Everyone needs to help prevent another Santa Fe
Kimberly was an amazing kid. She had been in Girl Scouts since kindergarten. She loved her little brother and our pet cat, Shannon. She loved to read and competed in a contest called Battle of the Books all three years of middle school. She wanted to design video games when she got older, and she loved her American Sign Language class at Santa Fe High School.
She was my life — and on May 18, 2018, my life changed forever.
That morning I had gone to work at 5 a.m., just like normal. Kimberly would catch her bus at home with her bus driver, Ms. Julie. I was driving my school bus route, as I did every day, when the dispatch asked all drivers to pull over to a safe location. About 10 minutes later they told us to proceed to the schools. I noticed something was wrong. There were too many police cars driving toward the high school.
Things were worse when we finally reached the campus at about 8:30 a.m. It looked like a war zone. Helicopters, police and ambulances were everywhere. The shock was immediate, but it would be many hours until I would find out that my daughter had been one of the 10 people murdered in her art class. They found four bullets in her body. I knew right away this was bigger than a school board issue or a city of Santa Fe problem. This was a systematic failure from Washington, D.C., on down. I announced on Facebook that Kimberly had been killed and immediately started calling for gun reform. I received a lot of negative feedback for that. People said I had not even grieved for Kim and here I was preaching on her grave.
President Donald Trump and Texas Republican politicians met with families and promised changes. I think they forgot about that during the midterm elections. In September, I confronted U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz at a rally and called him out on his lack of action on background checks after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. That earned me more negative feedback. I know that plenty of people probably didn’t want to hear what I had to say, but I refused to back down. I don’t want another family to have to deal with this pain.
It is a pain already inflicted upon too many families.
Texas marked the end of Christmas with the shooting death of 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes. Just a few days later, three children were killed in Texas City and their mother was shot in the head. Last month a teenager shot her boyfriend in Austin while posing with a gun.
Gun violence is a public health crisis. Americans kill each other — and themselves — at an alarming rate. In 2018, 40,000 people died from guns — the highest in 50 years. We need to realize that some people aren’t fit to own deadly weapons. We need to realize that Joe Citizen doesn’t need an AR-15 to protect himself. We need to find a balance between honoring the Second Amendment and reducing gun violence. This has been going on for too long. I was in high school when the shooting happened at Columbine High School. That was April 1999.
Twenty years and one month later, my daughter was murdered at her school.
Some Texans get upset when you mention gun reform. They take it as a personal affront. I had my own personal experience with weapons when I served in the Army. Frankly, it was not something I enjoyed. I wish that others, too, would share a healthy hesitance to the danger posed by firearms. However, I have noticed that when you explain the issue a little bit more, when you fight for common-sense regulations like background checks, safe-storage laws and red flag laws, that most people find common ground. It is a constant battle.
When I attended the State of the Union on Tuesday night, I had hoped to spread the message of gun safety and gun reform. I would not have been sitting here had I not lost my child to a mass murder. It was a unique opportunity, but let me tell you, I would much rather have my child.
Here is my message: Keep your guns but, please, help me prevent another shooting like the one in Santa Fe — help me end the rampant violence. Hart is a gun reform activist who lost her daughter in the Santa Fe High School shooting in May 2018. She attended the 2019 State of the Union address with U.S. Rep Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston, and was one of several guests who have been personally affected by gun violence.