Parents’ petitions demand Tillis, Burr to back ‘common sense’ gun safety legislation
A group of mothers — and one father — gathered outside of Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’ office Thursday in Charlotte to deliver a petition demanding the passage of legislation regarding gun safety.
The delivery took place just over a week after the shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that killed 21 people on May 24,and nearly three weeks after a white 18-year-old shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y.
Volunteers with Moms Demand Action, a national group advocating for gun safety measures, visited Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s office and Tillis’ offices in Charlotte and Winston-Salem to drop off the petition.
The petition was signed by 19,000 North Carolinians, volunteers said.
Shannon Klug, a volunteer, said as a mother of three, school shootings hit particularly hard. She began volunteering with Moms Demand Action shortly after 17 people were killed in a shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
Klug is an Air Force veteran and a gun owner. She said she believes in the Second Amendment, but says easy access to guns is a problem, and some reforms are needed. These reforms start with a background check, Klug said.
Guns are the leading cause of death among youth in the United States, according to the New England Journal of Medicine and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Joe Biden, in an address to the country Thursday night, implored Congress to take legislative action against gun violence.
“Enough, enough,” he said repeatedly.
Michael Dierkes, a father of four children, says Moms Demand Action is asking Tillis to consider “common sense” gun legislation, including background checks, because he says there should be more scrutiny for those who want to buy a firearm.
“No child should die before their parents and certainly not at the end of a barrel,” Dierkes said.
At least 28 guns have been found on campuses of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools since Aug. 26, according to school district data. Following the shooting in Uvalde, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police announced they would increase patrols around elementary schools.
Tillis moderately supports improved background and mental health checks but is strongly against the banning of firearms, The Charlotte Observer previously reported. In the hours after the Texas school shooting, Tillis reportedly cautioned Democrats against having a “reflexive reaction” by trying to pass laws that would impinge on Second Amendment rights.
“Senator Tillis is part of a bipartisan group in the Senate seeking to find common ground solutions to curb gun violence that also protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans,” a spokesperson for the senator said in an email to the Observer on Friday.
On Friday, U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, a Charlotte Democrat, and Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather hosted a virtual event on gun violence.
Easy access to guns is a problem and measures need to be taken to make it more difficult to obtain them, Adams said.
“We know how close to home school shootings are,” Adams said. “We’ve reached a point in our country where people have legitimate concerns about making it home at the end of the day.”
Some of the reforms Adams called for included background checks and a crackdown on ghost guns.
Gun safety demands
The petition submitted by Moms Demand Action calls for:
▪ An expansion of background checks to all gun sales;
▪ Passage of a federal red flag law, a tool to temporarily remove guns from someone who has shown clear warning signs that they pose a danger to themselves or others;
▪ Confirmation of Steve Dettelbach, Biden’s nominee for director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“The agency that enforces our gun laws and proactively shuts off the pipeline of illegal guns has been understaffed and under-resourced for 20 years,” according to a statement from Everytown for Gun Safety, the organization helping to organize the petition. “The Senate needs to give it the resources it needs and confirm Steve Dettelbach as director so it can do its job.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
This story was originally published June 3, 2022 at 7:30 AM with the headline "Parents’ petitions demand Tillis, Burr to back ‘common sense’ gun safety legislation."
