Uvalde families will urge gun ban
More than 50 people from Uvalde are packing for a trip to Washington, D.C., to ask the Senate to ban assault weapons, their latest effort at gun reform advocacy after 19 children and two teachers were killed in their town May 24.
Family members of the victims and a handful of other Uvalde activists on Tuesday will join others whose lives were upended by mass shootings across the country. They’re coming together thanks to a nonprofit group created just six months ago.
Called Marchfourth, it was organized after seven people died in a shooting at a July Fourth parade in High
land Park, Ill. Its sole mission is to lobby for a federal assault weapons ban, and its focus is a bill that passed the U.S. House this year.
House Resolution 1808, which would make it a crime to import, sell, manufacture, transfer or possess (with some exceptions) a semiautomatic assault weapon, will die if the Senate takes no action before it adjourns.
“There is nothing in their way. There is nothing stopping them from literally removing weapons of war from our streets,” Kitty Brandtner, the founder of Marchfourth, said in an Instagram video. “We don’t have military tanks in our driveways. We certainly don’t need assault weapons in our homes and on our streets.”
“This is not hard,” Brandtner said. “Surviving a mass shooting, being impacted by a mass shooting, that is hard.”
But even the bill’s backers in Congress have acknowledged that they don’t have the 60 votes needed to meet the Senate’s filibuster requirement for passage, and its odds of revival in the new year will decline to near zero when Republicans take control of the House.
The bill’s opponents have called it blatantly unconstitutional, though a ban on assault weapons — a common term for semi-automatic, high-velocity firearms that can accept largecapacity ammunition magazines — was enacted in 1994 on a bipartisan basis and allowed to expire 10 years later.
In the weeks before the Nov. 8 midterm election, victims’ families and activists in Uvalde had campaigned for Texas lawmakers to raise the age limit for purchasing assault rifles from 18 to 21 because the high school dropout who killed their kids had just turned 18 when he purchased his Ar-15-style rifle.
“I’ve always been against these types of weapons. I don’t own a gun,” said Kimberly Matarubio, who lost her daughter
Lexi, 10, in the shooting, and will be traveling to the nation’s capital this week. “On June 8th, almost right after what happened here in Uvalde, I addressed Congress and also asked for a complete ban.”
“But I recognize just how difficult that was at that point, so I asked for some sort of progress, which is raising the age … to 21,” Mata-rubio added. “But ultimately my focus is a complete ban because I don’t think that the average citizen should have access to these weapons.”
The results of the Nov. 8 election blunted the Uvalde activists’ hopes for even narrow changes to state law. This trip is one way the families can keep fighting, said Jesse Rizo, the uncle of one of the shooting victims, Jacklyn “Jackie” Cazares, 10.
“I think that part of the reason that all of a sudden people said basically, ‘Let’s go,’ is because it is a short trip, in and out. And we had an election that didn’t turn out how we anticipated, it just adds fuel to the fire — ‘Now I am going,’ ” Rizo said.
“The other reason, I think, is … because the autopsy reports are coming out,” Rizo said. “All of a sudden, you see on paper, ‘My God.’ You can’t take vengeance, but what can you do to honor your child? You get on the plane. You go and do what you can to honor them.”
Marchfourth first reached out to Uvalde families in July. Another invitation came in late September, and at that time many Uvalde families connected with people from other communities that had been through mass shootings going back decades: Las Vegas; Buffalo, N.Y.; Parkland, Fla.; Newtown, Conn.; and Columbine, Colo.
Lisa Derus, a Marchfourth spokesperson, said she doesn’t know how every family affected by the Uvalde tragedy feels about a total ban on assault weapons but that some of the parents she has spoken to believe it’s needed to address what feels like a mass shooting epidemic in the United States.
Marchfourth, which is funded by private donations, is paying for all the flights, buses and hotels for the Uvalde families.
The group will attend a vigil Tuesday on Capitol Hill. The next evening, some families will stay for a second vigil hosted by the Newtown Action Alliance Foundation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill.
The trip will take an emotional toll on participants, Mata-rubio predicted.
“I’m not going to lie. It has been difficult. It is difficult that the holidays are approaching,” she said.
Mata-rubio graduates Saturday from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and has been writing essays and studying for finals.
“It’s chaotic, but it’s important, and that is why we are going to go, to try to urge them to put the bill on the floor to vote,” Mata-rubio said. “I’m hoping they’ll take this time to actually do something while we have the momentum and we have the bill.”