On the night of Oct.1, 2017, a lone gunman opened fire on the crowd at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip.

He killed 58 people and wounded 422, with the ensuing panic bringing the injury total to 851.

One thing is clear: America’s mass shooting epidemic rages on and there seems to be nothing that can stop it.

In times of grief and uncertainty, the ways we choose to remember these tragedies is increasingly consequential for how we — as a nation — attempt to heal from trauma and perhaps prevent further violence.

But how do we properly honor the dead and memorialize such tragedy?

This question, and many like it, has become far too common in communities across America. Most of these discussions yield smaller acts of remembrance: a bench in Birmingham, a cherry tree in Wakefield, a stone gazebo in Crandon. Many of these discussions, however, never take place, leaving the tragedy unmarked or forgotten.

Those shootings deemed particularly heinous in nature have spurred large-scale memorial projects organized by communities and foundations. In Aurora, the 7/20 Memorial Foundation erected “Ascentiate,” an art installation of cranes representing each victim lost.

In Newtown, the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission is designing a memorial walkway that surrounds a sycamore tree planted in “sacred soil,” or the now-incinerated tributes sent to Newtown after the shooting.

In Orlando, the onePULSE Foundation is working to build a national memorial and museum to commemorate the tragedy.

And in Charleston, members of the community are planning a memorial and garden space on church grounds.

However, while these projects are largely labors of love by the affected communities, they are often plagued with controversy. In cases of extreme trauma, conflict over how to properly remember the tragedy and its victims is not new.

For the U.S., the clearest illustration of this is the Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum. Here, survivors and family of the deceased repeatedly clashed with the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation over the apparent monetization of the site. The decision to charge admission fees and sell souvenirs at the museum in particular incited major backlash from various groups.

This fear that tragic deaths may be commodified and used for profit is a central concern in the ongoing debates around how to memorialize the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting.

Within the past few months alone, opponents against the onePULSE Foundation’s memorial project have publicly clashed over the move to charge admission, sell merchandise, and provide a six-figure salary for the foundation’s creator (and owner of the nightclub), Barbara Poma.

For some, the idea of making profit off this site is a form of “dark tourism” which exploits and fetishizes moments of traumatic death and grief.

Another issue around Pulse’s memorialization is how to handle the site of the shooting.

The treatment of place after a mass shooting has become an important conversation for communities with very diverse responses. While the schools in Newtown and Lancaster were razed after the shootings and tributes located off-site, some, like Virginia Tech, renovated the buildings where the attacks took place, erecting their memorials nearby.

In Sutherland Springs, the shooting site was converted into a memorial: the church now a monument to the lives that were taken. For Pulse, the Foundation’s plan is to use the site of the nightclub, its structure, and neighboring areas for the memorial and museum.

However, the Community Coalition Against a Pulse Museum — a growing opponent against the onePULSE Foundation — has advocated for the nightclub to be torn down and a memorial to be built on public land.

At the same time, though less explicit, these memorial projects must also grapple with the politics underlying these tragedies.

In “Tourists of History,” communication scholar Marita Sturken discussed how politics were situated in the memorialization efforts for Sept. 11 and the Oklahoma City bombing.

What she found was that the political and cultural issues related to these tragedies were diminished in order to facilitate public grieving spaces.

While many supported these spaces being separate from politics, others, like Sturken, have wondered if it is worth losing critical, collective engagement with the broader issues and causes driving violence in America.

While the Orlando community continues to debate the best ways to memorialize Pulse, discussions about where to situate issues like gun violence and hate in this tribute will be key to how it is remembered.

Despite these painful struggles, we must still remember. To remember means to mourn as a community. It means to both demand and enact political and cultural change. It means to bring justice to the victims and survivors.

We are in an age where digital technologies make it increasingly easy to forget; yet, we are also in an age where remembering as a community, as a nation, and as people is more important than ever. As the collection of tragedies and memorials has shown, there is no template for remembering, and the endeavors to do so are primarily – and rightly – led by the survivors, victims’ families, and residents of a specific community.

What this might also suggest, however, is a recognition by the American public that the very existence of these memory projects stops indiscriminate violence from going unanswered.

In fact, in some ways perhaps, these acts of remembrance function as acts of resistance against the bloodshed, against the culture of terror and hate.

With the tragedy at the Tree of Life synagogue only miles away, efforts to remember mass shootings and callsP for the end of such violence have become more personal – and more critical – than ever.

Jeanna Sybert, a 2014 Mars Area High School and 2018 University of Pittsburgh graduate, is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania.