This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

When 32 people were burned to death in the French Quarter's Upstairs Lounge back in 1973, that attack on the gay community was, until the massacre in Orlando, the largest mass murder of gays in U.S. history. At that time, neither the mayor of New Orleans nor the governor of Louisiana offered a statement. Gays weren't important enough to be mourned. In Orlando, however, even Rick Scott, an extraordinarily right-wing politician, felt forced to say something supportive of the gay community. I guess hypocrisy is better than blatant disregard. So definitely, there has been some progress in the past 43 years.

When I first wrote about the Upstairs Lounge fire, several editors wouldn't publish the book because they said I couldn't demonstrate how anything significant had changed as a result of the tragedy. This made any discussion of the event "unsatisfying." The fact was, unfortunately, that almost nothing of importance did change. The question we have to ask ourselves now about what happened in Orlando is whether or not we're going to learn from this latest horror and make the changes that clearly must be made.

As someone excommunicated from the Mormon church for the abominable sin of homosexuality, I understand that despite the progress of society in general, there are still many people who hate us. The shooter could have been a Mormon homophobe as easily as a Muslim one, especially given the LDS Church's history of Danite assassinations of "apostates." However, I'm not sure I see the attack in Orlando in that restrictive a light. There are always going to be people who hate gays or blacks or women or abortion providers. The problem is that we as a nation don't provide any check to that hatred. We are always diverted toward worrying about "more important" problems.

Mormon leaders, to give one example, are constantly talking about the dangers of pornography. Officials in the state of Utah have even declared pornography a "public health crisis."

But the truth is that society is much more heavily addicted to the destructive pornography of violence. While we worry incessantly about someone seeing a breast or a penis or, God forbid, a bare shoulder, we do everything we can to ignore the health crisis of murder.

When I hear people describing the shooting in Orlando as "the largest mass murder in U.S. history," all I can think is that this becomes a challenge to the next murderer, not merely a statement of fact.

Someone listening or watching or reading this news just wants to be the one to take murder one step further. I'm not sure it really matters if the victims are gay or Latino or schoolchildren or postal workers or anyone else.

We obviously cannot prevent every murderer from killing, but we can certainly make it harder for those who want to kill to achieve their goal, whatever their motivation. At the very least, we can perform background checks and limit the most dangerous kinds of weapons from being purchased by virtually anyone who walks into a gun shop or gun show with enough money to purchase the death of 20 or 50 or 70 people.

If we don't, then whatever other lessons we learn from these worsening attacks will be meaningless. Yes, we've learned to be more accepting of the LGBT community over the past 43 years. People ignored or forgot the Upstairs Lounge almost immediately because gays weren't important enough back then to remember.

But who cares if gays are "important" now, if we still allow them or anyone else to be killed in mass shooting after mass shooting, and all we can say is "you're in our thoughts and prayers" and "don't politicize this terrible tragedy!"

With every mass shooting and terrorist attack, we give away a little more of our freedoms, and those are freedoms we almost never get back. We don't need more surveillance of email and phones or anything else. In the long run, those invasions of privacy and violations of our rights are far worse than any "invasion" by "the enemy."

Regina Adams, a transgender woman from my Mormon congregation in New Orleans, survived the Upstairs inferno. Her partner, Reggie Adams, was not so lucky. When Regina transitioned to living as a woman, she took on her dead partner's name to honor and remember him every day for the past four decades. We owe everyone who has lost loved ones in all of these attacks to at least attempt making the world better. With action, not platitudes.

We can help protect ourselves by teaching tolerance for all of our friends and families and neighbors who are different from us. And we can limit the most deadly of weapons from mass consumption. To our shame and condemnation, we didn't learn anything from the Upstairs Lounge fire, the previous "largest mass murder of gays." Will we learn anything now from the slaughter in Orlando? If we don't, then I'm not sure there's really any point in covering the story at all.

Johnny Townsend is the author of "Let the F——— Burn," an account of what was until June 12 the largest mass murder of gays in U.S. history. He is also associate producer of the documentary "Upstairs Inferno," directed by Robert Camina.