Congress’ deadly negligence

It was a little after 10 p.m. in Las Vegas. My colleagues and I were packing up our things. We had just finished day three of work at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. All of a sudden, three shots rang out. It got quiet for a second. People started to say it was gunfire, but the performance on the stage continued.

Maybe those were fireworks marking the end of the music festival, I thought. As more shots sounded, my colleagues and I started to quickly sense that what we were hearing wasn’t normal.

Time was frozen. My mind raced and my adrenaline spiked. This can’t be happening, I thought. I shouldn’t be here.

The stage went dark and I knew it was bad. My colleagues and I took cover behind a beer trailer.

In between the loud gunfire and horrific screams was an eerie silence I worry I’ll never be able to forget.

Then the gunfire got even louder. I could even feel the bullets pass by me at this point. The trailer just a few feet from us was getting hit.

In the chaos, my colleagues and I thought there were multiple gunmen and they were shooting from inside the venue. It never crossed our mind that there was a single sniper shooting hundreds of rounds into the crowd from all the way across the street.

The shots stopped for a moment and that’s when we made a run for it. As we ran a few hundred feet to the nearest exit, more shots continued to rain down. I was praying we wouldn’t get hit.

Eventually we got to safety. We followed the crowds of people running for their lives, eventually arriving at my hotel. There, I went up to my room, closed the blinds, turned off the lights and turned on the news.

I called my wife because I just needed to hear her voice. And then I broke down. It is terrifying to live through and witness a shooting, but I know that I am one of the lucky ones because I wasn’t injured.

It seems like yesterday, and at the same time it’s hard to believe more than one month has passed since that night in Las Vegas when 58 concertgoers were killed and more than 500 others were injured. And it’s unbelievable that this tragedy wasn’t enough for many of our elected leaders to stand up to do something about gun violence in our country.

After initially suggesting they might take action to prohibit “bump stocks,” the equipment that the killer used to turn semi-auto- matics into automatic weapons, they’ve even been paralyzed on that relatively easy step.

I wish, like Congress, those of us who were there could just go on with our daily lives as if nothing had ever happened. But every day, the horror of gun violence goes on: 93 Americans are shot and killed and hundreds more are injured. What will it take for Congress to act? The risk is the same if they do nothing, which is a continued loss of 33,000 Americans each year due to gun violence, from suicides to homicides to accidents.

Instead of sitting home as we marked one month since that fateful night, I headed to Capitol Hill to talk to members of Congress. I urged them to take action to save lives. I urged them to reject the NRA’s dangerous agenda.

I never thought this would happen to me, but in just a few short weeks, I’ve learned too many Americans think the same way.

I’ve learned that receiving thoughts and prayers from family and friends is one thing. But politicians are elected to do much more than that. Inaction is not a solution.

We need our leaders to pass commonsense gun legislation that will help save lives. We need leaders who will stand up to the NRA’s radical agenda of making guns available to anyone, anywhere, with no questions asked.

In fact, just days after the shooting, the NRA’s leaders shamefully pushed Congress to enact their No. 1 legislative priority: to weaken state laws on who can carry hidden, loaded guns in public, called “concealed-carry reciprocity.”

What’s more, some lawmakers and legislative staff aides confirmed that they still hope to hold a floor vote on gutting silencer safety laws, making it easy for people with dangerous histories to buy silencers without a background check. I can’t even imagine how much worse Las Vegas could have been if it had been harder to hear the shots and discover where they originated.

I went to Washington yesterday because it’s not too soon to talk about gun violence; it’s too late. My three days at the Route 91 Harvest Festival showed me that we are not as divided as politicians and pundits try and make us out to be. We are bound by the common desire — and right — to live free from getting gunned down at a music festival, or anywhere in this great country.