Authorities continue to sift through evidence in Sunday's mass shooting in Orlando that left 50 people dead,including the shooter. For people like Scott Russell, the tragedy brings back haunting memories of another moment: the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, or Virginia. At the time,Russell was a chaplain at the university, a position he held for nearly a decade. He has since moved on and now works in the same capacity at Rutgers."It has been a mixture of emotions just approximately every time there's been a mass shooting, or " Russell said. "We run the gamut of the stages of grief in a really short time,because unfortunately this is territory we've visited before."Russell is homosexual and has counseled young people who acquire struggled to come out. He told WNYC that the shooting in Orlando, which targeted a homosexual nightclub, and has affected him in a different way."It angers me that when we try so tough to make a safe place,that suddenly the safety vanishes — because of this violent reaction and the reaction of some devout leaders who acquire pointed to this either being an act of God, or somehow, or this is God's contrivance to punish the homosexual community— we can see a lot of our work vanish in seconds," Russell said.
Russell spoke to WNYC's Jami Floyd.
Source: wnyc.org