Local 'Moms Demand Action' react to Santa Fe school shooting

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MISHAWAKA, Ind. --- The local Moms Demand Action group spoke out on Saturday about the most recent school shooting at a Texas high school.

Group members said they are devastated for the families of the 10 people killed in the Santa Fe High School shooting on Friday.

“Schools should be safe places,” said Liz Anderson, Moms Demand Action South Bend. “Parents, teachers, and students should have the right to learns in freedom and peace.”

Anderson said equally every communities should be safe spaces and no one should have to live in fear.

Moms Demand Action held their meeting at a church in Elkhart, where they discussed the most recent shooting.

“More and more of what I see is that people are getting fed up,” Anderson said. “The Facebook messages, at least in my feed, have started to turn to ‘what do we do about this’ or ‘tell me how to get involved.’”

The group spent an hour talking about upcoming events including a day where they encourage the community to wear orange for National Gun Violence Awareness weekend. Click here for event information.

“Groups across the country, including right here in South Bend, are going to be meeting together to raise our voices, to remember those lost and to show unity that Americans have around this issue, saying we want change,” she said.

In an ABC News poll from April, more than 62 percent of Americans support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons. 85 percent say yes to red flag laws, which empower police to take guns away from people judged to be a danger to themselves or others. And 57 percent of people say enacting new laws to try to prevent gun violence should be a higher priority than protecting the right to own a gun.

“We’re playing a lot of defense on the state level and on the federal level,” Anderson said. “But we’re getting to the point now, where we are starting to play some real offense in terms of wanting to pass laws that are really proactive.”

The group is still lauding the gun safety resolution the South Bend Common Council passed in 2017. However, Anderson said they are not losing focus on the several shooting deaths just in 2018.

“It doesn’t stay in the news like these big school shootings, but a family in a community is torn apart every time and we say it’s acceptable to live in a country where this rate of gun violence that’s so far past the rate of any developed nation there are things that we can do there are things that our law makers can do that we know work to reduce the rate of gun violence,” she said.

Moms Demand Action is also hosting voting registration drives closer to the mid-term elections. Anderson said they are helping to set up Student Demand Action groups in several schools in the county.


 

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