“My name is Laura Burns and I'm a founding member of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Together with our partners at Everytown for Gun Safety, we're the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country, with a chapter in every state and nearly 10 million supporters.”

That's my spiel. Usually when I talk to a group like this, I talk about stats. Like that more than 110 people a day are killed by guns in America. I'll say that again, every day, more than 110 people are killed with a gun here, that's the toll of our national epidemic of gun violence. But I'm not feeling that today.

This has been a strange week--two big verdicts came down this week related to mass shootings. One was about the Sandy Hook shooting, which happened almost ten years ago in Newtown, CT and took the lives of 20 little children and 6 educators. Moms Demand was founded in response to Sandy Hook, basically the next day, on Facebook. In the decade since, the grifter Alex Jones and his despicable followers have been harassing the families of those children and educators, and this week his defamation trial verdict was reached and will hopefully put an end to his reign of terror.

Then a couple of days later, the criminal trial of the Parkland shooter ended in a life sentence for the man who murdered 17 students and teachers at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida.

Like a lot of people, I watched the families during these verdicts, and I saw their pain, their grief still fresh, unending. It will never end. Their lives are forever changed by gun violence. But it's not just them, and that's what I can't stop thinking about. It's those people in the courtrooms this week, but it's also the rest of their loved ones. It's the extended families of the victims, and it's their friends who still think of them every day.

• It's the other kids who were at school that day, who didn't die but were injured, and it's THEIR families. And it's the kids who weren't injured but live with survivors' guilt, or were witnesses and live with trauma, and their families.
• And it's everyone who lives in those towns and bears the scars--who worked with the parents, who lived near the educators killed, who carpooled to soccer and dance with those children, who attended services with those families.
• It's the first responders who came from nearby towns who carry the images in their memories, and it's their families who have to share their pain. Gun violence doesn't only traumatize individual victims, it traumatizes entire communities.

 

Think of just these families in the courtrooms this week, still traumatized nearly ten years after Sandy Hook, nearly five years after Parkland. And now multiply them by that 110 people a day. Think of all those communities traumatized--all the other extended families, friends, witnesses, first responders, all throughout our country. THAT is the actual toll of our national epidemic of gun violence.

It's everyone whose lives are touched by gun violence, from those who lost someone they loved even to those like me, who couldn't sleep for weeks after Sandy Hook because my daughter was the same age. Or those who got involved in the gun violence prevention movement more recently because of Uvalde, so similar to Sandy Hook ten years later, because they felt like nothing had changed. Or maybe it was Las Vegas that traumatized them enough to become active. Or maybe Buffalo here in New York. Or the active shooter situation on Long Island a few years back. Or maybe it was just the daily grind of living in fear right here in our own communities, in Hempstead or in Wyandanch where there is too much gun violence that we turn a blind eye to. 

We are a nation traumatized by gun violence, and I'm sick of it. Aren't you sick of it?

Aren't you sick of it?

Well, the only way we end it is by voting out every last one of the NRA's lapdogs.

You want to end gun violence? Vote in people who will fight the gun lobby's agenda of “guns everywhere for anyone with no questions asked.” We need people who will reject the radical Supreme Court that wants to overturn good gun laws like those in New York State.

We need to elect leaders to Congress like Robert Zimmerman, who will fight to close every loophole in the background check laws and crack down on trafficking across state lines. We need a Congress that will build on the work President Biden has begun now that we've finally broken the 25-year-long gridlock and passed gun legislation at the federal level. Let's get Robert in office and keep going until we get federal red flag laws and a ban on assault weapons once and for all.

On the state level, we need to keep proven leaders in our state senate like Anna Kaplan, who led the way on New York's laws against ghost guns. When Anna first ran for the state senate, we asked her to promise she would vote for stronger gun laws in New York. And when she was elected, one of the very first things she did was to help pass nine new gun laws! But she didn't stop there, and she hasn't stopped since. Anna Kaplan has been one of the strongest voices in Albany on gun violence prevention and we need to send her back there.

So if you're sick and tired of being told there's nothing we can do to end this trauma, I'm here to tell you that there is. You can get out there and canvass. Phone bank. Text bank. Work your butts off. Every minute from now until the polls close on November 8th, do whatever you can do to help elect these gun sense champions to office!

And then you can go to sleep. Or have a beer, or a Coke, you do you! But until then, if you're serious about ending our national epidemic of gun violence, let's get to work. Say it with me:

Together…We can end gun violence!