More than a dozen spoken word artists performed pieces inspired by gun violence at local restaurant Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C. the night before the March for Our Lives.

Busboys and Poets, established in 2005, is a community gathering place named after the American poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in the 1920s before gaining recognition as a poet.

According to their tribal statement: “Busboys and Poets is a community where racial and cultural connections are consciously uplifted… a place to take deliberate pause and feed your mind, body and soul… a space for art, culture and politics to intentionally collide… we believe that by creating such a space we can inspire social change and begin to transform our community and the world.”

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Busboys and Poets on 14^thand V street, The D.C. Youth Poetry Slam, Sixdegrees.org, Once Common Unity and Split this Rock cosponsored an event called Louder Than A Gun – Open Mic for Our Lives. More than a dozen young activists performed spoken word pieces inspired by gun violence, school shootings, racism, sexism and more.

“When I say something like ‘make some noise’ or I introduce someone to this stage, we need to make noise like we’re saving lives tomorrow,” Split This Rock Director of Youth Programs and event host Joseph Green said. “We need to make noise like we’re sending a message to the people who have been making decisions that have cost us our lives for years.”

Similar to Busboys and Poets, Split This Rock is named after a line in “Big Buddy,” a poem by Langston Hughes. The organization encourages poets to accept a greater role in public life by teaching and celebrating work that calls out injustice and invokes social change. Joseph Green, dressed in a t-shirt printed with the face of Martin Luther King Jr. wearing a gold crown, brought his organization’s energy and encouragement to the event when performing a piece about his son and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I am overwhelmed by the irrational rankings of a society too busy arguing about whether or not black lives are important enough to fight for, to actually fight for black lives,” Green said.

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One Common Unity, another co-sponsor of the event, is an organization that works to break cycles of violence by building healthy communities through music, arts, and peace education.

Rodney Johnson, a volunteer with Split This Rock and One Common Unity, is a lanky young poet and rapper, who is known on SoundCloud as “one great bastard.” As the crowd roared for the first performer, he took the stage with a huge smile on his face. Audience members showed support and appreciation by snapping their fingers and clapping their hands or shouting things like “word” and “shezus.”

“We don’t even talk to our youth about weapons ya’ll, turn the TV on and Call of Duty gives the lesson,” Johnson said.

Actor, musician and philanthropist Kevin Bacon sat quietly in the audience next to his wife, Kyra Sedgwick. Bacon attended the event in support of his charity SixDegrees.org, which allows ordinary people to become “celebrities for their own causes” by donating or raising money for local charities across the nation.

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Dani Miller, a high school student from Winston Churchill High School in Maryland, spoke about oppression and standing up for the lives of others:

“And I’m tired of writing poems about oppression, probably just as tired as you are of hearing them,” Miller said. “But we both aren’t as tired as the women who are forced to let politicians make decisions about their bodies, as 10 year-old girls who take skinny as a compliment, and as children who have to hide under desks and text their mom’s they think they are going to die, as people who can’t afford health insurance, as anyone who has had to fight for their lives and their own humanity as a means of survival. I’m tired of writing poems about oppression, and that is why I keep writing them.”

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Washington D.C. native Tony Keith is in his last year of a PhD education program focused on student engagement with spoken word poetry. In 1999 his friend, Gary Hopkins, was killed by police. He wrote his poem after the shooting of Michael Brown.

“There’s a correlation between the way we treat money and the way we treat people,” Keith said. “Cash, coin, bills and bodies all commodities meant to be traded in exchange for products, goods and services. The denomination depends on our purpose, but a lot of us don’t know what our purpose is, so all we do is consume. Rarely do we create, and the result is that our wealth has become low with a really high interest rate, and somehow, we’ve defaulted. We’ve been told that some of our payments arrived a little bit too late, and granted we have our checks and balances, but let’s be honest, none of my checkbooks are really balanced. We need to check our balance. Check to determine the status of what our account is because the last time I checked we were deeply in the red, and we used to be in the black. Now, blood covered brown men, hands up, holes in their backs, racism is making withdrawals ya’ll.”

