John,

This past weekend was a tough one for us to get through as a nation. My family and I live in Chicagoland, not too far from Highland Park, so this weekend’s shooting hit extra close to home for us.

I was at home playing with my kids when my mother-in-law called my wife. She lives in NYC and has her phone set to notify her whenever anything bad happens near Chicago so she can call to check on us and make sure we’re okay.

Thankfully, so far, we’ve always been able to tell her that yes, we’re fine, and to stop checking the news so often and stop worrying all the time. But this time, it hit differently. Highland Park is one of the nicest, quietest, most peaceful communities in the state – the exact sort of place I’d take my kids to watch a parade, just like so many other parents did yeterday.

It just goes to show us that no one and nowhere in America is safe from the gun violence epidemic anymore. This is a national crisis, and we need to treat it as such.

I'll be honest, I was a little bit angry that the fireworks shows went on as scheduled yesterday.

On the one hand, I get it – we all want to take a break and celebrate and enjoy our time with our friends and family during these warm summer months. But how can we do that when we know so many of our fellow citizens – not just in Highland Park, but in Philadelphia, in Chattanooga, in Uvalde, in Buffalo – are completely devastated?

I think we should be taking the time to mourn and really absorb the magnitude of these tragedies when they take place. It scares me that we’ve become so desensitized that we can brush something like this aside, move on, and enjoy our own holiday celebrations. But that’s exactly what the MAGA Republican nominee for Governor here in Illinois, Darren Bailey, urged his supporters to do – less than two hours after the massacre, before they even caught the shooter, he complained about public safety officials canceling a parade in a nearby town and told everyone “let’s move on and celebrate freedom.”

Somehow, I don’t think what happened in Highland Park yesterday was what the founders of our nation had in mind when they wrote the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights.

But in the aftermath of this tragedy, I want to share something our national spokesperson Richard Ojeda always says to me whenever we talk on the phone: Our country is too great, too beautiful, too precious for us to ever give up hope on it.

We know we face challenges; we know we face a powerful gun lobby and billion-dollar special interest groups, but we also know we have the vast majority of our country’s people on our side. As Americans, we are all fed up with the never-ending gun violence.

I had so many conversations with my neighbors after yesterday's shooting, everyone was in their front yards just checking on everyone else. We were all shaken up. Even some of the Republicans with the Trump flags were devastated, but when they tried to blame the problem on something other than easy access to weapons of war, like “It's the violent video games!” everyone else pushed back hard, and I felt like some of those Republicans started to change their perspective.

Here's the thing: When you ask these folks if they own assault rifles, most of them say “No,” and then when you ask if they think any civilian really needs that, most of them say, “No, probably not.”

We as Democrats need to stop being afraid to say that high-powered, high-capacity weapons of war do not belong in our homes, schools, and communities.

We are not trying to take away everyone’s guns, because the vast majority of gun owners don’t own a high-powered assault rifle. Just a small percentage of very loud gun owners do. Well, it's time for us to get loud, too.

We need to get loud, we need to fight back, and we need to defeat the gun lobby in November. Every Republican politician you see is just a paid representative of the gun lobby. They read their talking points, then go on tv and repeat what they are told, even when it’s lies and nonsense.

Let's call them out, and let's beat them. Help us do it, join us on this one, our country, our children are worth fighting for.

In Solidarity,

--Hassan Martini, Executive Director, and the No Dem Left Behind team