Marc Orfanos
October 1, 2022
Five years ago today my son, Telemachus Orfanos, was in Las Vegas at a music festival. That evening close to 600 people were shot in the worst mass shooting in modern United States history. 60 of those people died.
It was the middle of the night when I first heard about the massacre. I was awakened by a call from my cousin, as she had seen the news on TV. She had called inquiring about by son. I felt an awful throbbing in the pit of my stomach as I tried unsuccessfully to call him. Shortly thereafter my cousin sent me a text with a video of my son being interviewed by a local TV reporter. It was an indescribable sense of relief to see that he was apparently ok. But then, as a parent is prone to do, I noticed that he was attired only in his undershirt. Silly as it is, I was somewhat embarrassed that my son was on TV clad in a stretched out undergarment. When I was finally able to talk to him, he told me that he had given his shirt to a young lady who had used her shirt to stop the bleeding on someone who had been shot. My son, who was a Navy vet and an Eagle scout, was trained in First Aid. He utilized his training that day. Because the carnage was so extensive, and the first responders so overwhelmed, he spent the next several hours helping to get the dead and dying off the concert grounds. To say that my son was traumatized by what he had experienced would be like saying the sky is up, or water is wet, or blood is red.
Nevertheless, I felt lucky because my son came home the following day. The moment he arrived, I wrapped my arms around him, all six foot two of him, and just held on. It is a moment so indelibly embedded in my brain, that I can still smell him and feel the rhythm of his breathing. That evening he briefly talked about the horror he had witnessed. He talked about the blood all over the ground and the gaping holes that high caliber rounds leave in people’s bodies. He talked about the noise: the screaming, the crying, the rumble of feet, and the sound of gunshots that seemed to never end. He spoke in a very deliberate manner, as if he had to get it all off his chest. And then he never talked about it again. The impact, however, of what he had experienced was always there. He was always wary around tall buildings, he could not tolerate fireworks, large crowds made him uncomfortable.
13 months and six days after having survived the carnage in Las Vegas, and after months of therapy to cope with the horror, my son was shot and killed in another mass shooting three miles from our home in Thousand Oaks, California. That killer used a semi automatic Glock with an extended magazine capable of holding thirty rounds, you know, so one doesn’t have to worry about reloading whilst gunning people down. My son’s body had five bullet holes in it. I can never shake from my head the image of bullets ripping into his body and he gasping his last breaths while bleeding out on the floor.
In both Las Vegas and Thousand Oaks the killers had equipment that made their killing efficient and devastating and overwhelming. And in both instances the equipment was easily accessible. Last April would have been my son’s thirty-first birthday. At the time I wrote a piece about the catastrophic impact these weapons have on the human body. I was speaking from first hand knowledge, having seen the autopsy report on my son. Things like assault rifles and extended magazines serve one purpose, and that is to kill as many people as rapidly as possible. And they work. And they are used. I had commented that in no civilized society would these weapons be acceptable. Someone responded to me by saying that we needed those guns to protect ourselves and to fight tyrants. In other words, a regurgitation of gun culture talking points. I pointed out that the excuses are always the same, the rhetoric is always the same, and the results are always the same: more dead Americans. This person responded by calling me smug and arrogant because I had pointed out the obvious. That is the mindset of the gun culture. Just since that brief exchange around 16,000 more Americans have been shot and killed. The death toll is relentless and virtually nothing has been done to curb the slaughter.
Unfortunately, over the last five years, it has become apparent that there is no amount of death or destruction or pain or agony that is enough to motivate some to take action to control these weapons of mass destruction. One can describe the devastation visited upon one’s child by said weapons, only to be greeted by the same rhetoric and inaction. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these responses is the simple lack of humanity exhibited. Recently, Ted Cruz, when faced with some parents of the Uvalde massacre, said flatly that gun control doesn’t work, so he wouldn’t consider it, despite the fact that it works in every other civilized country. Marco Rubio famously looked Parkland survivors in the eye and said he would do nothing about assault weapons that were used in that massacre. They have proven by their callousness and indifference that the death of my son is acceptable to them. They have proven that the deaths of thousands of sons and daughters every year are acceptable to them. And the killing goes on.
Tonight I will go to bed, as I have for the last 1424 days since my son was killed, with the singular goal of trying to shake from my consciousness the image of my son being shot multiple times and gasping his last breath. Meanwhile the status quo remains. Here we are, five years after the Las Vegas massacre, and the circumstances that allowed it to happen are still in place. We still reside in an environment where weapons that can kill dozens of Americans in a matter of minutes are easily accessible. It is a dystopian landscape where mass murderers, terrorists and violent street gangs can readily equip themselves for the next mass casualty act of violence. And the same excuses and rhetoric will enable these events. It does not have to be this way. People of conscience do not have to tolerate this. Remember those that enable this never ending violence when you go to the polls in November. The death and heartache and brutality will never end until we as a society reject those that promulgate it.
So today commit to choosing peace over violence, love over hate, civilization over barbarism, but most importantly, life over death.