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.)

A couple nights ago we honored several amazing individuals who have stepped forward in the last year to advocate for common-sense gun laws in this country.

The Brady Center awarded Col. Gerald Massengill the James S. Brady Law Enforcement Award for his work as chair of the Virginia Tech Review Panel. This group made strong recommendations to close the gun show loophole, report all records of the dangerously mentally ill to the Brady background check system, and allow colleges and universities to keep their campuses gun-free.

We also awarded Abigail Spangler the Brady Center Advocate Award for the grassroots movement of concerned citizens she has inspired – including students, parents, and people from all walks of life – who have been willing to demonstrate publicly their desire to strengthen America’s woefully inadequate gun laws. Like many of us, she was moved to tears by the shocking events of April 16, 2007. Unlike many of us, she decided to do something about it.

She started ProtestEasyguns.com, and anyone can with participate or help organize one of their events. All you need are 32 people who agree that it should be harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons. This symbolizes the total number of murdered at Virginia Tech, as well as the number murdered by guns every day in this country. These individuals lie down on the ground in a public place silently for just a few minutes, to symbolize the amount of time it took for the Virginia Tech shooter to get his guns.

We expect over 50 of these or similar events to take place across the country this coming Wednesday, the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings. If any of these are in your area, I encourage you to participate.

Finally, and most important last Wednesday night, we heard the voices of Virginia Tech family members Joseph Samaha and Pat Craig. Joe lost his daughter Reema in Norris Hall and Pat lost her nephew Ryan Clark at the West Ambler Johnston residence hall. Joe and Pat – two truly courageous individuals – gave talks that those in attendance said were among the most moving they had heard in a very long time.

I’ve been involved in politics since I was a child, and since that time I’ve heard more speeches than I can count. But listening to Joe Samaha and Pat Craig reminded me of the oft-quoted story recounted by Adlai Stevenson many years ago:

“Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke’– but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, ‘Let us march.’â€�

Joe Samaha and Pat Craig moved us all to march to do everything we can to help prevent other families from having to endure the pain they’ve endured this past year, by strengthening America’s gun laws.

It was an honor just to be with all these individuals.

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

Robert Novak has an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post about Sen. Barack Obama and the Second Amendment case from DC.

If Senator Obama is “doing the gun dance,� then he’s in step with most of the American people. A recent poll by the Washington Post indicated that while 72% felt the Second Amendment provided an “individual right,� 59% also supported gun restrictions as strong as those in the District of Columbia. The crucial issue to be faced after the Supreme Court announces its decision in the D.C. v. Heller case is what reasonable restrictions will meet Constitutional muster in the future.

It says something about the current state of the politics of gun control that all three remaining Presidential candidates favor reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. Senator Obama, for example, supports banning assault weapons, opposes the Tiahrt restrictions against sharing crime gun trace data, supports limiting handgun purchases to one per month, and supports closing the gun show loophole. (Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain also supports requiring criminal background checks by unlicensed dealers at gun shows).

As for the next primary state, Pennsylvania, the state with supposedly the highest per capita NRA membership, gun control supporters regularly win there statewide: Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore (against strong NRA opposition) in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004.

Even more telling, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell – someone who just two years ago said, “I believe with all my heart that we need more gun control� – has won two gubernatorial elections against NRA-endorsed opponents, beating Mike Fisher in 2002 by nine points and Lynn Swann in 2006 by 20 points.

Support for common sense gun control should be a vote-winning issue for most candidates.

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

Forty years ago today, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by an assassin’s bullet. He was 39.Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for President in 1968, was in Indianapolis on the evening of April 4, 1968. The first to tell the crowd the terrible news, he reminded them of what Dr. King lived and ultimately died for:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. … [W]e can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, with compassion and love. 

