You don't need me to tell you how it was on November 1, 1991, the day I spent most of an afternoon lying on my belly on the floor of an office in Van Allen Hall on the University of Iowa campus. At the time, I didn't know what was going on outside that room or what those loud popping sounds were. I knew only that those popping sounds weren't the sound of construction taking place next door, that those sounds were different. I knew only that we locked the door and turned out the lights, and I lay there smelling the smell of that institutional carpet on the floor, the carpet I pressed my 10- and 4-year-old children's faces into, and that at some point maybe the SWAT officers would come and tell us everything was fine.
But you don't need me to tell you that things weren't fine.
Open up a search tab on your browser. Look up "University of Iowa mass shootings 1991." Pick any result link: Wikipedia. NY Times. Amazon. Murderpedia. It doesn't really matter which link you open; they all offer information on what happened that day.
That day. That one day a little more than 21 years ago. A blip in the chronology of mass murder in my country. "Only" five people were murdered before the shooter killed himself. One young woman, my friend Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, was shot and survived; the bullet severed her spinal cord, and she lived as a quadriplegic until her cancer death in 2008.
The list of facts about November 1, 1991, is endless. And so, it seems, is the list of mass shootings our nation will put up with in the name of "freedom."
I want to point out that although we had no way of knowing at the time, my children and I weren't necessarily in danger; we weren't on his "list" that day. My children had a Turkish folk dance practice that day in the offices of a faculty member a few doors up from the conference room where most of the shootings took place. The children were fine, I was fine, we weren't in the conference room when Lu Gang (Gang Lu in our Americanized version) came to "solve a problem" he had with losing a dissertation award to a fellow doctoral student. Or even when he returned to the conference room some time later after murdering the university administrator who heard his appeal and turned it down, or when he shot Miya because she was, through random circumstances, the administrator's work-study receptionist on November 1, 1991. We weren't in the conference room when he returned to make sure he'd actually killed the people he'd shot earlier, or when he took action after realizing he hadn't actually killed them all.
We were just hiding and terrified and trying to be as quiet as possible. And not a day goes by without wondering what I might have done or what I would have done or what I might still do now ... I am pretty sure I didn't even see Lu Gang in Van Allen Hall that afternoon, and yet I'm haunted. Every day. For more than 21 years.
We really need to talk about gun violence in the United States. To my shame, I definitely haven't done enough of that. Well, that's going to change.
I'm sure you've tried to have a conversation with someone who argues against gun sense in our country. It's difficult. We've let those knee-jerk reactions to our initiating conversation about gun violence stop us from pushing harder. And that's got to change.
There's one question I have asked many times over the past couple of decades, and I've never received an actual answer. Responses and reflexive arguments? Sure. Accusations of wanting to steal other people's guns and destroy the future of democracy for all tie? Check. But answers? Nope. Not a one. And that's going to change.
Would you sign a declaration when you bought a firearm that states, "I realize that there have been many senseless acts committed with firearms, and even children who've been murdered in schools and daycares, but I'm OK with that. My freedom to buy and keep a gun outweighs the lives of people who've been shot, of people who've been ruthlessly murdered by a shooter, of people who have to live with the memories and consequences of those shootings every day for the rest of their lives. And I'm fine with that."? Would you sign such a declaration?
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty fed up with our nation's avoidance of healthy discussions on gun violence and the consequences of gun violence. I'm sick of hearing that guns don't kill people. (Well, cigarettes themselves don't pull out a .45 and shoot anyone's lungs out, but we still put warning labels on 'em.)
I've had it up to here with excuses about mental illness and "evil" being the real culprits here. Seriously, does anyone believe that a corollary to that statement is that the United States has one of the world's highest populations of mentally ill and/or evil people? Hoo boy. That's the start of a whooooooole new conversation -- yet another conversation Second Amendment extremists refuse to explore.
