Tag: alison parker
Gun-Control Activists Stage Nationwide Rallies

Gun-Control Activists Stage Nationwide Rallies

Every few weeks this summer, there was another shooting in the news. There was the massacre in a Charleston, South Carolina church in June; in July, theatergoers watching an Amy Schumer comedy were assaulted by gunfire in Lafayette, Louisiana; and in August, two journalists were gunned down near Moneta, Virginia.

Under the banner of #WhateverItTakes, activists descended upon the Capitol for a rally on Thursday – scheduled to coincide with Congress’ recent return – to protest legislators’ inaction on gun reforms. The hashtag, which trended on Twitter, was part of a coordinated effort by Everytown for Gun Safety and the Everytown Survivor Network, a coalition of gun-control advocates, including Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, that formed last year. The nonprofit—originally backed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who along with former Boston mayor Thomas Menino formed MAIG in 2006—was created specifically to combat the political force of the NRA.

One of the featured speakers at the Capitol rally was Andy Parker—the father of journalist Alison Parker, who was murdered two weeks ago in Virginia. Parker, who renounced his own run for office in order to devote himself to what he calls his “life’s work,” assailed certain Virginia politicians for failing to bring up gun legislation while in office.

“Too many members of Congress remain in the pocket of the gun lobby, and that has got to change,” Parker said. “If you won’t support background checks, we’ll find someone else who will.”

The rally at the Capitol was only one of about 50 coordinated rallies across the country, from Louisville, Kentucky to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Some of the rallies, like the two in North Carolina, took place at their respective senators’ home offices.

U.S. senator from Virginia Tim Kaine, Congressman Mike Quigley, and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who was the first politician to mention gun control after the August shooting in his state, were among the politicians in attendance.

Despite all the media coverage of continuous gun violence and statistics that show that the majority of Americans support increased background checks, among other reforms, national changes to gun policy have long been out of reach.

While none of the Republican candidates for president have spoken out in favor of reforms, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal criticized politicians for being opportunistic in the wake of the Lafayette shooting.

The only Democratic candidate for president who has repeatedly addressed the gun issue in any substantive way is Martin O’Malley. Hillary Clinton spoke out only after the shooting in Charleston, and Bernie Sanders has a mixed record; he has said that it is not a major issue for him.

O’Malley, who is running partly on his record of strict gun control and reducing crime as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland, has a long history in dealing with both criminal justice reform – a cornerstone of his platform – and gun control.

O’Malley isn’t shy about his opinion on the matter, either.

After the Charleston shooting in June, O’Malley sent out an angry email to supporters, using the word “pissed” in both the subject line and four times in the body of the email. Calling the epidemic “a national crisis,” he pleaded with supporters that it was time to act.

He is calling for Congress to enact reforms similar to what he championed in Maryland, including banning assault weapons, instituting a strict licencing system that requires prospective gun buyers to undergo training and enter their fingerprints into a database, and tightening restrictions on who can be banned from purchasing a gun.

In an op-ed to the Boston Globe in July, O’Malley called for comprehensive gun safety laws, starting with the gun sales and gun shows so that only regulated licensed dealers can sell firearms.

“We should also impose greater restrictions on what, to whom, and where dealers can sell guns,” the email said. “That means banning the sale of assault weapons, increasing inspections, and establishing a national gun registry to help law enforcement track down dangerous criminals. It also means requiring gun owners to secure and safely store all firearms in their homes.”

President Obama has said that losing the battle on gun control legislation is among his biggest failures. He was visibly resigned, yet angry and as speechless as a president can be in the aftermath of the Charleston shootings, shaking his head in disbelief and calling on fellow lawmakers to stop the madness.

In a special broadcast by CNN where many Everytown activists – a broad coalition of survivors and family members of those affected by gun violence, among them, yet far from limited to, the parents of victims from the high-profile shootings at Isla Vista, California in May 2014; Sandy Hook, Connecticut in December 2012; Aurora, Colorado in July 2012; Tucson, Arizona in January 2011; and Virginia Tech in April 2007 – spoke to Brooke Baldwin on the eve of the Capitol march. Parker was one of 40 in attendance; most of those who spoke did so with tears streaming down their faces, hands clenched, in impassioned and angry tones.

“It is a world of difference now than it was on December 13,” said Colin Goddard, who was shot at the Virginia Tech shooting, referring to the massacre in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in which a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children, before turning the gun on himself. Goddard, who has been involved in the movement for years, said that the coordinated efforts of Everytown has made a difference in political pressure.

“There has been no coordinated effort to bring people of similar experiences together …to tell each other ‘You’re not alone in this,’” he said.

“The NRA cannot defeat us on background checks, straight up. They have to associate with an extreme endpoint in order to muddy the waters and make people confused. Because when you do have a genuine background check conversation, the average American thinks ‘this makes sense, this ought to be done everywhere.’”