Out of nearly 100 major cities in America that rioted at the news of Dr. King’s assassination, Indianapolis was not among them. Just two months after this speech, Robert Kennedy too would be assassinated by gunshot.From these horrible losses would come the Gun Control Act of 1968, one of the few pieces of national gun control legislation on the books today.Dr. King said many profound things in his public and ministerial career. His statement at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3, 1963 – one month before I had the opportunity to hear him and meet him in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana – seems particularly meaningful today:

The reason I can’t follow the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy is that it ends up leaving everybody blind. Somebody must have sense and somebody must have religion. I remember some years ago, my brother and I were driving from Atlanta to Chattanooga, Tennessee. And for some reason the drivers that night were very discourteous or they were forgetting to dim their lights …. And finally A.D. [King’s brother] looked over at me and he said, “I’m tired of this now, and the next car that comes by here and refuses to dim the lights, I’m going to refuse to dim mine.” I said, “Wait a minute, don’t do that. Somebody has to have some sense on this highway and if somebody doesn’t have sense enough to dim the lights, we’ll all end up destroyed on this highway.”And I’m saying the same thing for us here in Birmingham. We are moving up a mighty highway toward the city of Freedom. There will be meandering points. There will be curves and difficult moments, and we will be tempted to retaliate with the same kind of force that the opposition will use. But I’m going to say to you, “Wait a minute, Birmingham. Somebody’s got to have some sense in Birmingham.” 

If Dr. King is looking down on us today, I can imagine him seeing 12,352 gun murders a year in the United States – nearly 34 every day – and telling us that “the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy leaves everyone blind.�Somebody’s got to “have some sense� in America.(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

In the late 1970’s, Saturday Night Live ran sketches called “Consumer Probe� or “On The Spot� featuring Dan Aykroyd as the sleazy Irwin Mainway, President of Mainway Toys, Mainway Novelties, or Mainway’s Kiddie Funworld, usually being interviewed by consumer reporters played by Candace Bergen or Jane Curtin (as Joan Face).

Aykroyd played Mainway like a con-man, complete with pencil-thin mustache, slicked-back hair, pinky ring, and tacky polyester sport jacket, whose “toys� and “rides� were some of the worst ever marketed to children.

Examples from the Mainway Toys product line included the “Bag O’ Glassâ€� for $1.98 – which was just a plastic bag filled with pieces of broken glass. (Other products in this category were the “Bag O’ Nails,â€� “Bag O’ Bugs,â€� “Bag O’ Vipers,â€� and the “Bag O’ Sulfuric Acid.â€�) Then there was “Johnny Human Torch,â€� a package of oily rags and a lighter, where the child was supposed to pin the rags on his body (“like a hobo,â€� Mainway said) and light himself on fire.

The Mainway Latex Corporation featured the Halloween costume called “Invisible Pedestrian,� a sack of black clothes meant cover the kid’s body from head-to-toe, which made him completely invisible to oncoming traffic when out trick-or-treating.

Then, there was the “Johnny Combat Action Costume�:

Joan Face: Alright, Mr. Mainway. But surely even you can see the danger in this next costume, which you call Johnny Combat Action Costume. This is an actual working rifle!

Irwin Mainway: An M-1, yeah.

Joan Face: I mean, this is a deadly weapon, and you’re selling it to children!

Irwin Mainway: The ammo’s not included. I mean, this is a very popular item, you know? Give the kid a little something extra! Field glasses, a little helmet there, the gun, you know, it makes ‘em feel like a real general! I mean, this product is very popular in Texas and Detroit!

These skits (you can find some of the transcripts here, here, and here) were funny precisely because they were so outrageous and unbelievable.

But now, in a case of life imitating “art,� we read about a company in Wisconsin promoting “a rainbow of candy-colored paints� – including bright pink, green, even something called “Barney Purple� – to make guns look like toys. The company will even send you a kit to paint your own guns. Another report says a different Wisconsin gun dealer charged $200 to paint an AK-47 “Pepto-Bismol pink,� and put the cartoon character “Hello Kitty� on the stock.

These stories are not jokes like those old Dan Aykroyd skits.

As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said,

Making a quick buck by coloring a handgun to look like a toy is craven and beneath any honest businessman. By coloring these guns, a real one looks like a toy, and a police officer won’t be able to tell the difference.

This is not an idle fear. There was another story recently about police officers being forced to distinguish between fake guns that look real – in that case air guns made to look like actual firearms. Here, with weapons painted in cartoon colors, we have real guns that look fake.

No one benefits – except maybe some “Mainway�-like businesses – when we make our police officers work even harder to distinguish real guns from toy guns.

Painting a gun “Barney Purple� is something only Irwin Mainway could be proud of.

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