“You Allow Your Heart to Be Broken Every Day” [View all]

[DonViejo]

Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Newtown. Isla Vista. Families of shooting victims describe the struggle of lobbying for gun control, and how they keep going.

By Emily Bazelon

On Tuesday, a man with a gun killed a student and wounded a teacher at an Oregon high school. Two days earlier, a couple on an anti-government rampage shot two police officers and a man in a Walmart. And the week before that, Elliot Rodgers killed three people and wounded 13 in a shooting spree in the college town of Isla Vista, California. Those are just the recent fatal shootings that made headlines. At Slate, after the devastating mass shooting at Newtown, we tried to track each gun death for more than a year. The data were incomplete—and the total was still 12,042.

In the wake of the Isla Vista shootings, the father of one of the victims, Richard Martinez, spoke out in an effort to “make my son’s death mean something.” He has joined a brave, sad band of family members who have made preventing more gun violence their cause. At Slate, we wanted to know what it’s like to do this work, day in and day out. How does it feel to watch the shootings recur? How do you keep going?

On Monday, I sat down to talk with people who have lost loved ones to gun violence. They’d gathered in Washington, D.C., for a conference hosted by the Brady Campaign. Tom Sullivan lost his son Alex, on his 27th birthday in Aurora two years ago (12 dead, 70 wounded). Sandy and Lonnie Phillips lost their daughter, Jessica, 24, also at Aurora. Carlos Soto, who is 16, lost his sister, Victoria, a 27-year-old teacher, at Newtown (26 dead, two wounded). Tom Mauser, who joined us by phone, lost his 15-year-old son, Daniel, at Columbine in 1999 (13 dead, 24 wounded). Eddie Weingart lost his mother when he was 2 years old; she was murdered by her ex-husband. Andrew Goddard’s son, Colin, then 21, was shot four times at Virginia Tech (32 dead, 17 wounded). Colin recovered and also works to prevent gun violence.

more
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/06/columbine_aurora_newtown_isla_vista_families_of_shooting_victims_talk_about.html?