Several students from Parkland, Florida spoke at the event. Diego Pfeiffer, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said that poetry and music hold the power to heal.

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“I came to talk, to push and tug at heartstrings for change, but voices caught against the wind can never really be the same. My voice is caught in lives I never thought I’d touch, and those whose touch I will never feel again. My eyes can’t focus on a future because they are so focused on the dark and horrid past. A darkness that protrudes each and pore, that fills my head with sorrow and guilt, guilt that right now I’m standing where others have fallen before me.”

The venue vibrated with cheers after the eloquent performances of each artist and women could be seen wiping tears away from their eyes. The young activists spoke with passion and conviction, inspiring each and every member of the audience for much longer than the duration of the event.

“Have a wonderful evening,” Green said. “Please go out and support in whatever way you are able to support tomorrow and in the future.”

The post Open Mic for Our Lives appeared first on Gun March 2018.

Patricia Herzog-Mesrobian strolled up and down the Amtrak train from Chicago to Washington, D.C. with a smile on her face, one of the more social passengers on the train.

Herzog-Mesrobian spent 16 years working as a nurse in New York, and she describes her time in the hospital as the most amazing gift she has ever been given. Although she is “very anti-gun,” Herzog-Mesrobian says mental health should be part of the gun control conversation.

“I would see, on a daily basis, people coming into the clinic and therapists doing amazing work,” Herzog-Mesrobian said. “They are the firefighters of mental health. They are metaphorically running into burning buildings.”

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Now, living on the East Side of Milwaukee, Herzog-Mesrobian devotes her time to the development of local children, working as a paraprofessional for the past 20 years at the Maple-Dale Indian Hill School District. Although the Maple Dale community has a strong sense of safety, she admits that the active shooter drills are scary for her students.

“Going to this march is changing my life,” Herzog-Mesrobian said. “I’m a parent and I’m out here for these kids.”

Herzog-Mesrobian has attended several large demonstrations in the past, from the 2017 Tax March to Get Out the Vote. The self-labeled activist tried to decide between attending the March for Our Lives in Madison or Milwaukee on Thursday morning, before buying a last-minute train ticket to the nation’s capital, since several members of her family planned to be in D.C. on the same weekend.

“Nothing was put in place. I just sort of went!” Herzog-Mesrobian said. “I don’t even know where I’m going to sleep tonight.”

Having three relatives who have served in the military, she describes her family as “all-American.” Her father served in the Army, her late twin brother served in the Navy, and her nephew is a Marine. She admits that politics can be a very touchy subject when talking with her family.

“You have to be really careful because we’re so polarized. People are very sensitive. I don’t even know how to ask my family who they voted for,” Herzog-Mesrobian said.

She said that activism is something that comes naturally, and she has caught the fever.

“My mom and dad were poll workers for years,” Herzog-Mesrobian said. “You need to do what you have to do to help, so I’m going to be out there for the first time knocking on doors for 2020.”

The post The Milwaukee Woman Who Took a Last-Minute Train appeared first on Gun March 2018.

Chen, 25, works in a small gun store nestled on a quiet block in Arlington, Virginia, only three miles from the White House. It has a door that opens with a handgun handle. Its website touts that it sells “high-end sporting and self defense arms and accessories.” Inside, the store bustles with activity only hours after the D.C. gun march. The diverse clientele strolling through the shop consists of women, whites, Hispanics and African-Americans.

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Chen is a graduate student studying National Security at Georgetown with hopes of one day working for the Department of Defense or Homeland Security, and he finds a particular interest in history as it pertains to guns and war.

He spoke heavily on the nomenclature used in the media to describe guns and weaponry and how it is often incorrect.

“I think a lot of journalists, you know and don’t take this personally,” said Chen. “But that’s just not what they specialize in, and it’s hard for them. A job in journalism means fair balance.”

He went on to explain the terms like semi versus fully automatic, assault weapons and explained that the textbook definition of an assault rifle is a Select fire weapon using an intermediate caliber so select fire basically means it can go from semi-automatic to fully automatic or some variant of fully automatic fire.

