INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - Prior to Sunday's mass shooting in Las Vegas, the biggest such event in American history occurred last June in Orlando, Florida.
Eyewitness News Reporter Kevin Rader covered that tragedy and takes a look at the disturbing trend that all of us want to see come to an end.
I, like many of you, have spent most of my day watching and reading everything I could get my hands on about this tragedy and the one that stuck with me the most was also the shortest. It was a tweet that read simply, "Wasn't the last worst mass murder in American history just 16 months ago?"
Sad to say it was.
We all remember the last mass shooting in America. Sunday, June 12, of just last year. Forty-nine people lost their lives in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.
"At the end of the day, we are all American. We are all human and we bleed the same blood. So the skin he's wearing, that I am wearing, he's wearing. It doesn't matter," a distraught man exclaimed.
It was a horrific scene that, at the time, was the largest mass murder in American history. The city known for making dreams come true at Disney was living a nightmare at Pulse.
This is how I described the scene at the time, as I watched people mourn at the memorial in Orlando:
"So for some reason we cannot explain, Orlando now knows how New York City, Oklahoma City, Sandy Hook and San Bernardino all still feel."
The first mass shooting in this country occurred on the campus of the University of Texas in 1966, killing 16. There were two incidents in the 1980, two in the 1990s and two more in the 2000s, taking a combined total of 132 lives. Sadly, in the last five years alone, five incidents have taken at least 160 lives, meaning we have had more victims in the last five years than we had in the prior 45 years combined.
Randy Rauch lamented about that very thing to me as he assessed the murder scene in Orlando one year ago with his four-year-old son Riley.
"It's sad what my world has become. It's sad what we are looking at and the country, it's everywhere. It's not just Orlando. It's Indiana, it's North Dakota, South Dakota. It's everywhere. It just seems like we can't end it. We can't stop it. Nobody knows what to do," Randy Rauch said.
Sadly, that is still the case. Whether you are going to a movie, dropping off your kids at school, going out for a night of dancing or attending a concert. No one knows what to do about it.
There will be ample debate about all of this and there should be. About gun control, about mental illness and about the ever increasing trend of mass murder which threatens each and every one of us but you can't find the solution until you at least have the conversation. But that is for another day.
Today, we grieve.