On Mother’s Day, May 14, 2000, approximately 750,000 individuals, led by mothers concerned about gun violence, gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC to demand sensible gun laws. Across the country, an additional 150,000 to 200,000 people marched in their own communities.

Marsha McCartney and her family, including two grandchildren, marched on Mother’s Day in 2000 at the local event in Fort Worth, Texas. Marsha went on to become a member of the Brady Campaign Board of Trustees as well as the Chair of the National Council of Million Mom March Chapters.

Concerned about the violence in our country, Marsha left the May 2000 events ready to do what she could to help make her community safer. Now the co-president of the North Texas Brady Campaign Chapter based in Dallas, as well as state president of the Texas Million Mom March Chapters, Marsha believes that one day her state will strengthen its weak gun laws, and that Texas communities and families will be safer because of it.

Marsha sent me the following column she wrote for this Mother’s Day, and I wanted to share it with you:

The Best Mother’s Day Gift of All

This Mother’s Day, millions of American moms will receive flowers, gifts, and the special attention of loved ones.

But approximately eight moms will receive something else – the news that one of their children has been killed by a gun. Another 48 moms will learn that a child has been shot, but has survived. On an average day in America, 56 children and teens are the victims of gun violence – and eight of those die of their injuries.

That’s every day of the year, Mother’s Day included.

And those figures don’t include the 76 adults who will be killed by a gun, or the 148 other adults who will be shot and wounded on Mother’s Day. Each of these victims is someone’s child, too.

Why does this happen? Because right now, it is far too easy to obtain a gun in America. In most states, even convicted felons and the dangerously mentally ill – like the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre – can walk into any gun show and buy any weapon from an unlicensed seller without anyone checking their background. Or even asking them any questions.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Effective gun control legislation works. The Brady Bill, which was passed by Congress in 1993, has kept at least 1.5 million dangerous people from purchasing firearms. Think of how many moms have been unknowingly spared the pain of losing a child simply because the law prevented the purchase of a gun by someone who has no good reason to have one.

Unfortunately, the Brady Bill contained a loophole. The sensible and effective background checks imposed by Brady cover only sales by licensed gun dealers, but are not applied to the significant share of guns that are sold every day by unlicensed sellers at gun shows. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure out that if you want a weapon but can’t pass the background check, you go to a gun show.

What can we moms do? One common-sense step we can take is to help close the gun-show loophole. Legislation has been introduced in Congress to do just that, and all three of the leading presidential candidates have previously voiced their support of the idea. But our elected representatives need to hear from every mom, loudly and clearly, that we support this bill and that we will keep pressuring them until it is passed and signed into law.

Getting gifts on Mother’s Day is wonderful. But imagine if every mother in America joined together and persuaded Congress to close the loophole that makes gun violence against our children so prevalent.

That means eight more moms may get to kiss their child good night on Mother’s Day. That means another 48 moms might get to tuck their kids into their own beds instead of spending Mother’s Day at a hospital bedside.

Now that gift would be priceless.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

When we talk about making it harder for dangerous people to get guns, we usually focus on felons, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill. Less often do we think about children in this context.

There are obvious reasons for this, yet a child with a gun poses its own set of dangers for communities and families.

According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, over 30,000 people were killed with guns in America in 2005. Of those, over 3,000 were children and teenagers, with almost 1,000 16 years-old or younger.

As the Washington Post reported in 2006:

Gun-owning parents who think their children don’t know where firearms are kept or haven’t handled the weapons without permission may be in for a disturbing surprise.

A new study [see here] involving 201 parents and an equal number of their children has found that 39 percent of kids knew the location of their parents’ firearms, while 22 percent said they had handled the weapons, despite their parents’ assertions to the contrary. Parents who had talked to their children about gun safety were just as likely to be misinformed about their children’s actions as those who said they never had discussed the matter.

The dangerous curiosity of some children was tragically demonstrated by an incident in Indianapolis last weekend where a five year-old climbed to the top of a shelf of books in house, found his father’s gun with the magazine removed, but with a round in the chamber, took the gun upstairs to play and then shot and killed his four year-old sister.

There are many important ways that stronger gun laws can help protect children, including safe storage laws requiring gun owners to store their weapons locked and unloaded when not in use; child access prevention laws that hold gun owners responsible for leaving firearms easily accessible to children; as well as laws requiring trigger locks to be sold with every firearm.

Another idea that is already the law in New Jersey – and which is now making its way through the California legislature – is to require that handguns be manufactured to operate only for an authorized user, employing technology already in use with door locks, personal computers, cell phones and credit cards.

As well as helping to make handguns childproof, this technology can also help make unauthorized handguns useless to gun thieves, gun traffickers, and those who attempt suicide with a gun.

