Pillsbury: Marching for gun reform on Mother’s Day
Valley Voices
Mothers, we don’t want to be single-issue voters. We care about a lot of things: women’s rights, defending the police, mental health, immigration, the fentanyl crisis, the environment. But we are now single-issue voters on gun safety.
Gun violence is the leading killer of children and teens in our country, the land of the free, home of the brave. This makes no sense. Why do our children, teachers, religious leaders, and check-out clerks have to be the brave ones in the face of gun violence when it should be our elected officials passing reasonable and much-needed gun safety laws?
Gun reform (not control) should not be a political issue. We as parents and community members all share the same goal, to raise our children in a safe place; to worry about grades, teenage heartache, winning lacrosse games and social media, not our children being killed at school or on the playground.
The vast majority of Americans, including gun owners such as my father and close friends, want sensible gun laws. Gov. Jared Polis signed four gun reform bills into law last month, including background checks, red-flag laws, establishing a three-day waiting period from purchase to receipt of a gun, and raising the buying age of guns from 18 to 21 years of age. I wish he had gone one step further and banned assault weapons. Why do we need high-capacity magazines and assault weapons — which are the guns of choice for mass killers? Why are these weapons so easily available? We don’t need them, end of story.
But the story sadly does not end, because week after maddening week we have mass shootings, ripping the hearts out of families, gutting communities, and breaking the soul of our country. Some politicians talk only of mental health, and yes that is part of it, but without access to guns, this would be a very different, less mortal story. It’s the guns, and it’s the access to the guns.
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We are broken. We are brave, but certainly not free to live our lives without worry. We have to make gun reform a bipartisan issue. There are reasonable solutions. We need Republicans and Democrats to come together on this issue and represent their constituents and pass federal gun safety measures to protect all of us. Or maybe we need to demand gun reform be a ballot issue.
Why march in Vail? Gun violence, whether from suicide or mass shootings can happen anywhere. No one is immune from gun violence. We cannot afford to be complicit. We must show up.
That’s why Mountain Moms Demand Action has organized a Mother’s Day March in Vail on Sunday, May 14. We’ll meet at the Covered Bridge at 1 p.m. to march through Vail Village, ending at Yeti’s Grind in Solaris Plaza. Wear orange, bring signs, and show up — rain or shine.
Cynthia Pillsbury is a mother of three who is involved in community organizations such as Vail Health Behavioral Health. She lives in Edwards.
