Executive Director's Column

April is the month in poetry and literature that is about life, green trees, grass and buds flourishing, starting anew after long dark cold winters.

Green too, is the word we use for Earth Day/week and the “green” things we do to protect our environment and our globe, not just this one week, but every week.

April, in recent years, brings the color red. Red for the blood of our men, women, and –yes– innocent children that comes out of their bodies as they are shot by automatic AK47 and other weapons. Violence in America seems to raise its ugly head of death even higher in April.

It was on April 4th 1968 that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in Memphis. Five days later on April 9th we walked behind the mule drawn casket all the way from Ebenezer Church to Morehouse College where Dr. Benjamin Mays said those beautiful words. I sat under a tree with Marlon Brando and Nina Simone.

It was the pretty month of April 1993 when the 80 people, 21 of them children, were massacred in Waco, Texas.

It was April 19th 1995, people were killed after a truck, parked outside the Murray Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City containing 5,000 pounds of fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, was ignited with a fuse. The driver locked the keys inside, lit the fuse and walked away and started to jog. At 9:02 am the entire north face of the building was reduced to dust and rubble. People were there ready to work; children had been dropped off at the day care center. 168 people were killed on the beautiful April day, including 19 beautiful and innocent children.

It was on April 20th 1999, a beautiful day in Colorado, that two students with high-powered firearms embarked on a massacre mission at Columbine High School and killed 12 students, one teacher and significantly wounded 23 others before committing suicide. Following this tragic event on that beautiful day, only the fourth deadliest school massacre in the USA, there was indeed, at least, national conversation. Denver Mayor Wellington Webb was our President; he asked Charlton Heston, the great actor turned gun fanatic, not to come to the National Rifle Association (NRA) meeting in Denver where Heston would raise his rifle over his head. We designed a portable “Wall of Death” like the Vietnam Wall depicting names of victims in 100 cities that were killed by gun violence in America during the year after Columbine. It got attention. It was displayed on the Washington Mall, the Denver City-County Building and at the Stapleton Convention Center in Los Angeles. It all started on an April day in Littleton, Colorado. The conversation lasted for a few months. They even developed and marketed a deadly video game which delves into the beautiful morning of April 20, 1999 and asks for players to relive that day through the eyes of Eric and Dylan the kids that used the deadly weapons, kept in the bedrooms of their homes, as they came to and fro attired in long black coats, and then used the weapons to kill those beautiful children on that beautiful April day in Rocky Mountain high blue sky Colorado in 1999.

It was on another day in April, on the 16th in 2007, at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia that the deadliest single gunman peacetime shooting occurred anywhere in our history. The killer had had some mental challenges before he hit the Hokie campus; he was treated for severe anxiety disorder in middle school, received therapy through high school. While in college he was accused of stalking two women students and was declared mentally ill by a Virginia Special Justice. But with his mental issues he purchased a 22 caliber automatic handgun and a 9mm semi automatic Glock 19 handgun. Hundreds of rounds were fired; hundreds of live rounds were found. Thirty-two people were killed that day; many others were wounded and the killer also killed himself. That was April just two years ago.

The violent springtime blood of 2009 started a little early this year. Even before the beautiful month of April, ten innocent people in a church worshiping God and a preacher were killed in Samson, Alabama on March 10. Four police officers were killed in Oakland, eight nursing home residents were shot to death in Carthage, North Carolina, five family members were killed in Santa Clara, California. On April 3, thirteen people teaching and learning to be American citizens were killed in Binghamton, New York. In Graham, Washington five children were killed on April 4, and on the same day of April 4, three police officers were killed in Pittsburgh. And in Miami over the last few weeks twelve members of three families were killed.

This past week in Frederick, a Maryland father shot his wife, his three children, ages five, four, and two. The father, using a small caliber gun, shot the older children, ages five and four, multiple times in their heads; the youngest, age two, received only one shot to the head. After the father shot and killed the children, the Sheriff said the father nearly decapitated the children, cutting their heads almost off with a kitchen knife and pruning saw. Then the father killed himself with a shotgun.

We have a few more days left in April. There will be more. These killings haven’t received the media attention that was given to previous Aprils. There’s a silence about it in 2009. Conference President Miami Mayor Manny Diaz has issued a strong statement urging congress and the White House to act. They could begin by banning the sale of AK47 automatic weapons. Police Chiefs and border patrolmen will tell you that the open sale of these weapons provokes more killing and violence.

The “elephant” in the room is the NRA, the National Rifle Association. You have to admire Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. This past weekend he hit the tv talk shows calling for a number of actions from Congress that would help save lives and prevent violence.

It is interesting how contaminated peanut butter gets so much media attention. Two people woke up in California and had stomach cramps and the salmonella scare kept contaminated peanut butter on the radar news screen for months. Paul Helmke, President and CEO of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, former Ft. Wayne Mayor, and former USCM President talks about the news coverage the peanut butter scare has received as compared to the death by guns this spring. Then after the peanut butter scare we read about contaminated pistachio nuts and the dangerous threat contaminated pistachios pose to the lives of Americans.

Mass murders continue this April. The death by guns and violence continues. You have to wonder what it will take to get, at least, some movement on this issue. Maybe it will be more deaths. Aprils are tough for America. Nothing has changed. We had hoped for a little more from Congress, The White House, The Justice Department and the media. Mayors and Police Chiefs speak out, funerals and tributes where flags are folded and given to widows and widowers of police officers and multiple caskets of innocent men, women and children are on display. We see them, we count them, wondering when it will stop. While there is the strange silence, the red blood of America flows due to devastation of death and violence in this April of 2009. There are some common sense gun safety things we can do. But right now even though violence came a little earlier this Spring, and the deaths come stronger than ever, in so many places, Washington is asleep. Washington is deaf to the gunshots. Washington is in denial of the deaths that will continue to come when today so many guns, illegal or legal, are in the hands of youths, the mentally ill, and criminals in America.

Happy Earth Day 2009!