At 7:15 a.m. Monday, a social worker in Easthampton typed 23 addresses into an email and let it fly. As she absorbed gruesome news from Orlando, Lena Wilson had spent Sunday embracing the wisdom of labor activist Joe Hill, who’d sent a telegram to a friend in 1915 with this admonition before his own execution: “Don’t mourn, organize.”
“Hello, all,” her email began.
Wilson lit up social media for three days. Wednesday night, she and others succeeding in bringing 1,000 people downtown, turning Main Street into a massive outdoor wake for the victims of Sunday’s mass shooting. “We are especially looking for access to candles for an event of this magnitude,” Wilson had written in her email two days before.
How right she was. A rooftop photo taken by Northampton police officer Adam Van Buskirk — which appeared on our front page Thursday and here again today — depicted City Hall and a sea of people, the scene lit by the setting sun. It was one of the largest crowds assembled downtown in recent memory.
The headlines said one thing. Van Buskirk’s photo showed, head by head by bowed head, that something outrageous had happened and people were not going to simply accept it.
By streaming hundreds strong into downtown Northampton, from around the city, region and other New England states, people signaled the depth of their grief over the nation’s 47th mass shooting since an assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Early Sunday, Omar Mateen used a military-style rifle he’d been able to buy legally to kill 49 people, an act that pushed to 411 the number of people killed in the U.S. by such weapons since 2004.
The showing downtown made clear that Northampton remains a spiritual home of the LGBT movement. And so it was here that gay, lesbian and transgender people came to console one another over an attack that targeted their community. They sang, held signs, shared stories and cried.
One of the 49 people slain was Kimberly “KJ” Morris a former resident of Northampton known for her ebullient spirit. She was killed by Mateen inside the Pulse nightclub, where she worked as a bouncer. One of her closest friends, Aime Fife, climbed to the top of the City Hall steps to share memories. When you are grieving, it can help to allow the despair fully inside; Fife brought listeners deep into her loss.
Many others spoke as night came on, when the candles came out, those tiny symbols of the wish to defy darkness.
As she looked around her, Wilson says she felt a new connection with the city and its people.
That connection is desperately needed in weeks like this. And so is hope.
Time will tell, but there is a sense that news of Sunday’s killings struck a chord with a nation that is fed up with violence.
In an extraordinary departure from the norm, a sitting president ripped into the expected presidential nominee of the opposition party, after that candidate suggested that President Obama is “not tough, not smart or he’s got something else in mind.” The implication that the president was somehow involved in the Orlando tragedy is lunacy, pure and simple.
On Wednesday, a courageous senator from Connecticut may have broken part of the logjam over gun regulation by staging a nearly 15-hour filibuster, coming away with what he said was a promise by Republican leaders to hold votes on two issues. Neither of them involves the necessary and overdue re-regulation of assault weapons. But it was a victory nonetheless.
And on Thursday, the Boston Globe wrapped its print edition with a special four-page editorial package called “Make it Stop.” Inside, the newspaper documented the lethality of assault-style weapons, charted recent mass shootings and called out six sitting senators who the paper argued stand in the way of passing common-sense gun reform.
A “Take Action” section on the Globe’s website allows visitors to tweet at and email these six lawmakers — Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.; Richard Burr, R-N.C.; Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D.; Ron Johnson, R-Wisc.; and Rob Portman, R-Ohio.
Unseating those senators may be one way to make it stop. But the Globe also noted that everyday Americans, if they hold investments in certain mutual funds, play a role in propping up the American gun culture. In 2015, the sale of guns and ammunition was a $15 billion business in America, the Globe’s coverage notes. People may not know that their retirement funds are invested in gun company stocks, but that ignorance oils the murder industry and comes at a huge cost.
As of today, polls show that 57 percent of Americans support the restoration of a federal ban on the sale of assault weapons. But the Senate said no to that, 60-40, in 2013 in the wake of 26 deaths inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. It shows no signs of coming to its senses. Barring major election upsets, Congress will remain the place where good ideas about gun control go to die.
Hello, all. Can we find the focus, the numbers and the determination to make it stop?