Omar Mateen seen in 'The Big Fix' documentary
A couple of things I want to get off my mind from this past week. One of them is this shooting in a gay club in Orlando perpetrated by Omar Mateen. I was out of the country when this happened but I got an alert about it on my phone and it's been very hard to keep up with the constantly changing hoard of information while on limited internet access. But now I am home and I can process some of it.
He is, by all accounts, a very disturbed individual who decided to end his life by taking 49 other innocent lives with him. Lives that he took simply because he found them to be different. What a horrible tragedy. I am so saddened that America is once again reeling from this sort of gun violence. And worst of all, it seems to be getting worse over the years with this Orlando shooting at Pulse now being the most deadly mass shooting in America since 1984.
A few links I've saved from this past week deal with this scenario and the after-effects of it. Here they are if you are interested in reading.
- How the Orlando Sentinel reported the country's deadliest mass shooting with a third of its staff.
- Outed by a mass shooting in Orlando. I never thought about this, but this would be a double whammy for any families involved. Sucks.
- President Obama's statement on the Orlando nightclub shooting.
- Breakdown of the shooting.
- And finally, the video above which shows found-footage from a documentary called "The Big Fix" about the Gulf BP oil spill, that features Omar Mateen as a security guard for the spill premises.
Field of Vision - Speaking Is Difficult: Connecting 911 calls to mass shootings in America
Damn, this is a powerful video. Field Of Vision is a short film made by AJ Schnack that takes you directly to the location of several real mass shootings in America over the last 5 years and simultaneously plays the audio recording of the 911 calls over present-day videos of the locations.
Mass shootings in America have become a sad and commonplace event in the last few years but it's often easy to forget the tragedies that have taken place when we are only hearing about them on the news. The news cycle is made to relentlessly talk about these situations until the next big crime occurs, and when it does, these shootings and their aftermath get pushed out of the collective American psyche. This film brings us back to these locations and reminds us that these terrible situations are ongoing -- communities, families, and people recovering for much longer than these events stay in the news cycle.