Gun violence
We can all help reduce shooting deaths, an epidemic that claims 100 lives each day in U.S.
The day after yet another mass shooting in America, the Northeast Harris County chapter of Moms Demand Action met with tears and resolve.
A grandmother remembered her grandson who died by suicide with a gun. A longtime teacher thought of the students she would have to protect if a shooter burst into the classroom.
A suburban mother described the dread that engulfed her at the Rolling Stones concert at NRG Stadium, a big, crowded venue that easily could collapse into chaos. Her eyes glistened and her voice wavered as she recalled thinking: “What if this is it?”
They sat in the Kingwood Branch Library — more than 1,800 miles away from Gilroy, Calif., where on Sunday a 19-yearold armed with an AK-47 knock-off killed three people and injured 12 others. Yet, even there, they could not escape the tendrils of gun violence. None of us can.
It is an epidemic that claims 100 lives in this country every day. It fills us with outrage and grief for the victims — for 6-year-old Stephen Romero and 13-yearold Keyla Salazar in Gilroy, for the 21-yearold gunned down while filming a music video on a Philadelphia street that same day, for two Chicago mothers and antiviolence activists shot two days earlier.
It grips us with the fear that it could happen here — in our stadiums, our synagogues, our churches, our movie theaters — and sorrow because it has already happened here — last year, in Santa Fe High School where eight students and two teachers were killed and last weekend, in Jasper where a 13-year-old Jasper boy died in an accidental shooting. The heartbreak flows from more than just mass shootings that get big headlines. It flows from the shooting deaths that happen all year round in Houston and other big cities all over America, from the accidental discharges, the homicides — and the suicides. Suicides accounted for more than 60 percent of the nearly 40,000 shooting deaths in America in 2017. Suicide attempts by gun are fatal in most cases, leaving far fewer survivors than attempts made without guns.
The sheer volume, the unrelenting drumbeat of one shooting followed by another, of one set of victims subsumed by the next in the news cycle, is almost enough to numb us into surrender. It is easy to grow weary and feel defeated, to see armed teachers and school lock-down drills as normal, part of the price to pay for upholding the Second Amendment.
We can’t allow that to happen. The Second Amendment has always made room for reasonable restrictions, something even its biggest champions on the Supreme Court have made clear. Condolences are not enough; neither is silent worry. Every gun death should serve as a call to action, a reminder that there are steps we can take to stem the tide of violence while still honoring the “right to bear arms” guaranteed by the Constitution.
Take the example of the Moms Demand chapter, which was founded two years ago with a membership small enough to fit around a kitchen table. Back then, the group met quietly, unsure how members would be greeted in the Kingwood area, a heavily conservative enclave that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016.
The national organization, which is nonpartisan and counts more than 6 million supporters, pushes for stronger gun control legislation and to close loopholes in existing laws. The Kingwood-area chapter, now up to 100 members of both political parties, decided to zero in on gun safety — an approach designed to bring in both gun owners and gun control advocates.
They hold Be SMART workshops that teach gun storage safety, how to recognize signs of suicide, and ways to prevent child gun deaths. They teach parents to ask coaches, friends and relatives if they have a weapon in the house. At the Kingwood Fourth of July festival, they handed out more than 100 gun locks donated through the Mayors Challenge program.
They urge all of us to take steps on our own to make living with guns less dangerous. We should all ask the gun owners in our lives to store their weapons and ammunition safely and out of reach of toddlers and teenagers. Take a gun safety class. Ask the parent hosting a sleepover if there are firearms in the house.
And yes, the Moms Demand members do lobby elected officials to pass common-sense gun laws that keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. They are right to urge the rest of us to call our representatives in Congress and demand that they pass gun safety legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: The Kimberly Vaughan Firearm Safe Storage Act, Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act and Santa Fe High School Victims Act.
The trio of bills calls for regulating the storage of firearms and ammunition in homes with a minor or a person ineligible to own a weapon, stricter licensing of gun dealers and background checks, creation of a database of registered firearms. One would require federally licensed dealers to report when someone making a purchase exhibits signs of mental duress.
The Senate must also take up H.R. 8, a bill that would require universal background checks that was passed by the House in February. It was the first significant gun control legislation passed in more than two decades and it cannot be allowed to languish in the Senate.
In the Gilroy shooting, the 19-year-old suspect crossed into Nevada to legally purchase his weapon, as a way of evading California’s stricter gun laws.
The owner of Big Mikes Gun and Ammo later posted a note on the store’s Facebook page (since taken down): “We feel so very sorry for the Families, I am heartbroken this could ever happen. Please show only respect here. Good people have been hurt and this goes against everything I believe in.”
It’s unclear if any of those bills would have prevented the bloodshed at the garlic festival, but inaction is not acceptable. We must let our elected officials know that the voices calling for an end to gun violence will not be silenced.
As one Moms Demand member said, after wiping the tears away: “This just deepens my commitment. I will never give up.”