Lindsay Lange (left) and Kristin DuMont speak at a Richmond Moms Demand Action event at Main Line Brewery in December. (Photo by Jay Paul)
The first Moms Demand Action meeting I attended was in December 2017. I had been following the gun violence prevention organization online for years, but when I learned about local groups that met in person, I cleared my calendar and made my way to a chilly church basement to learn more. About 10 other activists were gathered there, talking about upcoming volunteer activities and doling out vanilla sheet cake to commemorate the organization’s fifth anniversary. I signed up that night.
We didn’t expect very many people for our next gathering, scheduled for late February 2018. Then an armed young man stormed his high school in Parkland, Florida, taking 17 lives and injuring 17 more. The Parkland community was devastated. The nation was horrified. The Richmond Moms Demand Action group heard from hundreds of people who wanted to do something to prevent this type of tragedy from happening again, and we scrambled to find a bigger venue for our meeting. More than 300 people showed up to grieve and rage and ask what could be done to stop the next shooting. Enough was enough.
Over the five years since, America has seen 2,670 more mass shootings (defined as those with three or more deaths) and lost 183,702 lives to gun violence, according to gunviolencearchive.org). More than 100 American lives are lost every day to gun violence, and hundreds more people are wounded by firearms daily. It is almost impossible to absorb data this grim.
Clearly, enough was not enough.
Following the May 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that took 21 lives, approximately 150 people came together to relaunch our Richmond Moms Demand Action group. Many local organizations across the country had stopped gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Richmond was no exception. Now, as the news revealed the catastrophic failure of both government policies and law enforcement to protect students and teachers from gun violence, moms in Richmond and the rest of the nation were galvanized once again.
This time, after decades of inaction, Congress finally responded to our collective trauma. In June 2022, the House and the Senate passed the first gun safety legislation in almost 30 years. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was a welcome step in the right direction, but there is still a lot of work to be done to keep our families safe. Recent shootings at a Walmart in Chesapeake and at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, among too many others, demonstrate how urgent our work is.
And those are just the shootings that made headlines. Daily gun violence plagues the commonwealth, disproportionately impacting communities of color.
Here in Richmond, more than 20 women volunteered for leadership roles in our Moms Demand Action group, and we are already making headway in addressing gun violence. Leading up to November’s election, we canvassed, phone-banked and text-banked for gun sense candidates running for Congress in Virginia. Gun safety is an issue Virginians care about, which was clear on Election Day.
Our Be SMART program teaches adults how to keep children safe from gun violence, secure all guns in your homes and vehicles, model responsible behavior around guns, ask about the presence of unsecured guns in other homes, recognize the role of guns in suicide and tell your peers to Be SMART.
The statewide Moms Demand Action volunteer base is gearing up for Advocacy Day on Jan. 13 at the Virginia State Capitol. We will meet with our elected officials about the importance of meaningful gun violence prevention laws and remind them that Virginians on both sides of the aisle consistently poll over 80% in favor of common sense gun violence prevention legislation, with 93% supporting universal background checks, 88% favoring an increase in the penalty for reckless storage of unsecured firearms that endanger children, 86% supporting measures prohibiting domestic abusers from buying or owning a gun, 81% approving of prohibiting anyone convicted of a hate crime from buying or owning a gun, and 81% supporting an expansion of Virginia’s background check system to cover all transfers of gun ownership, according to everytown.org.
As we continue to grow, Richmond Moms Demand Action is looking for other ways to curb gun violence in our community, including supporting local gun violence interruption groups and educating the public about the emergency substantial risk order law that Virginia’s General Assembly passed in 2020. It created a court process to temporarily remove firearms and restrict their purchase while an individual is at a heightened risk of being a danger toward themself or others.
I know the gun violence epidemic in America is terrifying and discouraging. As the mom of four young kids, I don’t go anywhere without looking for the exits or scanning crowds for signs of potential danger. And I know there are no places in America exempt from gun violence; from churches to schools, from stores to clubs, from parades to homes, gun violence has made its way into every aspect of American life. We don’t have to live like this. We don’t have to die like this. Enough is enough.
Kristin DuMont is the co-local group lead of the Richmond Moms Demand Action group.
