Ed. — From the Sunday, May 28, print edition.
VIRGINIA BEACH — I am originally from Louisiana, known as a “sportsman’s paradise,” and I grew up in a gun-owning household. My dad, like many in the Deep South, hunted. We had deer heads on the wall. Guns were just part of my life.
It took until 2015 for gun violence to creep into my own life. My hometown of Lafayette was the site of a mass shooting at a local theater, the Grand 16, one my family had visited the day before two people died, nine were wounded and the gunman killed himself.
As a young adult, I moved to D.C., where I met the man I would marry. He had been serving in the National Guard for more than a decade. He was and remains a gun owner.
In 2017, we went to Las Vegas to celebrate his 30th birthday with my parents. On our last night there, we left my parents at Mandalay Bay and departed for the airport. My parents had to evacuate after the mass shooting there.
These incidents left my husband and me traumatized and enraged. In 2018, we joined in the March for Our Lives demonstration at the U.S. Capitol. We felt uplifted by our community, but we made the difficult decision to leave the D.C. area in 2020.
While on maternity leave with our first child that February, there had been six unrelated, midday shootings in our neighborhood, many at the local parks.
We moved to Virginia Beach to be closer to my husband’s family. He was born and raised here, and he is a Kellam High School and Old Dominion University alum.
Unfortunately, we have continued to feel the dark shadow of guns – from Nashville, closer to home with the weapon scares at Little Creek and Bayside and, especially, with the Newport News incident involving young children. We have two little ones of our own.
In March, I attended my first meeting of the local Moms Demand Action group, part of a national organization that advocates to make communities safer by supporting sensible gun laws and responsible gun ownership.
The local team leads walked us through the group’s priorities, including promoting safe and secure gun storage through Be SMART, a program that helps adults have conversations about safe behavior around weapons and work to prevent child deaths.
Steps are simply about ensuring weapons are secured safely and modeling responsible behavior around guns.
When I first heard about this process, my face flushed. I wondered, where is our gun right now? Is it even locked up? How could we not have thought about this? We have a curious three year old rummaging through our house every day.
And we did not have our gun locked up. We were the same couple who grew up around guns, who were tactically trained in gun safety, whose communities have all been affected by gun violence, who had marched against gun violence.
That night, my husband and I made a plan to safely lock up and store our gun separate from our ammunition.
I am sharing a personal, embarrassing story because I know we’re not alone. There are other individuals and parents like us out there. They are vehemently against gun violence but may not have thought about their own firearms.
I’m on a mission to remind parents like me and my veteran husband to securely store our guns and model responsible behavior for our kids – and, of course, for each other.
Let’s push our Virginia Beach School Board to commit to regularly circulating messages on secure gun storage. Each year at school orientation and summer break, a quick and simple reminder email to parents could save lives. Let’s push our pediatricians’ offices to ask if our guns are stored, because guns should not be the leading cause of death in children in America.
SMART is an acronym representing five points:
- Secure all guns in your home and vehicles.
- Model responsible behavior around guns.
- Ask about the presence of unsecured guns in other homes.
- Recognize the role of guns in suicide.
- Tell your peers to be SMART.
That last point can be embarrassing or uncomfortable, but it matters. A shocking 4.6 million children in the U.S. live in a household with at least one loaded, unlocked gun, according to a study first published by the Journal of Urban Health, which is a peer-reviewed periodical, using data from a 2015 survey.
Respondents in that survey self-reported how weapons they owned were stored in their own homes. That should make the estimated number of kids in homes with unsecured weapons startling to all of us. I’m thankful my home is no longer one of them.
The author is a mom, wife, international public health specialist, beach volleyball enthusiast and ukulele player who enjoys Tuesday night figure drawing classes. She is a member of the Moms Demand Action local group, and she serves as the VB/Norfolk Be SMART lead.
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