Million Mom March : Speaking Up For Safer Gun Laws - march puts focus on confusing issue of regulation
There are four categories of federal safety regulations that apply to teddy bears made and sold in America. There are zero that apply to guns. — PAX
Well that can’t be true,” said my husband. “You have to have a license to own a gun, for example. Isn’t that a federal law?” We had just returned home to Brooklyn from Washington, DC, where we had joined 750,000 other parents, children, and friends in the successful Million Mom March, held on Mother’s Day, May 14. My husband is not alone in his confusion about firearms and the law. There is very little clarity about the topic and not much that makes sense. In fact, the average person, even one who has just attended a march to end gun violence, is likely to be surprised when discovering the truth. There is no federal law, for instance, that requires gun owners to have a license, and in many parts of our country, there is no state requirement either. Yet the pain of innocent victims’ families is borne by our society every day.
“It’s so hard for me to say I will never hold her again, she will never get married or have children,” said Veronica McQueen, the mother of six-year-old Kayla, shot in her classroom in Michigan by another six year old in February 2000. Spoken with unbelievable bravery by a woman who had lost her small daughter only last February 29, McQueen’s words were mind-numbing–her pain so inconceivable I almost couldn’t think about it. I stood in the midst of a weeping crowd and felt thankful that my own four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Adelaide, was sitting safely with her dad and our friends on a blanket under a nearby tree.
I met, face to heart-breaking face, women who had come in groups to the march with a common bond: each had lost a child to a gunshot. Looking into the eyes of these women as they told their stories was an incredible experience.
“My son, Greg, was shot in the chest trying to protect my sister on Labor Day 1996, when he was 24,” Debra Lampole of Butler, Pennsylvania, told me during the rally portion of the march. Standing only 3 feet away from her, I could actually feel her tired grief, and, for a moment, I could not push the possibility of losing my own child to violence out of my head. On average, 12 other women like Debra will lose a child today, 12 more tomorrow, the next day, and so on.
There’s no question that the Million Mom March’s message–to apply common sense to our gun laws and protect our children–was heard. Attended by more than double the expected number and conducted with peace and superb organization, it accomplished its mission easily and elegantly. The spirit in the air on that blessedly clear and comfortable morning was palpable.
The Million Mom March was most remarkable, however, for its success at bringing together people who have many different ideas about what it means to own a gun. Certainly many attendees, such as myself, do not own a gun and have no desire to ever do so. Many others think that gun ownership itself is not a problem and just want that ownership, and the guns themselves, to be more strictly regulated.
As parents with a common goal–keeping our children safe–we have to contend with these differences in beliefs about guns and the very confusing variations in gun laws from state to state, or even, in some places, from town to town. Our biggest roadblock, however, is our own ignorance about what is regulated in the first place. Most of us do not know just how much freedom the gun industry and potential gun owners really have. Here follows a gun primer.
Regulating People, Regulating Products
First, the gun issue is really two separate issues. There is the matter of regulating the people who buy and use guns, and there is the issue of regulating the products–the guns, and the industry which manufactures them. Gun owners are subject to the licensing and registration laws of their state, if it has any such laws at all–35 states do not.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no federally controlled system of licensing or registration for gun owners at this time. The closest thing we have to this is the Brady Law, which requires a potential gun buyer to undergo a background check to ensure they are not a convicted criminal.
The Brady Law has prevented more than 400,000 convicted felons from purchasing a gun, according to Talmage Cooley, the co-executive director of The Movement to End Gun Violence (PAX), a nonprofit organization that is devoted to increasing public awareness of the gun violence problem and one of the organizers of the Million Mom March. “Unfortunately, though, there are all kinds of loopholes in the Brady Law,” he says. “One of the biggest problems is gun shows in which your mentally insane and crack-addicted neighbor, the felon, can just pop in and purchase a weapon if he feels like it.”