The bottom line here is not whose fault it is that a trigger or two (or more) was pulled, or whose fault it is that there are mentally ill and/or "bad people" who have guns. The bottom line here is whether you're perfectly fine allowing physics professors, college students, restaurant diners, small children, moms, dads, grandmothers and grandfathers .... whether you're perfectly fine allowing these people to be murdered for what you personally interpret as freedom. Is it fine with you that people like my children and me have to live with our memories for the rest of our lives? Is it fine with you that family members and friends have to face every single day tormented over the final moments of their loved one's terror in the final moments of their lives?
Is it worth all that to stick your head in the sand and not even have one rational discussion about the meaning of these words to you?
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
If you believe it's worth it, what would be so horrible about just saying that you're fine with the consequences of your personal interpretation of what this "freedom" is all about? Why can't we discuss what the Federalist Papers say about what Second Amendment's significance to the people who wrote it, rewrote it, wrote it again, and discussed it both heatedly and rationally? Why can't we revisit the meaning of "a well regulated militia" now that our country has abandoned militias for a large standing army -- even though the Founders were vehemently opposed to such a thing, particularly during peacetime? Why would it be so painful for us to discuss amending the amendment?
And what's the deal about responsibility? Having firearms is not just about buying 'em but also about the training, discipline, and responsibilities thereof. Yeah, I know those words aren't in the Second Amendment, but those are things our Founders discussed at great length. They said so and left documentation about those discussions.
Look. We all have a million questions. The problem is trying to ask them without being screamed at, accused of ACTUAL ROBBERY (as in the ol' "taking away our guns" rhubarb), hit with all-or-nothing predictions of chaos and anarchy, or offered up death threats. Ah, irony deficiency. It's a scourge.
So how and when are we going to ask them and demand answers? When do we demand that freedom comes with responsibility and that people advocating for the unfettered sale of large-capacity munitions and the dismantling of gun licensing and registration policies and laws take responsibility for the consequences of their "ostrich's head in the sand" interpretation of the Second Amendment?
I've been visiting with U.S. Congressmembers and their staffs here in North Carolina. And on March 13, a few thousand of us will be meeting with our representatives in Washington DC as part of a series of Moms Take the Hill Day, sponsored by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense.
We'll be talking with Rep. Renee Ellmers, who herself lives large in her very own palace of irony as a person who carries a weapon every day yet still posts placards in her offices that state that anyone else who carries a weapon in her office will be prosecuted. Why is that, you might ask? What's so bad about guns, after all? Especially when the person prohibiting anyone else from carrying a gun in her offices is someone who supports arming teachers and bus drivers and janitors in schools? Or who wouldn't mind simply issuing firearms to all U.S. military service members and veterans without any impediment or checks whatsoever?
Sigh.
And we'll meet personally with Sen. Richard Burr, who hasn't actually sponsored a whole lot of legislation but still brings in thousands of lobby dollars from the NRA every year. He's one of their favorites, you know. They love to give that guy some money.
Who are your Congressmembers, and where do they stand? Do they take lobby bribes from the NRA? What's their NRA Report Card score?
Would you like to join us? If you do, sign up by March 6 and plan to come speak with your legislators about gun sense. There are blocks of hotel rooms available at specaial rates, and the Moms Demand Action people will schedule the meetings with your senators and representatives on March 13.
November 1, 1991. It's just a day, right? No. No, it's not. Nor is the anniversary of any number of mass shootings that have taken place before and since -- anniversaries that a whole lot of people are shelling out a whole lot of money not to commemorate and not to stop from accumulating.
On the average of every four weeks, we are adding more people to the Club of Survivors and Witnesses. Adding more funerals, more heartbreak, more of the searing pain that comes every morning you wake up and wonder "Were they in a lot of pain?" and "What could I have done?" Adding more people to the list of those who survive another day, only to face new fights with insurance companies unwilling to cover procedures, surgeries, medications, wheelchairs ...
We really need to talk.