As America prepares to celebrate Mother’s Day this week, I hope we can take a few moments to consider some common-sense ways our elected officials can help keep children safer, and help cut down on the tragic loss of life every year because of too-easy access to guns.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

The one-year anniversary of a tragic killing from South Bend, Indiana, illustrates many of the weaknesses in our gun laws: in a single incident, we have law enforcement officers being shot and killed, by someone who never should have been allowed to purchase a firearm in the first place, but who still passed a background check because of incomplete records, from a corrupt gun dealer at a gun show.

On April 24, 2007, South Bend Police Corporal Nick Polizzotto was shot and killed, and Patrolman Michael Norby was wounded, in a shootout at the Wooden Indian Motel.

They were shot by a man who had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution and who bought a gun at a gun show from a licensed dealer who later pleaded guilty and is now serving Federal prison time for falsifying Brady background check records.

Worse still, the gun dealer’s dishonesty was only part of the story. Because the states do such a poor job of providing records of the dangerously mentally ill to the Brady background check system, the shooter’s dangerous mental history didn’t prevent him from buying his gun.

The NICS Improvement Act – which gives states monetary incentives to supply records to the Brady background check system – should help prevent other mentally dangerous gun buyers from getting guns in the future from licensed gun dealers who follow the law.

Unlike West Virginia, however, which passed legislation less than a month ago to address this problem, states like Indiana have yet to forward any records of the dangerously mentally ill to NICS.

The following is from a powerful piece that ran last week on South Bend’s CBS affiliate, WSBT-TV. The video is here. You can read more about this tragic story here, here, and here.

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE LAW

It’s been 40 years since Congress banned the sale of firearms to anyone deemed “mentally defective” by a judge, and today, answering “yes” to “question 11-F” on a federal background check means an automatic disqualification for a handgun permit or purchase.

It reads, simply: “Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution?”

It’s aimed at preventing scenes like the one that played out on the campus of Virginia Tech just over one year ago. The gunman there, Sung Hui Cho, was responsible for the worst massacre on a college campus in U.S. history.

Court records show Cho was also ordered to receive mental health treatment by a judge who also declared him “dangerously mentally ill.”

But he never went.

Even so, his background check came back clean.

So did Barnaby’s, the day after the gun he bought illegally was used to kill Polizzotto.

Former Bristol firearms dealer Ronald Wedge was sentenced to serve prison time for falsifying information on Barnaby’s application, and allowing him to buy the gun before his background check cleared.

But the fact remains, it did clear.

The question for lawmakers in both Indiana and Virginia one year ago, was why?

SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS

They quickly found that the answers lie in the mental health records kept by each state in the nation. Just over 30 states share some, or all of those records with the federal government. In our area, Illinois recently began sharing many of their records, and Michigan is one of the few states in the country that shares nearly all their records.

But some states share none of their mental health records. That means all records of treatment, including treatment ordered by a court, is not included in the FBI’s NICS database used to check the backgrounds of potential gun buyers.

In other words, in many cases, the FBI has no way of knowing whether or not that buyer has ever had any sign of mental illness.

One year ago, as Scott Barnaby pulled the trigger, Indiana was one of those states.
Today, it still is, and Nick’s brother Tony Polizzotto calls that unacceptable.

“It seems like a no brainer to me,” he said. “Half the states [still] don’t have this law in action. And it’s something that really needs to be brought to the forefront.”

In the wake of Polizzotto’s shooting and the campus shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, it has been brought to the forefront in the Hoosier state.

Brady Background checks make it harder for dangerous people to get guns, but they only work when the states send in the proper information. Indiana – indeed, most of the country – needs to do a much better job in reporting those who have been defined as “prohibited purchasers� by Federal law since 1968 to this database.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

On the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, Andy Goddard, the father of one of those injured on April 16, 2007, spoke in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. 

I felt that Andy’s comments were very eloquent and needed to be heard by others.

Following are the remarks delivered by Andy Goddard on April 16, 2008: 

A year ago today, as I watched the unfolding coverage of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, at about this time, I found out that my own son Colin had been shot multiple times.  A year ago tonight, I sat by his hospital bed and struggled with my emotions as I watched him lying bleeding amidst a tangle of wires, tubes and pipes all connected to the machines that were sustaining him.

I decided that, in exchange for him being spared, I would dedicate myself to the cause of preventing gun violence.

