The Laurie Dann shootings took place on a beautiful spring day, the morning after I got home from college. My mother and I were in the kitchen when Laurie Dann came in with two guns and said we were hostages. She told us she had been raped, and her appearance gave her story credibility; she was wearing a trash bag around her waist. We gave her a pair of shorts from the laundry basket, and as she put them on I was able to take one gun. I took the clip out to win her trust. I learned about guns the summer after high school when I was recruited by the Olympic Committee to train for an obscure Olympic event-the modern pentathlon-which involves five events including target-shooting with a .22 caliber pistol.
My father came in, and we pleaded with Laurie Dann to put down her .32 caliber revolver, but she was becoming more irrational. Finally she allowed my parents to go out. I was alone with her for about 10 minutes when she saw the police moving around outside and shot me without warning, hitting me on the right side of my chest. I dove for cover in the pantry and carefully let myself out the back door, not knowing that she had gone upstairs, where she eventually took her own life.
I didn’t know what had happened at the school until I woke up in the hospital. I couldn’t believe that children had been shot. My being shot had not been terrifying because I had been entirely goal-oriented: how to get the gun, how to get out of the house, how to stay awake until I got to a doctor. I had no thoughts of death or terror until that gruesome image of a child being killed in a classroom.
During my month in Highland Park Hospital, I saw the news reports on the entire Laurie Dann shooting and I began asking how it could have happened. There seemed to me to be two distinct problems. One was a mental health problem, which involves so many issues. The second problem was gun control, and that was what interested me.
The idea that a single gun caused so much mayhem was what I chose to focus on. I think my training at Loyola Academy in Wilmette gave me a foundation to fall back on. The Jesuits there stressed education for social justice, and I took it to heart. We were taught that when an abuse or an injustice materializes, it becomes your responsibility to address it. Gunfire is the second leading cause of death among children. This is insane, and it’s a fact I like to throw in the face of the National Rifle Association when we’re in debate. To me, this is the statistic that hammers home. Guns are much more than a criminal problem.
After I was released from the hospital, I was asked to attend press conferences and I began researching the gun-control issue. I had always been interested in the process of lawmaking, but I kind of got the quick study. At 20, I was testifying before legislative committees. The next year at the University of Illinois was a real juggling act between classes and the swim team and working on the gun-control issue (driving to meetings, testifying at legislative hearings). The following summer I lobbied for gun control in Springfield and Washington.
I approach the gun-control issue the same way I approached competitive swimming: There’s a goal, and we can reach that goal within a reasonable time period. I don’t intend to spend my whole life running a gun-control group. This is a problem we need to fix, and then (we can) move on to other issues of violence and social inequity. This is an issue we should have solved 25 years ago, but the NRA has had a very effective strategy of saying, “It’s a right.”
A recent Harris Poll said that 90 percent of the population wants something like the Brady Bill. Gun-control advocates are a clear majority, and we need to make the numbers speak. This epitomizes the democratic process. On the other hand, the NRA’s lobbying efforts are financed in large part by a handful of dealers and manufacturers. The status quo only helps one entity-the firearms industry. The manufacturers and dealers are our main obstacle; without their support, the NRA becomes a paper lion.
Up to now the firearms industry and the NRA have set all the guidelines. For example, the NRA lobbied for the law that prevents computerizing records of where guns go, so now it’s very time-consuming to trace a gun used in a crime. Every other area in the world has computer technology to help accomplish the task, but not here.
People’s impression is that guns are like drugs, with illegal distribution, but guns all have legitimate sources. Most people are surprised that there’s very much a legal network of manufacturers and dealers that provides guns that eventually are used in crime. The public needs to establish the connection between the supply side and the damage that’s being done. There is a causal relationship between manufacturers and dealers and gun violence.
The joke of the whole gun-control debate is that if I want to market a toy gun, I have to go through a rigorous review, but to market a real gun, I don’t have to do anything. Manufacturers can make any kind of gun, and as many as they like. They push them off into the system of dealers (federally licensed dealers), largely through the mail, by the crate, and then we lose track of them. We don’t know where the guns go. There is no federal oversight. Guns are the only product we’ve allowed to have so little regulation. Yet people die from them.
There are specific initiatives before the national and state legislatures that can have an instantaneous effect on crime and gun violence. Nationally, there’s the Brady Bill and the Tax and Strict Liability Act, and in Illinois there are the Firearm Tax Act, the Handgun and Assault Weapon Strict Liability Act and the Firearm Commerce Act.
The Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence was founded in 1973 by four women who petitioned the Consumer Product Safety Commission to ban bullets as a hazardous substance. ICHV is now on an aggressive program to build a coalition of community groups, individuals, churches, businesses and the health care field. There are so many people who care but don’t know how to get involved. People can write all their government representatives and tell them to deal with the enforcement and the supply side of firearm violence.
Gun control is an issue Mayor Daley is heartfelt on. He’s very eloquent on this issue. He’s been working on gun control since his State’s Attorney days and is really committed to the issue. Probably statewide and nationally he is the leader.
There’s a cavalier attitude towards gun violence by our judicial system, in Chicago and in the whole state. A guy with an illegal gun comes into court, and the judge typically reduces the charges to a misdemeanor battery charge, which has nothing to do with firearms. So nothing ends up going on this person’s record, even though he’s already demonstrated a dangerous tendency of whipping out a gun in a public place. This may reflect our society’s tolerance of gun violence, but I think the judicial system must take a leadership role in intervention.
I don’t walk the streets in fear, but I do know that a shooting like the Laurie Dann incident could happen at any time, anywhere, and it does. A lot of other people are figuring that out. We want to prevent a shooting from ever happening. For me, the bottom line is lives.
