Marc and Susan Orfanos awoke at 2 a.m. on Thursday in Thousand Oaks, California, to a call from a relative in New York. The groggy-eyed couple stumbled into a ritual that is familiar to parents in Columbine, Blacksburg, Aurora, Newtown, Orlando, Parkland — and, as of this week, also in the quiet outpost of Los Angeles.
They waited to find out if their child, who had survived the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history last year in Las Vegas, had perished in another mass-casualty shooting.
“You’re always holding out hope,” Marc Orfanos, 63, said in an interview. He and his wife had raced to the Borderline Bar and Grill, where a line-dancing night for college students ended when a lone gunman opened fire shortly before midnight. As they waited in a crisis center nearby, several survivors told the distressed couple that they thought they had seen their son flee the bar.
It wasn’t until noon on Thursday that a police officer told them the news: Their 27-year-old son, Telemachus Orfanos, was dead.
That marked the end of one grim ritual, and the beginning of another, as the Orfanos parents channeled their private anguish into a public cry for gun control — a cry that has echoed from Aurora to Newtown and beyond.
But what distinguished their plea was an utter disavowal of the stock response to the violence that claimed their son’s life.
“I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts. I want gun control,” Susan Orfanos said on local TV.
“And I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers,” she said, vigorously shaking her head. She emphasized each word, demanding: “No more guns.”
Whether anyone will listen, her husband said, the victim’s parents know that’s in question.
Last year in Las Vegas, he
