Last Sunday, a gunman entered a gay club and committed the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Let’s stop talking about queer people in bathrooms as a threat to public safety.
The conservative right authored more than 100 anti-LGBT bills over the last six months. Let’s stop talking about hate as a Muslim problem.
In the 164 days leading up to Orlando, America saw 173 mass shootings. Let’s stop talking about why the United States shouldn’t join the rest of the developed world in adopting sensible gun policies.
But let’s also stop talking as if Orlando is, first and foremost, a story about guns. Because it is not.
Orlando is about far more than the uniquely American paralysis on gun violence. It is about the persistence of a still-mainstream America that terrorizes the everyday lives of LGBT people with subtle and insidious regularity.
The trauma inflicted upon queer people, specifically queer people of color, does not trace its origin back to a Middle Eastern desert. It originates in American backyards. And the danger is not merely that America imbues those backyards with de-facto machine guns; the danger is that a substantial portion of the conservative right has created a culture of violent intolerance that, when left to fester in an unstable mind, compels the squeezing of a trigger.
In my home state of North Carolina, I have watched politicians deny the dignity of trans people, neglect queer homeless youth and crusade against my right to marry. And last Sunday morning, I awoke to these same politicians proclaiming that an attack on gay Americans is an attack on all Americans.
But the attack on Pulse was not random. It was directed at queer people. And responding as if the identities of those killed are of secondary importance—identities for which people were murdered—is not merely dishonest. It is erasure.
The American gun epidemic and the anti-gay hatred which exploited it are problems that demand serious solutions, but the question remains what to do. There is virtue in developing response narratives that address both, but a pragmatic approach to Orlando is not a call for gun control. It is a call for LGBT equality. To move the needle, we have to stop talking about guns.
This is because Orlando will not change gun law. Not even the LGBT movement—a force that has achieved unmatched change in recent history—is powerful enough to change that. To suggest otherwise is not merely an exercise in misdirected optimism, but an exercise in amnesia.
Time and again, it has been made clear that consequential gun reform—gun control measures expansive enough to reach the violence that quietly decimates colored, queer, and poor communities in arenas unilluminated by the spotlight of a camera—is going nowhere. Not only did Aurora, Charleston, and Sandy Hook fail to incite meaningful change, they failed to incite marginal change. Yesterday, the Senate voted down every single proposal brought to the floor in the wake of Orlando. Yelling at NRA members or pro-AR-15 lawmakers is not galvanizing. It is catharsis. And when 49 people lie dead on a dance floor, humanity deserves more than forays in futility.
It is obvious to the left that a homophobic terror-suspect should not be capable of purchasing a weapon of war on EBay. But to reiterate calls for gun control, rather than to first confront state-sanctioned queer violence, is to neglect an injustice Orlando can change for one that it cannot. The challenge is to identify an actionable policy platform capable of doing justice to everyday abstractions about confronting hate.
That policy platform exists. Legislating love in a way that takes seriously our collective obligation to respond to Orlando is neither abstract nor beyond the scope of small-ball American politics. There is much left to be done; there is also much left that can be done.
So, for a moment, let’s stop talking about guns.
Let’s talk about the legality of firing someone because they’re gay; different ages of consent for same-sex couples; trans exclusion in health insurance; forcible sterilization or surgery as requirements for changes to trans birth certificates; prohibitive policies on trans asylum seekers; legal LGBT discrimination in adoption, custody and visitation rights; trans exclusion in the military; prohibitions on conjugal visits for same sex couples; state-sanctioned conversion therapy; the persistence of gay and trans panic defenses in lawsuits; same-sex couples excluded from paid family leave; virtually non-existent public school LGBT sex education; the unequal application of Romeo and Juliet Laws to same-sex partners; medical professions that lack required training in trans healthcare; rape, stalking, sexual harassment and domestic violence laws still not applicable to queer folks; legal LGBT discrimination in homeless shelters while 40% of homeless youth are queer; prohibiting gay men from giving blood; and, yes, trans exclusive bathroom laws.
No, these reforms will not stop the next Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora or Newtown.
But they may stop the next Orlando, and there is hope in that.
Tanner Lockhead is a Trinity senior.
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