Written by Sarah Ladd Lantern of Kentucky
FRANKFORT Survivors of gun violence and anti-violence activists repeatedly shared their experiences in the Kentucky Capitol rotunda on Wednesday, urging lawmakers to take further action to safeguard them.
According to Calvin Polachek, a graduate student at the University of Louisville, he passed his closest buddy who was laying in a pool of blood during a school shooting in Pennsylvania when he was a high school student.
The toughest part, according to Polachek, was returning to that school a week later. I had to act like nothing was wrong and pass the location where I saw my best friend. It wasn’t typical.
Volunteer leaders with duPont Manual High School Students Demand Action, Joanna Lee and Viet Pham, detailed how they lived through the dread of a swatting episode following a fictitious police call about a school shooting.
According to Pham, our age is unwilling to live with this fear any longer. At school, no student should have to be concerned about their safety. Nobody should be afraid of being shot at work. In the future, we must struggle to ensure that our homes, workplaces, schools, and recreational areas are all absolutely free from gun violence.
While the rallyers at the Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action event did not have a specific list of bills to support, they did speak generally about the need for safe storage laws, increased gun education and training, and crisis aversion and rights retention orders (CARR), which create a procedure for temporarily taking guns away from people who pose a risk of harming themselves or others—a red flag law, to put it another way.
At the demonstration, Rep. Adam Moore, D-Lexington, a freshman lawmaker and former Moms Demand Action volunteer, discussed his support for gun safety education and holding parents legally accountable when their children misuse their firearms.
Moore submitted House Bill 214, which has received bipartisan support and would provide Kentuckians who take a firearm safety course with a tax credit.
In the fall of 2003, I had my first genuine encounter with gun violence. Moore said, “My grandfather shot himself.” 988 is the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Everyone has a person like that. What if he had been able to get the assistance he required? What if we could have stayed with him for those more years?
Moore claimed that many years later, his next significant experience with gun violence occurred when his kid was in preschool and a 3-year-old squeezed the trigger on a revolver on the playground after someone had tossed a firearm onto it.
“A 3-year-old can fire a handgun on a playground when guns are so easily accessible because they are not locked up, they are not secured, and anyone can get them,” he continued. There is a problem with it.
The state must do more, according to Davita Gatewood, who lost her children’s father and first love to gun violence in 2017.
“I don’t minimize what our community members have done for us,” she stated. However, as I reflect on that period, I must ask: What about our elected leaders’ accountability? What about the Kentuckians who swore to serve as our representatives and carry out the best possible deeds for all Kentuckians?
In the early 1990s, Nathan Thompson, a member of Moms Demand Action, survived a school shooting in Eastern Kentucky. Thompson claimed that he experienced anxiety, despair, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of seeing the carnage that day.
We’ll never know what may have happened that day if legislation governing safe storage had been in place in 1993, he said. What about background check reform? If (CARR) had existed at the time, one can only hypothesize as to how the story could have turned out.
“I firmly support the right to bear arms,” Thompson stated. I simply have a somewhat stronger belief in the need to prevent gun violence.
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