Sam Fulwood III: Americans must understand that a bullet has all of our names on it

  By any measure of civil rationality, the plague of gun violence in America is out of control. Almost daily and across the nation, the body count of people wounded or killed rises like the mercury in a thermometer under a summer sun. Every weekend, for example, news reporters in Chicago and Washington, D.C., track shootings and deaths in what has become a morbidly routine tally.

  These daily accounts read like a police blotter—all cool details and dry facts. The stories are devoid of the emotional wallop that surely fills the hearts of the family and friends who knew and loved the victims. There is little humanity shared in the description of the lives crippled or ended by a bullet.

David Dinielli: Elected leaders must acknowledge Orlando gunman targeted LGBT community

  From the earliest hours of the tragedy in Orlando, one fact was not in dispute: The worst mass shooting in U.S. history was committed by a killer who targeted LGBT people for murder.

  The LGBT community didn’t need to see a manifesto. We didn’t need to wait for the results of a full investigation. We knew – as soon as it happened, because of the fact that Pulse is a gay bar – that the killer had decided to slaughter LGBT people.

  We also felt it in our gut because we’ve been targeted for years. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s own analysis of FBI data shows that LGBT people are far more likely to be victimized by violent hate crime than any other minority group. Among LGBT people, people of color are the most frequent victims of hate crimes and were the majority of those murdered at Pulse, where each Saturday was Latin Night.