Advisory: Please note that this post is about the Pulse nightclub massacre on June 12, 2016. It contains sensitive and difficult to read content. Post written with narrator’s consent.
David Thomas Moran co-founded Gays Against Guns in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting. He participated in a sit-in for the 49 lives lost and was arrested.
David first became an activist in college. The Pulse hate crime and Donald Trump’s election made the stakes higher than ever for him. He feels marginalized people are being scapegoated and targeted for everything.
The day before the shooting at Pulse, a friend had returned to Orlando. He picked his friend up from the airport and his friend wanted to go out that Friday before the shooting, but David was tired and so stayed home. His friend went out and saw Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero at Southern Nights, another club in Orlando. That was the same night Christina Grimmie was murdered at the Plaza Live.
Saturday morning, David walked to Plaza Live to pay his respects to her. That night he had to work at the restaurant again. After work, he asked his friend if he wanted to go out to Southern Nights or Pulse. However their car battery kept dying. They struggled in the parking lot to jump the battery and by the time they got a charge they decided they were done for the night. They went home.
David didn’t sleep well that night. He noticed some vibrating. He got a text message that said, “there has been a mass shooting at Pulse.” What? He went to CNN and the top story was the shooting. It did not make sense. At the time the news said that 20 people had been killed. Searching Facebook he found a post from Brandon Wolf that said, “Eric and I were there, we got out.” If they were there then other friends might have been there. Drew might have been there. Are they OK? he started to message friends. He had already texted his family to let them know he was OK. When he reached Brandon Wolf he was told, “We got out but Juan has been shot and we don’t know where Drew is.” A friend sent a link to a news clip and it was of Drew’s mother. She was at the hospital trying to figure out where he was. David froze.
Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero had planned to have a pool party on June 12, 2016 and they had invited David. He was considering going. The whole day he kept thinking, this is just supposed to be a pool party. The news announced that Juan was one of the first three who was confirmed dead. Juan and Drew’s pictures were being plastered all over the media.
David decided to walk to The Center and he got there around 9AM, then spent the whole day there. He posted updates and let people know where they could donate blood. He managed several Facebook pages that addressed peoples’ needs. At the Center, everyone stood and listened as President Obama came on the TV. He said it was an act of hate and terror. Moran felt some were calling it a terrorist attack to justify militarizing the police and anti-immigrant legislation, all of which he feels does not honor the lived experiences of the people who were victimized by this act of violence.
He left the Center and biked to Ember. He had originally met Drew at Ember. It was hard. Everyone was crying and grieving. There was a candle light vigil. We still didn’t know at that point who had been lost. Nothing was 100% confirmed. David went to Drew’s wake and funeral.
Much later, after the Dallas police shootings, Ida Eskamani contacted him and told him there was going to be a sit-in on gun safety reforms. They wanted to address intersectional concerns around racism, wage inequality, anti-immigrant sentiment, and Islamophobia. Though he had worked with OPD through Bike Walk Central Florida, and had a good experience with that, he was hesitant to participate in this sit-in. He got to the sit-in just in time to walk in with protestors at 10AM. When he was arrested, he only had the red hat and a red heart in his pocket that you see in the sketch above. He had nothing else. That experience made him aware of the solidarity awareness movement coalition in Orlando. Various organizations sat in solidarity. After most people left, he stayed behind to sit-in with Ida. The sit-in made him realize that he had the power to save himself. The sit-in was largely about politician Marco Rubio‘s inaction. Rubio was confronted by David the next week. The Pulse shooting targeted people he did nothing to help. He used their oppression as an excuse to run for office again. He did nothing for gun safety laws, he did nothing for LGBTQ+ equality, and did nothing to alleviate the oppression of workers across the state. Rubio was the epitome of the exploitation of the Pulse hate crime. People saw that confrontation. The Advocate dropped the story and it received a lot of coverage. That is when Gays Against Guns reached out to David about starting an Orlando Chapter.