Paralyzed Politicians Meet Marching Moms
Oregonian 4/20/2000 (ProQuest)

One year after the Columbine tragedy, this mom wonders what it takes to get gun control
Every time I sit down to type I think of my highschool typing teacher, who was also my basketball coach. Dave Sanders was a great teacher and a great coach.

He was murdered one year ago at my high school in Littleton, Colo. I still struggle with the feelings that surface from that massacre. I watch television news anchors somberly call what happened at Columbine the worst- ever high-school killing, and I still can't quite believe it.

I was deeply shocked by the shootings. I was only able to tell my then 4-year-old daughter that I was sad because a bad guy shot my basketball coach. I flew back for the memorial services last April.

Along with my two older brothers, who also attended Columbine, I stood and listened to the hurt that hate produced. I hugged former teachers and coaches and cried with former classmates.

Over the last year I've tried to make sense of the whole thing -- along with the rest of the country. I came home from Littleton and wrote letters to many of the teachers letting them know that long before their current pain, they'd touched my life in profound ways.

But my letters didn't address my anger at how easily the two killers had obtained their guns. Just after Columbine, I watched on TV as police led small children at a California daycare center across a road and away from a gunman.

Since Columbine, my feelings have turned from shock to denial and finally to anger at a society that effectively perpetuates Columbine- like tragedies by an unwillingness to pass common-sense gun control measures.

I'm taking my anger to Washington, D.C., where on Mother's Day, May 14, I'll march along with a million other mothers to demand sensible gun control legislation. I believe it's time to change our consciousness and say it's unacceptable for us to lose any more of our children to gunfire.

Without action another school massacre is a matter of when -- not if. I don't want to ban guns. I want to protect children from a product that's designed to kill and kill efficiently.

America has a blind spot on the issue of guns. Much like abortion, racism and homophobia, it stirs strong emotions that mask reason of any kind. But when our children are being slaughtered needlessly surely America's collective conscience can't avoid being pricked, no matter how much money is shoveled at elected officials.

Second Amendment advocates are fond of the bumper sticker "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That's true. But if the two killers at Columbine were armed with knives and baseball bats, their spree would have been a good deal less efficient. I wouldn't have spent a day at my coach's funeral, a week before and after crying and a year trying to comprehend the lack of leadership and action taken by the people we elect to govern our lives.

In the year since Columbine no meaningful gun control legislation has become law. Our government is impotent, paralyzed with fear at the prospect of unsettling the gun lobbyists. It makes me wonder what it will take to effect change.

My hope is that a million moms on the Mall in Washington and other cities around the country will be a strong force. There are 20 rallies planned in different locations on May 14 and hundreds of buses are bringing moms to D.C. from as far away as Texas and California.

I pray we'll succeed because if we don't, by the end of the day that you read this, another 12 kids will have been murdered -- with guns. Heidi Yewman lives in Vancouver, Wash.

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