Stirred by the massacre last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., about 200 supporters of expanded gun control rallied outside the National Rifle Association’s lobbying office on Capitol Hill today. The gun rights organization has been noticeably silent since Friday’s carnage, which left dead 20 six- and seven-year-old students, six school employees, the gunman’s mother and the gunman himself.
“Shame on the NRA,” was a common chant from the crowd gathered outside 410 First Street SE. Many held signs reading “Stop the NRA,” while others identified people as teachers using their lunch breaks to join the demonstration.
The protest was organized by CREDO Mobile, a wireless phone company that serves progressive causes.
In his remarks at a prayer vigil last night in Newtown, President Obama hinted he would take up gun control as an issue in his second term, following a first term in which he visited four U.S. communities in the wake of mass shootings. “In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens—from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators—in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” Obama said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said on Meet the Press Sunday morning that she is planning to introduce a renewal of the law that banned the manufacture, sale and possession of assault weapons.
While the NRA rally filled the building’s driveway and surrounding sidewalk with gun control supporters, a few detractors stopped by. Larry Ward, a political media consultant who works nearby, shouted back his belief that the shooting spree carried out by 20-year-old Adam Lanza would have been averted if someone at the school had been armed.
“If one teacher or principal had been armed, these children could have been saved,” said Ward, who identified himself as a gun owner living in Northern Virginia. Ward said his firm consults for Republican and libertarian clients, but that the NRA is not one of them. “It breaks my heart what happened in Connecticut. But the truth is there is more than the gun control answer for this problem. Perhaps the answer is to allow teachers and principals and other people to defend themselves.”
Educators in the crowd disagreed.
“I’ve never shot a gun before, and I don’t plan on it ever,” said Maggie Bertke, who teaches a kindergarten class in the D.C. Public Schools system. “I don’t want anyone to put a gun in my hand in a classroom full of children.”
Bertke said she was off last Friday for training, but added that she and her colleagues reacted to news of the Sandy Hook horror with “shock and sadness.”
Bertke said that despite the randomness of Lanza’s rampage, seeing such a story prompted her to consider what her reaction might have been. “It made me think of what I would have to do,” she said, thinking of Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old first-grade teacher who was killed after securing her students in a closet.
Additionally, Bertke and her colleagues are facing the challenge of answering their own young students’ questions about Newtown. She said DCPS distributed talking points to its teachers today, and that she is reminding her class that “these things don’t happen very often.”
Still, some in the crowd were intimately familiar with gun violence. Eddie Weingart, a Silver Spring, Md. resident, held a sign reading, “I am a victim of gun violence.” He told reporters of his own ordeal in February 1981, when he witnessed his mother’s first husband kill her with a 12-gauge shotgun in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. Weingart’s own life was spared, he said, when the shotgun misfired after his mother’s killer turned the weapon on him.
“My immediate reaction is I thought back to my childhood,” he said. “There was a certain level of survivors guilt. I remember my fear and my rage.” Weingart, who works as a massage therapist, it took him about a full day after Friday’s news to come to grips with what happened in Connecticut, and he decided to make himself an advocate, starting with a Saturday evening demonstration in Silver Spring.
“In the wake of what’s happened I’m making myself more visible,” he said.
