AFTER TV SLAYING, REPORTER’S DAD FINDS VOICE ON GUN CONTROL,
COLLINSVILLE, Va.—Andy Parker’s resolve to fight for gun control formed in the hours after his daughter was shot and killed on live television. In his first interviews after the tragedy, he briefly mentioned the issue as he eulogized Alison. By Friday, he was pledging a full-scale fight for tougher gun laws on national TV.
“This will be my mission,” he told reporters.
While his articulate Southern voice renews a push for gun restrictions, winning such measures has proved nearly impossible in the U.S., even after other high-profile tragedies garnered sympathy across the country and elicited similar pledges of activism from victim’s relatives.
And Parker is starting his battle in unforgiving territory. Gun ownership is part of the fabric of southern states like Virginia and communities like Collinsville, a town of 7,000 where the Parker family has lived for 17 years.
“I’ve got to do something going forward that makes her life meaningful and will always be with me. And this is the way to do it,” Parker said AP in an interview earlier this week.
Parker gained a strong supporter in Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a gun-owner himself, who has promised to help fight for stronger background checks for gun buyers.
“There are too many guns in America and there are clearly too many guns in the wrong hands. So we’re going to continue to do what we can,” McAuliffe said.
Yet it was unclear what measures would have prevented Vester Flanagan from buying the gun he used to kill reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward as they conducted a live interview Wednesday morning. With no apparent criminal record or other disqualifying incidents in his past, Flanagan passed a background check to buy his weapon.
Speaking outside the Roanoke television station where his daughter worked, Parker said he’s not against gun ownership in general, but stricter background checks are needed to keep guns away from mentally ill people. He wants to close loopholes for buying guns at gun shows. He also doesn’t see why civilians need assault weapons: “Who the hell needs a machine gun to go hunt?”
He acknowledged obstacles, ranging from a lack of political will to a desensitized public.
“Each time you think there’s a tipping point, with Sandy Hook or Aurora, and nothing gets done,” he said. Parker was referring to massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 26 children and educators and the July 2012 killing of 12 people in a packed theater in Colorado.
A push spurred in part by relatives of the Sandy Hook victims for stricter national gun control laws, including universal background checks, failed in Congress.
But the tragedy did push Connecticut lawmakers to adopt one of the strongest gun-control laws in the country.
Nicole Hockley, who lost her 6-year-old son in the shooting and is now communications director for the Sandy Hook Promise advocacy group, said Parker faces difficult choices as he considers how to fight gun violence.
“This is one of the most difficult issues in all of America. It’s one of the hardest, one of the most politically tense, and one of the most polarized out there, and it’s a long journey to make even simple changes,” she said.