“No more silence, end gun violence!” chanted students outside Framingham High School on Wednesday. Students across Massachusetts staged walkouts to demand lawmakers take action to prevent school shootings. This follows the latest school shooting in Nashville on March 27 in which six people were killed, three of whom were children.
These walkouts were organized by Students Demand Action and Moms Demand Action, two gun violence prevention groups.
Jennifer Robinson, co-leader of the Massachusetts chapter of Moms Demand Action, is the mother to two young teens. She spoke with Jim Braude and Margery Eagen on Boston Public Radio on Thursday to talk about her work with the group since she joined in 2019, something spurred after repeatedly reading about gun violence in the news.
“I couldn’t look them in the eyes without trying to be part of the solution,” she said.
Moms Demand Action is a national grassroots organization that has about 30,000 volunteers in Massachusetts. (“They’re fed up,” Robinson said.) According to her, the group is more than moms: dads, veterans, gun owners and hunters are also members. The group lobbies lawmakers to pass safer gun laws and works with communities to “encourage a culture of responsible gun ownership,” according to their website.
In Massachusetts, a top priority for Moms Demand Action is to require at least five hours of live firearm training for gun owners — a requirement that Robinson called “common sense.” Robinson said these laws are not meant to be a burden for law-abiding citizens.
“What we want is smart gun ownership,” she said. Robinson says trainings should also cover safe storage, teaching gun owners to store their firearms and ammunition separately and locked away to keep them out of children’s reach.
Massachusetts hasn’t passed new significant gun safety legislation since the red flag law, according to Robinson.
For Moms Demand Action, Robinson says that a “real bone that [they] have to pick with the Legislature” is ghost guns. The untraceable “do-it-yourself” weapons are constructed with gun parts bought separately, or even with 3D-printed parts. They don’t have serial numbers, something that’s allowed in Massachusetts.
“Just because it’s a part doesn’t mean it’s not a gun. So, let’s put serial numbers on it,” she said. “Let’s also make it against the law.”
Gov. Maura Healey said on Boston Public Radio last month that she supports banning ghost guns.
Some of Massachusetts other top officials are pushing for changes for gun safety. Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced that her office is developing a gun safety unit. State Treasurer Deb Goldberg is also asking the Legislature to divest the state’s pension fund from firearm manufacturers, where about $1.5 million of the $92 billion fund is invested in such companies — a measure Robinson says she personally supports.
For Moms Demand Action, a recent focus is to push companies to speak out against gun violence. In Massachusetts, the chapter just started a subcommittee to talk with corporations about publicly supporting gun safety.
Robinson said there’s been a major shift since Moms Demand Action formed 10 years ago.
“If you look at the way the conversation has changed in the last 10 years since Moms Demand Action came on the scene, you couldn’t even have these conversations,” she said. “We have seen a change in the conversation, and people are fed up. So I do think that we just have to keep chipping away.”
