It’s the text no parent wants to see from their child during school: “Mom, I love you, just in case.”
The message reach Hilary Uhlig’s phone while her child was lockdown after a threat to the school.
“My kids were in high school at the time, and they were being taught how to ‘run, hide, fight,’ and I just thought that was such a horrifying lesson,” Uhlig recalled. “My son was taught about lockdown drills on his first day of high school. That was his take home from starting high school: What to do if there’s a shooter. And I thought that was tragic on many levels, and also the exact opposite of what we want them to be doing in school.”
These now routine active shooter drills spurred Uhlig’s decision to join Moms Demand Action, a nationwide organization launched by Shannon Watts, a mother of five, the day after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. On Dec. 14, 2012, a 20-year-old man entered the Newtown, Connecticut, school with an AR-15 style, semi-automatic rifle and murdered 20 children, all between the ages of six and seven. He also murdered six adult staff members before taking his own life.
The day after that event, Watts started a Facebook page to talk about curbing gun violence, a discussion that has grown into a nationwide movement with more than 6 million volunteers in all 50 states, working for federal and local gun policies aimed at public safety and responsibility.
Uhlig joined the Oregon chapter four years ago, and now leads the chapter with 12 local groups statewide comprising thousands of supporters and volunteers.
The movement grew dramatically in 2018, when people sought to get involved after the Parkland, Florida, shooting that killed 17 and wounded 14. And with each mass shooting — Atlanta, Boulder — the interest swells again, Uhlig said, for groups like hers and other gun violence prevention organizations.
“Moms Demand Action gave me a way to take action and find out what I can do and learn more and make sure that I am actually doing something rather than just sitting by and waiting for the next tragedy.”
Last year was one of the nation’s deadliest years for gun violence: Nearly 20,000 people died by gun violence, more than any year in the past two decades, according to the non-partisan nonprofit Gun Violence Archives. An additional 44,000 people died by suicide with a gun last year. Only a few weeks ago, a gunman killed an 18-year-old woman and injured six others in a drive-by shooting in downtown Portland.
Street Roots spoke with Uhlig recently about the organization’s work for safer gun policies following a pandemic season that fueled a run on guns unseen in recent years.
Joanne Zuhl: The pandemic has had an interesting impact on gun sales, with store owners reporting a dramatic increase in sales after the pandemic took hold. The FBI, which operates the National Instant Criminal Background Check System for firearm sales, reported a 34% increase in transaction volume over 2019, totaling more than 36.7 million checks. How does Moms Demand Action respond to this kind of phenomenon? How do you change that instinctual survival response during a crisis that sent so many people to buy a gun?
Hilary Uhlig: There was so much fear that was circulating at the beginning of the pandemic, and people felt like they needed to go straight to the zombie apocalypse mode of survival. And we’ve done what we can to address this leading up to the pandemic. We were working for background checks on all gun sales, and that’s something that Oregon has, but we’re only as strong as our weaker neighbors. Idaho and other states don’t have gun background checks on all gun sales. So we can do what we can in Oregon, but really, the rest of the country also needs to catch up. That’s why right now we are the number one most basic, most common-sense thing we can do is pass a federal background check law that would require background checks on all gun sales.
Zuhl: Well, the gun lobby would say the background checks don’t do anything if you’re going to buy the gun illegally anyway.
Uhlig: Yeah, that’s what they say. Except that we have this incredibly prolific gun industry, where we have more guns than people, Which is horrifying. Making people aware that there are more gun shops than McDonald’s, more gun shops than post offices, I think they need to be aware of the actual number of guns to recognize that we don’t need that many guns.
And regarding people who buy guns illegally, there are things we can do for that as well, such as cracking down on ghost guns, which are increasing at a tremendous rate. Ghost guns are untraceable guns that are being found at crime scenes across the country. And cracking down on trafficking: Making sure that guns purchased in other states are being tracked, like Chicago, for instance. They have very strong gun laws in Illinois, but Indiana does not. So a lot of the guns that are being found in crime scenes in Chicago are being purchased or acquired in Indiana.
Zuhl: What does Oregon needs to do to stop gun violence and who should we model? It sounds like what you’re saying is that this really demands a national approach.
Uhlig: Well, I think there are absolutely successful things we can do at every level. It’s going to require a federal, state and local effort, right down to the community level. The federal level we absolutely need to get David Shipman confirmed as the head of the ATF. He has been a long-standing gun safety expert, and I think he would do a tremendous job of taking on the federal level at ATF.
We need to get those federal background checks passed. We’ve had lots of stumbling blocks in the Senate, but we are continuing to pressure and get those things moving forward.
There’s been a recent effort to crack down on federal gun trafficking, specifically in the cities with the highest rates of gun violence. So that is also good at the federal level.
At the state level, Moms Demand Action has been advocating for years, and we’ve been able to get some pretty significant gun safety laws passed in Oregon. We require background checks on all gun sales. We have a red flag law where we can have guns removed from someone who has proven themselves to be a threat to themselves or others. We have domestic violence protections that other states don’t have. And just this year, we passed a secure storage law, which would require gun owners to securely store their firearms to keep them out of the hands of people and children who shouldn’t have access to them. And also reporting loss and stolen guns, because that is a significant source of guns that are used in crime scenes — stolen guns that are never reported. So we don’t know they’re missing.