Chen had a lot of insight on the gun debate, partly because he spent his childhood bonding with his dad, who is a trauma surgeon in California, over target shooting and collecting guns.

“Where my dad was more interested in target guns, I just had an interest in older guns so I kind of had to cajole him over the years to switch over and be interested,” said Chen.

The gun debate sparks conversation about whether or not the Second Amendment is archaic.

“I understand how people think that way, but also the Constitution didn’t include social media, so if the Second Amendment only applies to muskets does that mean that the First Amendment only applies to print and how loud you can shout? Does that mean we all need to control social media or have government mandated accounts and ban assault accounts?” he laughed. “I know that that’s a gross generalization, but it’s the prospective that worries me. What concerns me is how many times until we say that could never happen here, and then it does.”

According to Chen, the average gun owner in Virginia does not necessarily fit a profile. He said that gun owners encompass men and women of all backgrounds including a spike in gun owners in the LGBTQ+ community after the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in Orlando, Florida in 2016. An organization called the Pink Pistols saw an increase in membership after fear of hate crimes.

“We do need to talk about guns, we need to talk about it. That’s how democracy works; we work to come to an agreement, to listen to each other,” said Chen. “You will find the anti-gun people talking with the anti-gun people and the pro-gun people are talking to the pro-gun people and everyone is upset, but if we talked about it, we might have a different result.”

Guns hold a special place in his life, as a bonding moment with his father and a tie to history.

“I’ve been shooting since I was 11 years old. I am really into guns, but the thing is, the worst thing is not, not knowing something, but thinking you know something you don’t. And not to be biased, but I think that it happens a lot with the anti-gun side, but the pro-gun people aren’t sharing that knowledge or that experience.”

Chen reflected heavily on both his relationship with guns as well as the gun issue. Chen while at work took time aside to educate and discuss the issue as an individual, separate from his place of work, to an extended degree and even extended his personal information to continue the conversation.

“What difference does it make if I post all over Facebook that I am pro-Second Amendment? People who know me know my stance, and it’s not worth the argument, but I am always excited to help educate people who are truly interested in my educated opinion and the knowledge I’ve acquired,” said Chen.

The post Each Gun Tells A Story: A Graduate Student Explains appeared first on Gun March 2018.

Elton Howard, who is African-American, was 7 years old when he was sitting in a car with his mother, her estranged husband, and his younger half-sister. Howard says he jumped out of the back seat of the car when the man shot his mother five times. She was 26 years old at the time, and, almost 40 years later, still suffers from aliments resulting from the shooting.

“I’m pretty screwed up, but I think I maintain well,” Howard said. “I’ve been to therapy. I’m pretty resilient mentally and I’m pretty aware of the damage.”

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Although Howard has witnessed gun violence, and he believes raising the age to buy a gun and eliminating the sale of toy guns is responsible, he owns several guns, which sit in a bag at his house. The reason he purchased a handgun at the Dulles Expo Center in Virginia, home of the Nation’s Gun Show, was to connect with his son. Guns are his son’s “thing,” he said, and the pair enjoy going to the range to shoot.

“It all goes back to a childhood thing like playing with toy guns. If you allow fantasy to become reality then there is something wrong mentally,” Howard said.

Even though Washington D.C. has some of the tightest gun regulations in the United States, Howard admits that people simply travel to areas with looser laws to purchase guns. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, firearms remain the number one weapon used to commit homicides, accounting for approximately 70 percent of murder weapons. Howard says the United States is in dire need of stricter gun laws across the nation and a better understanding of mental health.

“Mental health is the reason people commit violent crimes. Violence is a mental health issue period,” he said.

Howard did not participate in the March for Our Lives on Saturday afternoon because, he said, it is a youth movement, but he thinks movements like it are much needed.

“I agree with the march, it’s necessary. Big business runs the country, and the gun manufacturers have a lot of clout,” Howard said. “I just didn’t think it was necessary for me to attend.”

The post The Lyft Driver at the Intersection of the Gun Divide appeared first on Gun March 2018.