of the 550 billion dollars a year that gun violence costs the U.S. economy, as documented by The National Institute for Health Care Management (Jan. 16, 2024) There is no attempt to get destructive and deadly weapons off our streets. Rather, the opposite happens as state legislatures and members of congress propose having more guns on the street instead of fewer. And as more Americans, like my son, are shot and killed, we hear the same excuses and rhetoric over and over again justifying the lack of action to prevent gun violence. We see the toxic gun culture, that permeates so much of the Republican Party, pushing to maintain the murderous status quo that visits perpetual violence upon us.
Witness, for instance, Tim Burchett, the representative from Tennessee, who, after children were killed in his own district, said, “Well there’s just nothing we can do about it.”
Remember Ted Cruz who, when children were massacred in Uvalde, Texas said, “Gun control doesn’t work and I’m against it,” even though it has worked in every other industrialized country.
Then there is J.D. Vance who, after a school shooting in Georgia, muttered, “Well that’s just a fact of life.”
And, of course, Donald Trump has repeatedly told people whose loved ones have been killed to, “get over it and move on.” More recently he even joked about shooting reporters.
Do these sound like people who would ever be serious about preventing gun violence? When we see their callous disregard for the trauma and suffering of millions of Americans, one has to ask, where is the decency, where is the empathy, where is the basic humanity?
For those of you who have not yet voted, I ask you to keep in mind how certain of these legislators, exemplified by the aforementioned individuals, have responded to the gun violence epidemic. Do you really think that anything will be done while they are in office? Do you really think they will ever prioritize life over guns? If you care about your loved ones safety, if you are concerned about their well-being, then seek out those candidates who have demonstrated the desire and willingness to end the carnage. Reject those that enable it. That is the only way that we, as a country, will ever overcome the shameful legacy of the toxic gun culture that has wreaked such havoc and misery upon us.
Tonight, when I go to sleep, I will engage in my nightly ritual of clearing my head, trying to shake from my consciousness the horrible image of my son’s death. I hope that none of you will ever be subjected to my experience. Voting for those candidates that actually care about making our country a safer and more civilized place will be a good start to that end. Vote for sanity.
