'GET ANGRY' — After every school shooting in the United States, a now 7-year-old tweet by the British journalist Dan Hodges makes the rounds: "In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over." Nothing will change now, either. That's an overwhelming sentiment today, after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults Tuesday in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Nightly talked to Sandy Phillips, the founder of Survivors Empowered, an organization that provides support to survivors of gun violence, about these feelings of hopelessness and how she tries to counteract them. She said she would be lying if she, too, didn't want to give up at a moment like this, but there's too much work to do. Phillips lost her daughter Jessi in the Aurora theater shooting in Colorado 10 years ago. Her organization was leaving Buffalo when the reports of another massing shooting came in. She's flying to Uvalde on Friday, she said, and hasn't slept in 24 hours. This conversation has been edited. Tell us about the work Survivors Empowered does. My husband and I have lived in an RV now for seven years. We have been responding to mass shootings for 10 years. We come in and say: We'll help in any way we can. Here's our survivor toolkit, and here's our mindfulness classes. We're trying our best to organize with other grassroots organizations to make sure survivors end up having what they need, and that funds get released to them simply and easily without having to jump through hoops, which no survivor is able to do in the first initial weeks after the event. This one in Uvalde, that we're heading to, will be number 20 that we've responded to. I think that speaks to why people feel that nothing is going to change after this shooting. Have you lost hope? That whole community, very much like Sandy Hook, is going to be reeling forever. And it's heartbreaking to see. That's the minimum I can say about it because then my anger takes over. And I'm just furious that we, we in America, allow this to continue to happen. But we're hoping — hope against hope, that maybe this time, in a midterm year, in a red state of Texas, we are hoping that something will happen because of this. Do you feel like gun safety advocates have done everything you can at this point? What does the next phase of this movement look like, in your view? There is always more. When we got into this 10 years ago, we were being told by the big organizations to be nice when we go in to lobby, to go for the "low hanging fruit," not to spend political capital on things that can't be done. Do you think the NRA ever goes in with that kind of attitude? They don't. They go in and they demand and they say: If we don't get it, we're going to punish you. Well, we can take a lesson from that. We're not just going to say, "Oh, I understand you can't vote for this bill." I'm going to make it hard on them. I'm going to remind them of how my daughter died, how she had to be cremated because of her wounds. And now we've got 19 children that parents are going to have to be doing the same thing. I know what those bullets do, and I know that there are pieces of their children laying around on that schoolroom floor. We need to get angry, and we need to quit placating the Democrats just because they're Democrats. They have learned helplessness. It's "Oh, well, we don't have votes. We can't take that to the floor." Bullshit. There's also an argument that President Joe Biden's hands are tied. What do you want to see from him? The one thing that we all want the most is someone at the Cabinet level to be — I don't like to use the word gun czar — but a gun violence prevention specialist, if you will. An office of gun violence prevention, one person in charge of it who can work with all the other people. You cannot have Susan Rice taking care of 15 different things, and oh, one of them is gun violence prevention. What do you say to people who embrace the idea that nothing is going to change based on the inaction seen over the last decade? If you give up, you give in and you're part of the problem. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight's author at mward@politico.com, or on Twitter at @MyahWard.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment