Friends —

Today marks six months since the horrible tragedy at Michigan State University, in which three students were killed and five injured in a shooting.

I remember that day clearly. On the evening of February 13th, I was driving to my family farm in Holly when I got the call from my team and I just kept driving straight to East Lansing. I was pushing 90 mph but being passed by on the highway by parents rushing to find their children.

Unfortunately, I had some idea of how to respond to this kind of unfolding disaster. I was the representative of Oxford High School when they had a school shooting in November 2021.

I spent the night at the operations center at the East Lansing Police Department, listening to the police scanner and watching urgent updates come in in what would ultimately be a three hour manhunt and a total lockdown of the school and the entire area. The most searing moment for me was watching a student with an Oxford Strong sweatshirt, given out after the high school shooting, run across campus to try and find safety.

Kids were holed up in their dorm rooms for hours waiting for police to find the shooter. Students barricaded themselves in closets and classrooms. The next morning, on no sleep, we held a press conference. I can’t remember what exactly I said, but I remember feeling absolutely furious.

What is most gut-wrenching is that this is not an isolated issue. Gun violence is the #1 killer of American children under 21. Think about that. In 2022, over 6,000 children 18 and younger were killed or injured due to gun violence in our communities, our schools, by suicides and by accident.

The morning after the shooting at MSU, the first call I received was from a Republican business owner. He said very plainly that he was a responsible gun owner and would reject anyone coming to take his guns…but pleaded with me to protect his babies in school.

In the days and weeks after, I talked to hundreds of people and it didn’t matter if you were Democrat or Republican, no one could stomach seeing children die in their sanctuaries.

Now like many Michiganders, I’m someone who grew up with guns. I carried a Glock and an M4 on three tours in Iraq alongside the military. But as the first Congresswoman in America to represent a district with two school shootings in 14 months, I can also tell you that of all the terrible things I saw abroad in combat zones, nothing has been as terrible as school shootings.

But I still think there is hope. Michigan went from a state that hadn’t passed substantial gun violence legislation in 40 years to a state that is now leading the country and showing people what it means to actually pass gun safety legislation within two months. We passed universal background checks, safe storage requirements for anyone who has a child in the home, and red flag laws to take guns away from people who are threatening or harming others. Unfortunately, only two Republicans in the state legislature had the guts to vote for any of these bills. In Congress, these same bills have no Republican co-sponsors, including not one Michigan Republican congressperson, who watched the violence unfold with the rest of us.

Hopefully, Michigan can be a blueprint for other efforts across the country. And I won’t stop pushing for reform at the federal level. As terrible as this is, at some point, so many Americans will be personally impacted by gun violence that we will be forced to make change at the federal level. And I plan to be a part of that change when I get to the Senate.

Elissa