Last week, I was interviewed on a panel alongside a gun lobbyist.
This isn’t unusual for me — part of my job as executive director of CeaseFirePA is to highlight solutions to the gun violence epidemic we should all be able to agree on.
Here’s what stood out: over and over again, the gun lobbyist used his fingers to make quotation marks when he said “gun violence.” Putting air quotes around “gun violence” is a rhetorical trick designed to dismiss the reality of this crisis and undermine prevention efforts.
It’s an act that's stunningly dismissive of people I know personally — individuals who have lost their children, partners, and friends to this crisis.
This is the issue, friend. Some extremists have a financial stake in tricking us into believing that deadly, life-altering gun violence isn’t a problem because problems have solutions.
If we can’t get serious about calling 1,600 preventable firearm deaths a year in Pennsylvania a gun violence problem, we won’t get anywhere. One thing that’s standing in our way right now is that our state senators are more focused on punishing local leaders for trying to save lives than actually passing gun violence prevention legislation.
Kids being shot in school is gun violence. Worship being interrupted by bullets is gun violence. A mass shooting every 10 days in our state is gun violence.
Allowing preventable gun violence to continue is a policy choice.
