Taking Action: A Way to Respond to Florida (etc.)
Thanks to Boyd
In 2004, I found myself living in a part of the country that few ever even see unless they are on their way to Burning Man. The county has 9000 residents and is approximately half the size of the state of Illinois.
And everyone owns at least one gun.
It was in this part of the country that I held my first (and last) gun. It was handed to me by a State Police officer that attended the church where I was a Youth Pastor. My wife and I were over for dinner and he invited me to go shooting with him sometime. I didn’t have an opinion one way or the other about ‘going shooting’, so I obliged. After all, the best way to fit in to a new context is to basically be up for anything.
He handed me his pistol. “I didn’t know guns were this heavy,” I thought to myself. It was around this exact moment that my wife started having what seemed to be a panic attack. She did not want me to touch that gun, and she didn’t want me to go shooting. At the moment she didn’t know why, but she was so freaked out by the gun that I handed it back to my acquaintance, thanked him for dinner, and took her home.
It wasn’t long until my wife realized what had happened when she saw the gun. She remembered a terrible situation from her childhood that she had blocked out of her memory involving a domestic dispute and a gun. I couldn’t believe she had had such a harrowing, personal experience, and out of respect I committed to never touch a gun again.
It was that simple.
Many of us have had personal experiences with guns in our lives. Some of those experiences are loaded with fond memories of bonding, or successfully tracking a target, or even simply hitting a target at all at a shooting range. Others have terrible memories of those experiences, whether they are related to battles overseas, a friend who accidentally got shot, or even becoming a victim themselves.
As everyone must know by now, there was another mass shooting/school shooting in Florida this week. I think we all can agree, whether we love or hate guns, that these things shouldn’t happen. Kids should not be victimized by gun violence. No one should. What we will disagree on is what should be done about it.
The conversation will generally revolve around whether or not we should do anything about guns in light of unspeakable violence. These conversations will happen hypothetically, full of vitriol, snark, and hysteria, and mostly only on social media. Then, in about three days, we will forget about the whole thing until it happens again.
What if we didn’t participate in that cycle of outrage and amnesia?
What Sarah Said
Just after my friend Sarah was born, her 13-year old sister was shot and killed by a boy in her neighborhood. “The boy accessed a loaded shotgun that was hanging on the wall. He pointed the gun at the girls to ‘scare’ them, and pulled the trigger” (read her mom’s account of the event here). Although Sarah didn’t directly experienced this tragedy, she has grown up as a victim of gun violence.
You might balk at that last sentence, but break it down and it’s completely true. Her sister was shot and killed. That’s violent, whether violence was the intent or not. Even if you want to call it an accident, it was a violent accident in that her sister died. And she is a victim because her parents were victims. She was raised without a sister that should have been there for her, and raised with the knowledge that someone in her family was a victim.
Victims aren’t just people who get shot, after all.
Sarah joined Mom’s Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which is a gun violence prevention advocacy group not unlike Mom’s Against Drunk Driving. It was formed in 2012 after the Sandy Hook shooting. They work on all levels, from federal and state government down to educational institutions, to enact common-sense gun reforms. If that sounds like a liberal lobby, you’d be mistaken. People on both sides of the political spectrum want common-sense gun reforms. MDA is making that happen.
But that’s not what makes MDA special. When the mass shooting occurred in Las Vegas late last year, Sarah invited me to come to a coffee shop to make cards for the survivors. I didn’t know it was a Mom’s Demand Action event. I just knew I wanted to do something tangible rather than complain. I joined about ten other ladies, and we simply drew pretty pictures on cards to let people who had just experienced the worst tragedy of their lifetime that they are not alone.
I am not writing this because I am an active member of MDA. I literally own a t-shirt and have gone to two events. I have not lobbied for gun reforms and I have not rallied in downtown Denver. But I know this group is legitimately doing something that many people should know about. And when I have the space, I’ll certainly be marching in solidarity with victims of gun violence, asking that we do everything possible to keep kids safe.
If you don’t want to ‘move on’ from what happened in Florida this week, find out where the closest Mom’s Demand Action chapter is to you and get involved. You don’t have to be a mom. You don’t have to be a Democrat. You don’t have to hate guns. You just have to be ready to take direct action to make a difference when it comes to keeping kids safe from loaded weapons.
It is that simple.