Zuhl: People just don’t report their guns stolen?
Uhlig: That’s correct. And so there is a law that would require people to report their gun stolen. We just passed it in Salem this year. You have to report if you’re gun is lost or stolen within a reasonable amount of time; I believe it’s 72 hours. In the Clackamas Town Center shooting, the shooter stole a gun from a friend who had left a loaded weapon on his coffee table. And then when he realized it was stolen, he never let the police know, “Oh, hey, by the way, my friend who’s a danger has stolen my gun.” He never came forward, never recorded that. And it wasn’t required.
Zuhl: What are examples of the community-based approaches to gun violence prevention that your organization is calling for?
Uhlig: Community partners and community-based organizations are extremely important for getting into the communities where the violence is happening. Things like the Office of Violence Prevention in Portland has been doing a fantastic job of community outreach.
Organizations like Healing Hurt People, and getting into hospital-based violence intervention programs to make those interventions and interrupt the cycles of violence right away, right after an incident, and to provide those wraparound case management services for victims of gunshot wounds and their families and their friends, to prevent that from going forward — those are incredibly important. And there are all kinds of other organizations that have been doing great work in Portland for a really long time. There’s We Are The Caution and Love is Stronger and Go Get Your Child. And just making sure that these organizations have enough funding to be able to continue their really important, life-saving work.
Zuhl: The NRA has thrived on perpetuating the fear that people want to take their guns away. Is that what Moms Demand Action wants to do?
Uhlig: No, in fact, we support the Second Amendment, but we want to make sure that with those rights come the responsibility of being safe and secure with your firearms. My dad’s a hunter, I grew up with guns in the house. If he thought I were doing anything to attack the heritage of family hunting and things like that, he’d have a few things to say to me.
Moms Demand Action and other gun violence prevention groups, we’re not out to take away everybody’s guns, we just want to make sure that there are safety protocols in place, that there is a level of understanding that you need to be responsible with your firearms, so that we can reduce the number of children who accidentally gain access to a loaded firearm and shoot themselves or shoot a family member or a sibling. So many of these tragedies are preventable.
Zuhl: What educational efforts are you involved in?
Uhlig: We have two educational programs that our volunteers are trained to present to any organization or group or parent group, preschool pediatricians, church groups, veterans’ groups. One is called Be Smart. There’s a website called BeSmartforKids.org. And it is to normalize the conversations that parents or grandparents would have with other people to feel comfortable asking if there are guns in the home of where their child or grandchildren are going to go play. Because we are very comfortable saying, “My son has asthma, do you have cats in your house?” But we’re not comfortable asking, “Do you have firearms? And are they securely stored away so that children won’t have access?” We just want to make sure that’s really a comfortable conversation that people can have.
We also look at the role guns play in suicide. Keeping guns securely stored, so that your child or a friend’s child or someone else does not gain access to that gun if they’re having a suicidal crisis.
Another educational program we have is called One Thing You Can Do, which is to help people understand the Red Flag Law that was passed here because a lot of people don’t understand how to access that or what it does, or the limitations on it. Because the pushback we got when we were trying to get this passed was that anybody could have their guns taken away at any time. And that’s not true. There is a due process. There are certain people who can apply for a red flag relinquishment and others who cannot. So there are quite a lot of protections for gun owners, but also protections for society and the people around them.
Zuhl: The police claim that the increase in gun violence is due to police staffing, shortages, overstretched resources because of the protests, and the dismantling of the gun violence reduction team. What do you or Moms Demand Action say about that?
Uhlig: Well, I think definitely all of those factors are playing a role. Gun violence was on the increase before the pandemic and before the George Floyd shooting. So we have to recognize that it was growing prior to that. I recognize people have different perspectives. I’ve heard from both ends of the spectrum, I’ve heard from people who don’t want to work with the police at all, and I have heard from people who think the police is the way to do to handle this problem. But I think it’s way more nuanced than that. We need to involve the police and the community partners, and all of the different levels of local government, because there’s no one direction. There’s no one way that we’re going to fight gun violence, without involving everybody and working together collaboratively.
Zuhl: Do you worry that people will or have become complacent with gun violence?
Uhlig: Absolutely. I think I’m seeing that in the news and seeing that my personal reaction to stories are more muted than they have been in the past. Two years ago, we were in Washington, D.C., having our annual conference. We had leaders from across the country in one room for lunch. And news of the El Paso shooting broke. And you could feel the ripple as the news traveled across this conference room. The reaction was palpable. Because we were in Washington D.C., we went and marched on the White House that evening and then marched to the Capitol to make a statement that it is time to change things. It was a very emotional reaction because we were all concentrated in one place at one time. And now that we’re all back spread out across the country, I think individually, we all still feel that same horror and terror when we hear of new shootings, but there are so many now that it’s hard to keep track.
Tragic as the increase in gun sales and gun violence is, I think we all want to live our lives with a freedom from fear. And I think that includes gun owners. It includes NRA members; it includes the most fierce advocate for gun violence prevention. It’s the key. We are all trying to live our lives with the freedom from fear. And I think if we can reduce the gun violence, the needless preventable deaths, I think we will get closer to doing that.
If you’d like to learn more about Moms Demand Action, text READY to 64433, or visit the momsdemandaction.org website.