Photo: Andy Parker, the father of murdered journalist Alison Parker, speaks at the rally on Capitol Hill sponsored by Everytown for Gun Safety, a coalition of politicians, activists, and victims of gun violence. Everytown for Gun Safety/YouTube

Vester Flanagan Has Made Witnesses Of Us All

Vester Flanagan Has Made Witnesses Of Us All

“I’ve seen enough. I don’t want to see any more” — Bruce Springsteen, “Cover Me”

When terrorists beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 and posted video of the killing online, I refused to look. I explained my reasoning in this space. To watch that video, I wrote, knowing it was staged specifically to fill me with revulsion and fear, would feel like cooperating with the monsters who killed him. It would make me an accomplice.

I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want that blood on my soul.

Not long after that column appeared, I did see Pearl die. The video of his killing showed up in my inbox, sent by a stranger. Before I even knew what was going on, a terrorist was on my computer screen holding up the head of this 38-year-old husband and expectant father.

And I learned a sobering truth about murder and media in the new millennium. Increasingly, the decision about what we will and will not see is not ours to make. Increasingly, we are at the mercy, not simply of murderous monsters, but also of our own friends, family and colleagues who act as their henchmen, forwarding, retweeting and reposting their grisly misdeeds as casually as neighbors in another age might have shared recipes over the back fence.

If there were ever any doubt about that, what happened last Wednesday morning on live local television in Roanoke, Virginia, just laid them to rest. It wasn’t just that former WDBJ news reporter Vester Lee Flanagan II shot and killed two former colleagues — news reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward — as they interviewed local official Vicki Gardner, who was wounded but is expected to survive.

Wretched as it was, that kind of event is ordinary in America, the fabric of any given Wednesday. But Flanagan, who committed suicide as police closed in on him hours later, went well beyond the wretched ordinary. He filmed the murder with his cellphone, tweeted about it, posted the video on Facebook. For good measure, he faxed his manifesto to ABC News; it is said to be a 23-page rant in which Flanagan, who was black and gay, blames racism, homophobia, the Charleston massacre and micromanaging former bosses for sending him over the edge. He also expresses his dislike for whites, Latinos and blacks, and his admiration for the mass killers who shot up Columbine High and Virginia Tech.

In other words, he curated this murder, used tools of social media — and traditional media — to manage it like a PR campaign. In essence, he provided us his press kit. And while that bespeaks a deranged man’s incomprehensible narcissism, it also suggests a canny understanding of his target audience: us.

Indeed, within hours, the video of Flanagan’s atrocity was so ubiquitous online that Ella, one of my colleagues, posted that she was signing off for the day after being ambushed by it. She was, she wrote, just “being silly” with Facebook friends, and the next thing she knew, there was death, live on her screen. “I can’t stop crying. I wasn’t ready… What are we becoming?”

“The world,” wrote William Wordsworth, “is too much with us.” This was in 1806, 200 years before the first tweets and Facebook postings. Yet the poet’s words seem to capture something true about our time, when we live cheek by jowl online, connected to one another in ways he could never have imagined, and some people post murder porn like a new music video, as if it has never occurred to them that not everyone will not want to see this — or can bear to do so.

You’d think you’d have a right to make that decision for yourself. But these days, apparently, that’s no longer your call to make.

This, then, is Vester Flanagan’s perverse triumph. He has made witnesses of us all.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: WDBJ reporter Alison Parker (L) is pictured interviewing Vicki Gardner before a gun is fired at her in this still image from video posted to the Facebook account of Bryce Williams, in Moneta, Virginia, August 26, 2015. REUTERS/via Facebook/Handout via Reuters

Social Media Feeds Violent Narcissism Of Alienated Young Men

Social Media Feeds Violent Narcissism Of Alienated Young Men

We watched, so the Virginia shooter got just what he wanted.

We were horrified, sickened, stricken, but still we watched as a deranged gunman fired several shots and murdered two young journalists on live television, wounding their interview subject as well.

Alison Parker, 24, and her cameraman, Adam Ward, 27, were conducting a news report for their Roanoke, Virginia, TV station, interviewing Vicki Gardner, a local chamber of commerce official. It seemed a routine story, a staple of small-city local news broadcasts.

But its ending was anything but routine: A disgruntled former employee of the station came up behind them, paused a few seconds, and then opened fire. (I refuse to use the shooter’s name; he’s had more than enough publicity.)

We watched, so the gunman was gratified.

Psychologists tell us that our violent video age will breed more like him, more angry narcissists hungry for notoriety, for attention, for, well, viewers. In a carefully planned attack, he apparently wore a body camera to capture his savagery; he then uploaded the video to his social media accounts.

Responsible news editors refused to show the most explicit footage, and Facebook and Twitter responded quickly to shut the shooter down.

