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Group Marches Through Williamstown to Advocate for Gun Safety
By Rebecca Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
07:48PM / Sunday, December 13, 2015
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A crowd participates in a march to advocate for more gun safety in Williamstown on Sunday.


WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Carrying signs reading “#enough,” “change the laws or change Congress” and “Stop the NRA” and wearing orange knit caps, a group of upward of 65 people walked down Spring Street on Sunday afternoon calling for change to current gun control laws.

The Williamstown “Orange Walk for Gun Safety” was one of 100 across the nation held this weekend and the only one in Berkshire County. It was held on the eve of the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 20 first-graders and six teachers and staff members dead in a small Connecticut town.

Organized by Williamstown residents Holly Hardman, Kris Beanblossom Savitsky and Cecilia Hirsch, the group began on the steps of the First Congregational Church, where Savitsky read a part of an essay by Adam Gopnik that originally appeared in the April 30, 2007, New Yorker, right after the Virginia Tech massacre.

“This was so hard to read the first time I read it,” she said in introducing the passage, titled “Shootings.”

“The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were OK. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America.”

Hardman then listed off just a few of the mass shootings in America in the last years - Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Texas Christian University, Colorado Springs, San Bernadino - and invited the group to walk behind her down Spring Street to the park at the corner of Walden Street. There, Hardman invited anyone to speak about why they had joined the march; one woman said she had a new grandson and wanted a better world for him and another woman said her daughter’s roommate had shot and killed himself and an ex-girlfriend in a public place.

Hirsch then read a poem titled “Gun Culture,” this one by actor and theater educator Kelly Trumbull that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Feb. 23, 2013.

“Culture + Guns = GUN CULTURE. This is the culture WE have created. This is the culture WE choose to live in. This is hate culture. This is rage culture. This is shoot-your-neighbor-in-the-face culture. Let's rewrite this equation. Get it right this time.”

After the march, Hardman said she hadn’t known what to expect when organizing the event but was happy with the turnout. Word of the march spread over social media, particularly through a Facebook event she had created.

“Then people started sharing the invitation,” she said. “You could see the energy starting to build to support the cause.”

Hardman said her anger at the lack of common-sense gun safety measures really boiled over after the Sandy Hook shooting.

“Since then, it’s been one after another,” she said. “We are so fed up.”

But she said she was optimistic that their voices would be heard through events like this one around the country.

“How encouraging to see that our community would want to join this incredibly important cause and is ready to make a change,” she said. “It’s wonderful that so many people came.”

 

Holly Hardman kicks off an Orange Walk for Gun Safety on Sunday in Williamstown. About 75 people walked under the hashtag #enough.

Posted by iBerkshires.com on Sunday, December 13, 2015

 

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