Moms who demand actions on guns get caught in gun action at Art All Night
There’s over 4 million members of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a giant national organization started by an Indiana housewife in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and they’re part of the umbrella group financed by Michael Bloomberg called Everytown for Gun Safety.
What do they want? To melt down every gun in America and destroy the Second Amendment and … oops. Nope. That’s not right ...
“We’re just advocating common sense gun legislation,” said Reba Holley, the local lead for the Mercer County chapter of Moms Demand Action. “We’re not anti-gun, we’re anti-gun violence. We work on tightening universal background checks, to have nationwide laws for background checks on all sales. For instance, in Pennsylvania, there’s no background checks at gun shows for semi-automatic rifles.”
Not just Pennsylvania — the majority of states have the same “gun show loophole.” And in many of those states, it’s all guns that don’t require the need for background checks, including handguns.
And while I can’t say for certain the guns used in Sunday morning’s Art All Night shooting were purchased illegally … well, screw it. I will say for certain they were purchased illegally. Which led to scenes like the one Fran Carroll, another Moms Demand Action member, described to me that night.
She was hiding behind a piece of plywood. Her friend, crouched next to her, was calling her son to tell him “goodbye.” People were running every which way, bullets were flying in the Trenton Wire Works.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Carroll told me. “I had just spent the last three hours talking about this, and part of me was like, ‘this can’t be happening.’ But then I thought, ‘well, why wouldn’t it be happening? It happens so often. Of course it was happening.’”
Carroll was working at the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense table at Art All Night. They were putting together an art project.
“We had a simple prompt: Imagine a world without gun violence,” Carroll said of the group’s project. “People would write their thought on a piece of colored paper, and we’d roll it up and put it in the mural we were building. The colors would form a picture. We were trying to fill 8,000 spots. We didn’t make it.”
They didn’t make it because of the shooting, a shooting which happened directly in front of their table. (Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think? Well, “irony” means when events happen contrary to what might have been expected, usually with a humorous bent. Nothing funny here. So maybe not so much “ironic” as “gobsmackingly ridiculous.”)
“I had signed up for the 11 p.m. - 2:30 a.m. shift,” Carroll said. “I had gotten to the festival a few hours beforehand. I had never been, but I heard good things. And I was enjoying it. It was wonderful. I realized I needed to come back, bring my kids, bring my whole family.”
And then she found herself behind a piece of flimsy plywood contemplating death due to gun violence, something she has been working towards eradicating.
Which, of course, as I said earlier, begins with rounding up every gun owner in America and … whoops. Nope. Did it again ...
“Someone who is a law abiding gun person, we’re not looking to prevent them from taking their gun to the range, or to go hunting,” Holley told me. “But tightening up the gun laws would presumably limit the number of gun licenses issued, and that should presumably mean less guns being sold. It won’t change anything immediately, it would take time. But right now, 96 people are killed each day in America by guns. If we could get that number to 90 it would be a success. That would be over 2,000 lives saved a year.”
And while the group’s mission began after the killing of 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 years old, Holley said after seeing what happened in Trenton, her personal mission is expanding.
“This makes me more determined to get into gun violence in the cities, where gun violence is so prevalent,” she said. “I don’t live in Trenton, but when I think of my friends in Trenton who have to deal with this fear every day … it’s stunning. And it’s not right. I don’t think personal safety should be determined by our geography.”