Protesters push for gun reform
Shootings spur demonstration
Parents of victims of gun violence renewed calls for federal gun legislation Sunday, citing shootings in Boston over the past year as well as mass shootings in California, Texas and Ohio in the past month.
“We had 133 shootings in Boston so far this year,” said Angela Christiana, a Massachusetts chapter leader for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, to a crowd of hundreds of supporters at City Hall Plaza. “Not all of them fatal, but every one of them traumatic.”
Ruth Rollins, co-founder of Operation LIPSTICK and the mother of Warren Daniel Hairston, who was murdered in 2007, said “unfortunately this is a club that no one signs up for.”
“If we do not support our children, we will be back here in 25 years,” said Clementina Chery, founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, an organization that bears her slain son’s name. “My grandson is 6. For the sake of the children, I do not want to be back here in 25 years.”
Mayor Martin Walsh and U.S. Sen. Ed Markey were among speakers calling on Congress to pass legislation including background checks and a ban on assault weapons.
Markey attacked Senate Republicans for inaction, telling supporters he should be at an emergency session of Congress voting on gun legislation rather than speaking Sunday in Boston.
“If they brought a background check bill out for a vote on the Senate floor, it would pass,” Markey said. “It’s Mitch McConnell who is answering to the NRA, not allowing for us to have that debate on the floor of the United States Senate.”
Markey called for legislation on the gun show loophole, high capacity magazines, an assault weapons ban, and funding for research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to understand the causes of gun violence.
Walsh placed blame for local gun violence on New England states with weaker gun laws than those in Massachusetts.
He asked why, during his time as mayor, more than 4,000 illegal guns have been confiscated on the streets of Boston.
“The person that carried those guns didn’t have an NRA card in their pocket,” Walsh said. “They brought them from states that were allowing and just selling over the counter.”
Markey said the prevalence of illegal guns is why federal legislation is necessary.
“Where do these guns come from that cause the fatalities in Mattapan, in Dorchester, in Roxbury, in the suburbs?,” Markey asked. “They are coming largely from other states that do not have the same gun level, get the gun safety laws which we have here in Massachusetts.”
Melissa Giosi, a Boston mother of a 9-year-old, said she came to the rally because she was “just done” after hearing the news of mass shootings following each other.
“It seems endless,” she said after the rally. “And I feel like there’s a list, and my child is on it, and it’s just a matter of time. So I have to do something.”