“National gun crisis” discussed by Democrats in the US House of Representatives during a roundtable meeting

WASHINGTON – Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives held a roundtable forum on Monday on changing U.S. gun laws following the recent mass shooting in Maine, where 18 people died.

The top Democrat on the committee, Republican Jamie Raskin of Maryland, invited witnesses to discuss solutions to gun violence and said the gun industry lobby, the National Rifle Association and Republicans oppose gun reform.

“We intend to examine the nationwide gun crisis, the endless waves of gun violence and massacres that plague our society,” Raskin said.

These witnesses included gun safety advocates, educators, people who have experienced gun violence, and people who want to intervene in community violence.

“There is light at the end of the tunnel on this,” said Democratic Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida. “The gun lobby is now more afraid than ever as it sees a multi-racial, multi-generational army of Americans unwilling to back down in the face of demands for common-sense gun reform.”

Democrats on the committee who attended the forum included Reps. Greg Casar of Texas, Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia and Dan Goldman of New York.

Democrats said they decided to hold the roundtable after their request for a formal hearing before Republicans who control the chamber was denied. “We failed to convince a majority to hold a state of the nation hearing on gun violence,” Raskin said.

After the mass shooting in Maine, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana rejected Democrats’ call for gun control measures and argued that prayer was the appropriate response.

For years, Democrats have tried to pass gun safety legislation. While the House managed to do so, the Senate requires a 60-vote threshold and Democrats have a razor-thin majority in the upper chamber.

Safer communities work

Congress after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas enacted the most comprehensive federal gun safety legislation to date for almost 30 years, known as The bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

in September The White House announced the creation of the Office to Prevent Gun Violence to support state and local governments implement the bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

There have been 602 mass shootings this year alone according to the Gun Violence Archive who tracks shootings in the US

Kelly Sampson, senior legal adviser and director of racial justice at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said research there has shown that a majority of Americans support universal gun background checks.

“Despite what the gun lobby tries to tell people, laws to prevent gun violence are very popular,” Sampson said. “What we really need to do is keep the momentum in the conversation about what this looks like.”

Community intervention

James Timpson, who works with Community Violence Initiatives in Baltimore, Maryland, said federal funding for gun violence needs to be stretched over a longer period of time and that funding lasting six months or a year is not enough.

Timpson works with many adolescent people and uses cognitive behavioral therapy, i.e. strategies for changing thought and behavior patterns. Realistically, he said, “It will take at least 18 to 24 months before we start to see a lasting change in young people’s behavior.”

“To disrupt violence, we must heal trauma, the trauma that our young people experience,” he said.

Mariah Cooley, a 22-year-old Howard University graduate, said there needs to be a holistic approach to addressing gun violence in the community, such as adequate funding for schools, access to grocery stores and jobs that pay a living wage.

“When people don’t have access to these basic needs, crimes occur,” said Cooley of Illinois.

Cooley is a board member of March for Our Lives, a youth-led organization that advocates for gun control legislation at the state and federal levels.

She first experienced gun violence at age 13, when a peer was killed, and again at age 16, when her cousin was killed by gun violence.

School principal’s opinion

Michelle Kefford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, said that because school shootings are so common, teachers came together to create a guide on how to deal with the aftermath of gun violence in schools.

Kefford became principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after the 2018 Valentine’s Day mass shooting that killed 17 students and teachers.

Injuries from firearms are now main cause of death according to the New England Journal of Medicine for children and adolescents in the United States.

Kefford said she is a member of an organization called the Principle Recovery Network, where 21 current and former principals are reaching out to schools affected by the shooting to support find best practices for recovery. Members include the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six teachers were killed.

She said there were hundreds of shootings on school grounds last year.

According to the school’s K-12 shooting databaseThere were 305 school shootings.

“That’s an average of a school shooting every other day,” Kefford said. “There are so many shootings that there are simply not enough federal funds and resources to cover the medical costs of all those shot in schools.”