Each life was important, and should be remembered

Anderson Cooper's emotional tribute to victims

Please listen as he reads the names, and tells something of each one of them, if known. The one that got me the most, for whatever reason, was Brenda Lee Marquez McCool. She was 49 years old--the same age I am. She had eleven kids, and had beaten cancer twice. One of her sons was gay, and she was so supportive that they often went to Pulse together to dance. That night, she died. He lived, and I'm sure it's torn him up completely.

As Cooper said, these were people who 'loved and were loved'. They had families and friends. They had dreams to chase. Many of them were very young--one was just 18. They seemed to have their whole lives ahead of them, but were cut down by a gunman who somehow seems to be an intersection in a complex diagramme of hate crime, terrorism, mental illness--all the usual suspects in mass murder, rolled up into one.

This incident has weighed heavily on me all of today; I could barely concentrate at work. So many lives cut short, due to a type of mentality that is incomprehensible to everyone I've talked to. It's so sad. Please, do not let these men and women become merely statistics. They were vibrant people who made a difference to those around them. Several were partners who died together. We need to remember their names, and more to the point, we need to take steps to make sure it's a lot harder for this sort of thing to happen again. Thank you, Anderson Cooper. You put the emphasis where it needed to be--the dead, rather than the gunman. Those names have meaning. Those names were lives lost.