Gun Violence and Hadiya Pendleton

Is taking action now too little, too late?

On Saturday, First Lady Michelle Obama attended the funeral of Hadiya Pendleton, the young 15-year-old student from Chicago who was killed in a shooting, just days after participating in President Obama’s inauguration festivities.  A young woman with a seemingly promising future ahead of her will have one of the greatest honors in life, but won’t be able to experience it.   It’s been a much too tragic and yet common theme that has seen lives end and their names and faces live on forever.  After the devastating shooting in Newtown, Conn., along with other senseless murders in major cities, legislators and leaders have finally sensed the urgency that many people have already been feeling.

Gun violence has been a hot topic of late, discussed on television, in newspapers, in board rooms, at dinner tables, and water coolers across the country. During a recent conversation, someone made a comment that gave me pause.  The person said, “It’s too little, too late.  There are already too many illegal guns on the streets.  Even if you stop people from buying more, it won’t matter because people will still buy, sell and trade the illegal guns on the streets.”  I wondered how true that statement was and a sense of hopelessness began to set in.  But the fighter in me wouldn’t allow that rationale to be the end of the argument.

Since the Newtown, Conn. shooting there have reportedly been over 1,600 gun-related deaths, including that of Hadiya Pendleton.  If we apply the thinking above, we should do nothing, and continue to see that number rise.  But if we create a law that will prevent people from buying guns without background checks at private gun shows and address high count magazines, perhaps that number would decrease and, worst-case scenario, stay stagnant.  There is absolutely more that needs to be done and we should try sensible approaches in order to save lives.  It’s like a cancer patient deciding not to get chemotherapy because they will die someday anyhow.  That thinking doesn’t even give you a chance at hope and certainly not at a prolonged life.

For Hadiya Pendleton and so many others, this new commitment to ending gun violence is too little and it is too late.  But for the many lives that will potentially be saved by making sure that guns stay out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, or that people don’t walk the streets with military style weaponry, this new wave of concern makes all the difference.  If we can pass legislation that will save lives, we should do it, without hesitation.  There have been many missed opportunities and signs that we need to address this problem.  But we can’t focus on that.  We have to stay fully committed to addressing gun violence whether the perpetrator is a mentally ill person or a trapped gang-banger who sees this as the only way out.  In the fight for life, it is never too little and it is never too late. National Action Network is committed to this issue and it will be one of the many topics of discussion at our national convention.  Click here, for more information on how you can join our convention for free.

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Will Newtown, Conn., Be The Breaking Point?

Children are being shot around the country; can we do something, now, to make it stop?

When she thinks about the shooting, Shianne Norman knows there is no answer to the “why?” and so instead goes back into the “what ifs?” What if things had somehow unfolded differently? Would her little boy, the one who loved pancakes and bananas and fighting with his sister, then still be alive?

“This is, I hope, the worst I will ever feel in my life,” Norman told the "New York Times." “Please don’t tell me my son is in a better place. Though it’s true, I wanted him to be with me. Don’t tell me to be thankful for the time I had, because I want more.”

The country is consumed with the deaths of the 20 children, ages 6 and 7, who were killed Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.

On Friday morning, parents received calls instructing them to go to the school, and they waited at a nearby fire station for news. As the hours passed, most had tearful reunions with their children; but finally, officials came into the room to say that there were no more children to come. There would be no more reunions. Parents began to wail.

Norman knows these parents’ anguish well. But she is not from a tony Connecticut suburb, she lives in a New York neighborhood 65 miles south—the Bronx. Norman’s 4-year-old son, Lloyd Morgan Jr., was shot and killed July 22, 2012, as he played on a basketball court, at a memorial event for Troynisha Harris, an 18-year-old who had been fatally stabbed at the playground two years earlier.

“This ought to be a wake-up call for all of us,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said during his eulogy for Lloyd this summer. “Our babies are dying.”

But it seems Lloyd’s death didn’t wake anyone up. Nor did the deaths of the hundreds of children who have been killed in the Bronx, South Side Chicago, and other urban neighborhoods this year. There was no tearful president on TV, no stream of messages on Facebook and Twitter listing the names of the dead or calling for gun control. The deaths of Lloyd Morgan, of 7-year old Heaven Sutton, who was shot as she sold candy in her Chicago neighborhood, of others like them, passed almost without notice.

And here, I think, the question is why?

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According to statistics from the Children’s Defense Fund, on average, 3,000 children die each year due to gun violence. That’s one child killed every three hours, every single day. Black children and teens were only 15 percent of the total child population in 2008 and 2009, and yet accounted for 45 percent of all child and teen gun deaths.

So why, given the 3,000 children who are killed each year, does the shooting in Connecticut have such an impact on us? Several of my friends mentioned hugging their children extra tight when they came home from school on Friday. Before the day was done, they had signed petitions and donated money to the Brady Fund. But by June of this year, 24 children had been killed in Chicago alone, due to gun violence, and I didn’t see the same sense of outrage and grief. So what is it about this particular case? Is it the fact that 20 children were killed at one time? Is it that this was at an elementary school, a place we send our children expecting that they'll be safe? Is it because this was a neighborhood that looks much like the ones the more fortunate among us live in, which makes us think that even though we live in places that are good and safe, we too can be affected by gun violence?