Today, I choose to stand here, in front of the Supreme Court, rather than by my son’s side in Blacksburg, because, at this time, the justices are deciding on what could be the most important case regarding guns in my lifetime.  While they have been asked to rule on the constitutionality of the DC handgun ban, they will also be examining the meaning of, and intent behind, the 2^nd amendment.  This involves far more than the parsing of an antiquated sentence.  I am not a constitutional scholar, or much of a historian, but it is obvious to me that our founding fathers took great care in crafting our constitution and used the language of the day with great skill.  They didn’t use words or phrases which they expected to be ignored or were of passing importance.  Those brave and intelligent men, put into words the aspirations and hopes of the fledgling nation and they addressed the most pressing of problems and threats that faced them at that time. 

I find it difficult to believe that they would have wanted to craft any language which would prevent future generations, of their descendants, from addressing the new and more complex problems that face our evolving society.  In those early days of flintlock muskets, our ancestors could not have imagined a future world where a deranged individual could murder so many people with such ease.  They probably could not imagine that weapons would become so powerful, so easy to conceal and so simple to use.  Regardless of whether the court rules that the 2nd amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun for self defense or a collective right for communal defense, I hope and pray that the justices uphold the concept that no right is absolute, that no right comes without an equal amount of responsibility and that the expression “well regulated� is not totally ignored.  

Normally we expect strong leadership on difficult issues, but look at the current crop of Presidential candidates: their silence on this subject is deafening!  It seems to be the perception that, in political suicide, just as in actual suicide, nothing is as effective as guns!  OK America, it looks like “we the people� will have to work out this problem ourselves from the ground up.

In a few moments many of us will lie down to commemorate the 32 students and faculty that were murdered on that awful day one year ago in Blacksburg, but I want to remind you that today is also another anniversary, in fact it is many.  Today is the one week anniversary for the 32 Americans that were shot dead on April 9^th, the one month anniversary of the 32 that were shot dead on March 16^th this year. 

I know this because an average of 32 Americans are murdered with guns each and every day of the year and almost 200 others are wounded, with injuries ranging from minor all the way to permanent disabilities that last their entire lives. Sadly today is also the day before 32 more Americans will lose their lives to our national obsession with guns.  Tonight 32 people will go to bed for the last time and tomorrow 32 families will be ripped apart by bullets.

During the Lie in, and afterwards, I would like us all to think not only of the 32 Virginia Tech victims and the injured, but also of the other victims whose passing may not be as well memorialized. People whose murder is noted only on the inside pages of their local newspapers with a short paragraph, but who are equally mourned and missed by their relatives and friends.

It is too late now to stop the 32 people from dying today and even the 32 that will die tomorrow, but we must seek ways, that we can agree on, to do something about reducing this number in the near future.  Laws alone may not completely solve the problem, but neither will the unchecked proliferation of guns!  There are many common sense measures that need to be taken to reduce the ready supply of guns to criminals, terrorists, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill.  We need to ask ourselves, what real benefit does an honest law abiding gun owner gain from protecting the right of unlicensed sellers at guns shows to sell dangerous weapons to complete strangers without a background check?  What responsible law abiding citizen needs to own an assault rifle or a 50 caliber sniper rifle for their personal defense?  

It is time to declassify guns as objects of worship and treat them as dangerous tools that should only be owned by responsible people, who can operated them in a safe and responsible manner.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness remain the aspirations of all Americans, but none of these is available to those that lose their lives, or their health, to gun violence.  Our founding fathers did not expect us to live our lives staring into the barrel of a gun - just waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

Wednesday, April 16, marked the one-year anniversary of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were murdered and 17 wounded by an individual who never should have gained access to guns.

Survivors and family members of those killed and injured in that shooting joined students, parents, and concerned citizens across America to remember the lives lost on April 16, 2007, and to comfort those who bear the scars, both physical and emotional, of that day.

In remembrance events across the country, groups of at least 32 people lay silently on the ground (following the example of Abby Spangler, founder of ProtestEasyGuns.com), rang bells, read names, or said prayers to remember the victims and to demonstrate their outrage at weak gun laws in America. Virginia Tech family members and survivors like the Samaha family, the Read family, the Goddard family, the Habtu family, the Pohle family, and others were an integral part of these events.

In almost 32 states, and on at least 32 college campuses (including Virginia Tech), Americans remembered the lives lost one year ago, and then expressed their dismay over our unwillingness to do something more to reduce the toll of 30,000 gun deaths in this country.

From Portland, Maine to Phoenix, Arizona; from Los Angeles, California to Washington, DC; from Dallas, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota and many points in between – in cities like Bloomington, Cincinnati, Colorado Springs, Kalamazoo, Tuscaloosa and Winston-Salem – Americans sent a message to their elected officials:

We need to make it harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons by doing things like strengthening our background check system and closing the gun show loophole.

America is turning a corner on the gun issue, and Wednesday was another example of that.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)