I applauded when presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley put forth strong gun control platforms right on the heels of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.
However, brave stances have always been taken by Democratic presidents and candidates after such horrific events as Columbine (1999), Virginia Tech (2007), Newtown, Conn. (2012), Aurora (2012) and Charleston, S.C. (2015) — to name onlya few.
But congressionally, nothing happens.
The fervent adherence by conservative (and even some progressive) politicians to the National Rifle Association’s claim that any limitation on the right to bear arms — even for convicted felons, domestic abusers or the seriously mentally ill — is akin to mass weapon confiscation could render progress hopeless.
That’s why both President Obama and Clinton have recently sworn to go around Congress with executive actions on universal background checks.
In 1999, right after Columbine, I traveled with a group of Colorado high school students to Washington to lobby Congress. Some Democrats promised support. Yet what sticks in my mind is the voice of a Republican senator from the South, who listened skeptically, and said: “Y’all will soon go back to your schools and your life, but we will still be here, year after year.”
And the problem goes deeper than no restrictions on firearms. Few people know is that the NRA’s stranglehold on politicians also morphs into massive restrictions barring research on the public health effects of gun violence.
In 1996, congressional Republicans mandated that a bill to study traumatic brain injury could in no way “allow funding to go to research that might be used in whole or in part to advocate or promote gun control.”
Now mass murders — the shooting of more than four people in the same episode — have increased to an average of more than one a day. This year, there were 294 in the 274 days between January and September. (The death of four in Colorado on Halloween will certainly ratchet up the October count.)
Add to those sobering statistics the high incidents of black-on-black gun deaths in our nation’s ghettos, the increasing cases of children accidently killing siblings or friends in gun-stocked homes, and the shocking fact that a full 60 percent of gun deaths in America are suicides.
Yet, government agencies are prevented from even studying such slaughter as a public health concern?
Research done by non-governmental entities has revealed that states with stronger gun laws have fewer gun deaths. So maybe there is more hope state by state.
In Colorado, even though two Democratic legislators were recalled and another resigned her seat under pressure from gun rights groups in 2014, the legislation that provoked the recall — a 15-round limit on ammunition magazines and the extension of background checks to private and online gun sales — still stands, despite intense efforts in 2015 to repeal it.
Just last year, Washington state voters approved a measure to expand background checks by a 60 percent margin; Maine is expected to hold a similar vote in 2016. A victory would make it the 19th state to do so. And California may follow suit.
Maybe a citizen initiative is the way to go. Nationally, about 85 percent of Americans support background checks. It is easy for the NRA to “pocket” individual politicians and hold them hostage, yet much harder for it to put whole populations in its pocket.
And perhaps there is hope with a new generation of voters.
As gun control advocate Tom Mauser — who lost his son, Daniel, in the Columbine massacre — recently said to me, “Just like they did in the gay marriage movement — looked around and said ‘Why not?,’ the millennials will look around at gun violence and the lack of sensible gun restrictions and say, ‘Why?’ “
Dottie Lamm (dolamm59@ ), former first lady of Colorado, is a social worker and political activist.
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