Vaquero Voice

“Well, with the combination of some of the ideologies in the faith of Islam coupled with the relative ease of acquiring weapons, some people within the faith of Islam are intolerant of other people’s point of view and they use violence to force their way of life on other people and that’s just not going to be tolerated in the U.S. and we’ll bounce back from it one way or the other.”

“At first, to me, the Orlando shooting, to me, wasn’t a big deal. It was like, ‘OK, a massacre happened and we just need to work on preventions for that.’ A few days later, I started reading more about it and started seeing more videos. I became more aware of who the shooter was and where he was from. There were accusations that he was from ISIS. After seeing the videos and reading more information about what happened in Orlando, I became very sentimental and I started crying. I felt for these people because they do not do anything to us. If you are against homosexuality, don’t pay attention to it, just move on. That is how they want to be happy, so let them be happy. I mean, it is one of our rights, anybody can be happy. Just because they like the same sex it doesn’t matter. They are living their life happily and we should live our life another way. It did occur to me that it could happen here. I think a measure that we should take is about educating everybody about homosexuality.”

“So, that night of the Orlando shooting, my own boyfriend was attending a gay club with his friends. The reason why this is such a complete terrifying impact to the LGBTQ-plus community here in the Valley is because we go to gay clubs or gay bars for our own safety, our own sanctuary because we know that if we go there, the least you can worry about is someone buying you a free drink or the unwanted flirtations, but of course you can easily shut that down. The one thing you can’t really shut down is when you are getting shut down yourself. Something told me that something bad was going to happen, so I stayed up to make sure that my boyfriend got home. So when I woke up and read about it, I felt completely devastated because I could not believe how those people could have felt. The nightmares, their sanctuary and their own safe place now became a shooting range, a bloody massacre. Upon reflecting that, I realized that it could have been my boyfriend, it could have been my friends that were with him, it could have just been a complete powerful impact to my own life. A lot of my friends, a lot of the communities here in the Valley are very scared to go to the vigils themselves. My own dad told me this morning to not speak for the Muslim community again as I did for the vigil. I read a statement for the Muslim Association here on campus since we were worried about them as well. He told me not to read for them again because he is scared somebody might shoot me for speaking for the Muslims. These kind of events just spark fear into everyone and that is because we are scared of losing the ones that we love. Now it has come to the point where I can’t hold my boyfriend’s hand, I can’t kiss him, I can’t show any PDA whatsoever because I know that now, because [the gunman] saw two men kissing, he shot a whole club.”

“The only constant in this world is change and it is sad that there are still people who can’t accept the changes that are happening. Regarding the Orlando mass shooting, I think it could happen anywhere and it’s sad to think that innocent lives were taken away. My condolences go to the families of those who died from the shooting. Some laws could be changed to prevent a lot of crimes from happening nowadays. Obviously, we can’t control the curfew because people will still go out when they want to. Everyone should be aware of their surroundings and help the world to be better.”