But the video undoubtedly lives on in the Internet’s murky underworld. This is the modern version of the Roman Colosseum, a 21st-century update of public executions.

And, yet, it was uniquely American, the sort of horror show for which we have developed a worldwide reputation. While social media are in use everywhere — jihadists have used them to publicize their own gruesome executions — only in the United States do we allow madmen easy access to firearms. We have created the perfect conditions for turning places of work, of learning, of worship into shooting galleries, targets for the mentally unstable, the angry and unhinged.

According to a recent study, there are more public mass shootings in the United States than in any other country in the world. (The study, conducted by University of Alabama criminologist Adam Lankford, counts only incidents in which four or more people are killed and excludes gang killings and domestic, or family, episodes. The Virginia shooting, horrific though it was, would not have been counted.)

Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 mass shootings in the United States. That’s nearly a third of the 292 mass shootings around the world, in a country with only 5 percent of the global population. America’s high rate of gun ownership “appears connected to its high percentage of mass shootings,” Lankford wrote.

Parker’s father, Andy Parker, told CNN that he would fight for stronger firearms regulations, denouncing as “cowards” those politicians who kowtow before the gun lobby. “Look, I’m for the Second Amendment, but there has to be a way to force politicians who are cowards and in the pocket of the NRA to come to grips and have sensible laws so that crazy people can’t get guns,” he said.

He’s right, of course. I admire not only his willingness to speak out, but also his ability to string rational sentences together, given what he and his family are going through.

Still, his crusade is unlikely to bear fruit. He can join the countless other grieving families before him — there are enough to populate a small city — who tried to give meaning to their loss by fighting for sensible firearms regulations. Even the families of the Sandy Hook children — 20 kids and seven adults were killed in an elementary school in Connecticut in 2012 — were unable to budge a Congress in thrall to the National Rifle Association.

The cowardice of Congress was not assuaged by public opinion polls, which show overwhelming support for measures such as broader background checks on gun buyers. But the gun lobby threatens to defeat any person who suggests that individuals shouldn’t have their own shoulder-fired rocket launchers, and, apparently, politicians value livelihood over principle.

So there will be more bloodshed. There will be more angry and alienated young men who find it easy to grab a gun and commit a monstrous crime. And given the Virginia shooter’s creative savagery, there will be more video footage of helpless victims.

We’ll be watching.

(Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: A tweet apparently from the shooter of WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward appears to show the shooting during a live broadcast from Bridgewater Plaza, August 26, 2015. Handout via Twitter

‘If I Have To Be The John Walsh Of Gun Control’: Victim’s Father To Become Advocate

‘If I Have To Be The John Walsh Of Gun Control’: Victim’s Father To Become Advocate

The father of a victim in Wednesday’s murder of the local WDBJ7-TV crew in Virginia is quickly emerging as a new spokesman for gun control — saying that he’s determined to see to it that these mass shootings don’t keep happening.

“Alison was our bright, shining light, and it was cruelly extinguished by yet another crazy person with a gun,” Andy Parker, whose 24-year old daughter Alison Parker was killed by a deranged ex-employee at the TV station, said in a statement on Wednesday. “She excelled at everything she did and was loved by everyone she touched. She loved us dearly, and we talked to her every single day. Not hearing her voice again crushes my soul.”

That night, Parker and his late daughter’s fiancé Chris Hurst appeared together on Fox News’ The Kelly File — with host Megyn Kelly grateful and amazed that the two were even able to appear on television under such emotionally fraught circumstances.

While discussing his daughter’s life, and that of her murdered co-worker Adam Ward, Parker proclaimed his new cause:

I’m not gonna let this issue drop. We have got to do something about crazy people getting guns. And the problem that you guys have is — and I know it’s the news business — this is a big story, but next week it ain’t gonna be a story anymore, and everybody’s gonna forget it. But you mark my words, my mission in life — and I talked to the governor [Terry McAuliffe] today. He called me, and he said — and I told him, I said, ‘I’m gonna do something, whatever it takes, to get gun legislation — to shame people, to shame legislators into doing something about closing loopholes in background checks, and making sure crazy people don’t get guns.’ And he said, ‘You go, I’m right there with you.’ So, you know, this is not the last you’ve heard of me. This is something that is Alison’s legacy that I want to make happen.

Parker also appeared Monday morning on CNN’s New Day show, and told Chris Cuomo:

Her life was cut short. She had so much potential, and it’s senseless that her life and Adam’s life were taken by a crazy person with a gun. And if I have to be the John Walsh of gun control — look, I’m for the Second Amendment, but there has to be a way to force politicians that are cowards and in the pockets of the NRA to come to grips, and make sense — have sensible laws so that crazy people can’t get guns. It can’t be that hard. And yet, politicians from the local level, to the state level, to the national level — they sidestep the issue, they kick the can down the road. This can’t happen anymore.