Three professors have blamed the Orlando mass shooting on “toxic masculinity,” “ultranationalist” discourse, and “wide availability (and fetishization) of weapons.”

Their essays, collected on Ohio State University’s Mujeres Talk blog, appeared in a post titled “Countering Hate with Knowledge, Fury, and Protest: Three Latina/o Studies Scholars Respond to Orlando Massacre.”

“I trace this back to deep patterns of colonial violence that allow and empower men to terrorize everyone.”

“To say ‘We are all Orlando,’ is to risk being thought a queer, a fag, a freak, unnatural,” wrote Mariana Ortega, a philosophy professor at John Carroll University. “It is to lose the honorable shield of hetero-love.”

Professor Ortega described the “Latinx” community’s response to the shooting as one consisting of sorrow, anger, and despair.

“[The anger] sprouts many branches,” she said. “Infusing our breathing with fire when we hear that government employees find it unbearable to see the rainbow flag flying half mast in their building, when hateful followers of some pitiable but horrendous marginal church will desecrate the dead and pierce their loved ones with their hateful speech and their miserable signs and voices, because they all think they are loved by some made-up god of hate.”

Similarly, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Latina/o Studies Program director at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor declared it has become “self-evident that to be queer and Puerto Rican or Latina/o in the United States is strange and at times profoundly dangerous.”

“What’s worse, these challenges come along with the general risks of life in the U.S., given the prevalence of weapons, profound social inequalities, lack of comprehensive mental health care (and in some cases, basic health care), and the rise in xenophobic, ultranationalist and extremist discourses that we face,” he wrote.

When Campus Reform reached out for comment, La Fountain-Stokes declined to elaborate on the previous statement….