HOLYOKE — Lyn Horan remembers the time many years ago she got a call from the emergency room at a Baltimore hospital asking her if she was sitting down.

She learned that a man facing eviction had put a gun to her mother’s head and fired twice. The gun misfired, so he pistol-whipped her. Her mother managed to escape behind a locked door, which the gunman tried to blow off before leaving to repair his weapon.

Her mother knew the man to be a tenant they were trying to evict from her building and she tried calling her 78-year-old friend June Maxwell, but she couldn’t get through. The gunman went to Maxwell’s room and shot her dead.

Horan, of Holyoke, learned that the man had schizophrenia and was not being treated for it.

“Mental health is part of the problem,” Horan said.

She was one of several speakers at a gun violence awareness event Monday at City Hall.

Mayor Joshua Garcia noted that the event came “once again in the wake of a deadly shooting in Holyoke, just down High Street.” David Rivera, 31, of Springfield was killed early Saturday, the Hampden County district attorney’s office said.

Monday would have been the 27th birthday of Hadiya Pendleton, a Chicago teen who marched in President Obama’s second inaugural parade, Jan. 21, 2013, and was shot and killed a week later.

Hadiya’s friends commemorated her by wearing orange, the color of hunter safety, and Anne Thalheimer of Holyoke said Wear Orange is now a national initiative.

Thalheimer was 18 in 1992 when a classmate at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington brought a semiautomatic SKS rifle to the college and began shooting. He killed her classmate Galen Gibson and a beloved teacher, Ñacuñan Saez.

Thalheimer said it was important to “honor those taken from us.”

With gun violence, she said, “You do not come out of it the same person you were before it happened.”

Garcia said the lack of action at the federal level in the wake of horrendous school shootings such as Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvalde puts more pressure on local government.

Actions such as putting police in school and Shot Spotter technology are sometimes controversial, he noted.

“We have to do something,” he said.

State Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, agreed that mental health was a critical issue and said much more needs to be done on the prevention side of gun violence.

On a recent foreign trip, he said, he was asked why there were so many school shootings in the U.S.

“I had no answer,” he said.

Holyoke resident Richard Purcell said he had an answer.

“It’s the guns,” he said, noting that mass school shootings never happened during his younger days in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Purcell called for the National Rifle Association to be abolished and for assault weapons to be eliminated.

Research shows there were two school shootings in the U.S. between 1940 and 1980, killing seven adults and no students. The numbers increased in the 1980s and have ballooned since, with 51 people killing in school shootings in the 2010s.

Wearing orange for the event were at least a dozen members of the community organization Roca, which works in Holyoke, Chicopee and Springfield to help young men who have run afoul of the law get back on track.

Jalen McDonald of Springfield, who’s involved with Roca, said people might be surprised how easy it is to get guns.

His suggestion? “Do more to get guns off the street.”

James Pentland can be reached at jpentland@gazettenet.com.