Students discuss gun violence at Trenton event
TRENTON » The congresswoman who represents greater Trenton vowed this weekend to do whatever she can to help prevent gun violence.
“We’re entertaining a lot of different legislation, as you know,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman said Saturday during a town hall event at the capital city’s War Memorial building. She also acknowledged that Republicans in Congress have resisted federal gun-control action, saying that is what makes the 2018 general election “so vitally important.”
Watson Coleman’s town hall event attracted less than 30 people Saturday afternoon but provided a perfect opportunity for high school activists like Alexis Wilner to meet with the congresswoman for the first time and state their concerns regarding school safety.
“Definitely we need some gun reform,” Wilner, 15, of Edison, said in an interview with The Trentonian. “There’s a problem with the amount of school shootings we are having. There should be none at all.”
Watson Coleman in the 2017-18 session of Congress has cosponsored several bills related to gun control, including a measure that would make it illegal to possess, manufacture or sell bump stocks or trigger cranks.
A bump stock is a firearm device that increases the rate of fire achievable with the weapon and a trigger crank is an instrument that repeatedly activates the trigger of the firearm when attached. Such devices make semi-automatic weapons more lethal, as proven by the October 2017 massacre in Las Vegas that killed nearly 60 concertgoers.
“There’s no lack of gunsafety legislation,” Watson Coleman said Saturday, adding she believes more of those bills will be brought to a floor vote in the U.S. House of Representatives due to student activism.
“We are thankful for what she is doing,” Lauren White, 15, of Woodbridge Township, said of Watson Coleman, who represents parts of Mercer, Middlesex, Somerset and Union counties as the representative for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District.
Wilner and White are sophomores at Middlesex County Vocational and Technical school in East Brunswick who organized a March 14 walkout in memory of the 17 individuals murdered in the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
High school students throughout the state and nation held walkout events on March 14 to help demonstrate their concerns on school safety and security in this era of mass shootings. Wilner and White originally expected 10 students to participate in their walkout but were pleasantly surprised, they said, when about 200 Middlesex County Vo-Tech students participated.
Hopeful that Congress will enact comprehensive guncontrol measures in the near future, “I think if I wasn’t optimistic there wouldn’t be this much effort,” White said. “I wish nationally it was the same as New Jersey. I wish they could be at our level.”
New Jersey has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the United States, but the Rev. Derrick L. Green, a senior advisor to Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, said the governor is concerned with people getting guns in Pennsylvania and illegally bringing them into the Garden State.
“This governor is committed to commonsense guncontrol legislation,” Green said at Watson Coleman’s town hall event. “Pennsylvania has weaker gun laws than New Jersey.”
“Movements are not just marches; movements are long term,” Green added. “You shouldn’t have to worry about going to school and having something bad happen.”
A handful of college and high school students attended the congresswoman’s event. Other attendees included Carole Stiller, president of the Mercer County Brady Campaign Million Mom March chapter, and Ben Castillo, director of the New Jersey Department of Education’s Office of School Preparedness and Emergency Planning.
Watson Coleman, a Ewing resident, urged students to keep up the “momentum,” saying she believes it will have an “impact” on Congress in the area of gun control.
“We have to demonstrate when we need to demonstrate,” she told the students at her town hall meeting. “You are bold, and you are willing to have your voices heard.”