‘Don’t look away.’ March for Our Lives rally in Frankfort calls for stricter gun laws.
Wantrice Proctor said she wasn’t paying much attention to gun laws before her 17-year-old son Micheal Proctor, an honor roll student at Carter G. Woodson Academy in Lexington, died by gunfire.
“I did not realize this all was going on until it hit my front door, but I do now,” she told a few hundred people gathered on the steps of the Kentucky Capitol Saturday. “And I’m here.”
Demonstrators at the March for Our Lives rally in Frankfort called on legislators to enact stricter gun laws in response to increasing gun violence.
“The U.S. has more firearm homicides than any other developed nation,” Sam Pfeiffer, a volunteer organizer with March for Our Lives, told the crowd. “Is that the freedom we want?
“We have to hold the gun lobby accountable. They’re buying our lives,” Pfeiffer said. “We also have to address the social problems that contribute to gun violence,” including over-policing of minority groups and poverty.
She encouraged attendees to vote and to write their legislators to urge them to take action.
The rally was one of many held throughout the country Saturday, in the wake of the school shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead in Uvalde, Texas, and the mass shooting that left 10 people dead at a Buffalo, N.Y. grocery store last month.
The March for Our Lives organization is calling for policy changes including “a national licensing and registry system that promotes responsible gun ownership; a ban on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and other weapons of war; policies to disarm gun owners who pose a harm risk; and a national gun buy-back program to reduce the estimated 265–393 million firearms in circulation by at least 30%,” according to its website.
While mass shootings get lots of media attention, “the day-to-day gun violence” also testifies to the need for reform, said Kathi Crowe, a leader with Moms Demand Action of Lexington.
In Kentucky, she said a “Crisis Aversion Rights Retention” bill has not made it out of committee during the past two legislative sessions. The bill would set up a system to allow law enforcement officers to get a court order “when a respondent poses a present danger of causing serious physical injury to themselves or others through purchasing, possessing, or receiving a firearm,” according to the Legislative Research Commission.
But, Crowe said, more people are getting involved in the effort to make change. She said more than 2,000 people have recently expressed interest in joining Moms Demand Action in Kentucky, and the organization is holding an informational meeting at 2 p.m. next Saturday at Idle Hour Park in Lexington to help get new members connected.
“People are fed up,” Crowe said. “They’re just really tired of this gun violence that has really reared its head in Lexington and Louisville,” as well as more rural parts of the state, recently.
Those in attendance at the Frankfort rally participated in chants of “Vote them out,” “No more silence, end gun violence,” “Thoughts and prayers are not enough” and “Don’t look away.”
They held a moment of silence in memory of all the lives lost to gun violence until finally a lone voice broke out: “And let perpetual light shine upon them all.”
This story was originally published June 11, 2022 at 4:54 PM.
