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Dedicated to Stopping Gun Violence by Heather Stark

This spring, walkers around Greenlake were treated to scenes of children playing by the water and dogs frolicking with their owners. They were also treated to hundreds of daffodils blooming near the walkways.

The flowers weren’t there by accident. They were planted by members of Washington CeaseFire as memorials to those who have died from gun violence.

Washington CeaseFire turns 25 years old this year. The group has grown from a handful of Washington citizens to nearly 6,000 members across the state, half of whom are women, all of whom are concerned about the heavy toll guns take on our society.

Executive Director Kristen Comer says that women have a strong role in the organization. “We care for children; we are the voice of reason and compassion.” She was raised in a family that owned guns, but it was after she did a stint in Thailand with the Peace Corps and then worked as a teacher that she became interested in advocating for gun violence prevention.

“Several [of my] students were impacted by gun violence. Several had family and friends shot,” she explains. After graduate school at Columbia, Comer went to work with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., a group which, according to its Web site, seeks to have the courts interpret whether the Second Amendment really means individuals can own guns separate from a well-regulated militia. After she left Washington, D.C., she took on the job at Washington CeaseFire.

President Ralph Fascitelli, a member since 1999, says he knows that some people think Washington CeaseFire is about taking away people’s right to have guns, but that’s not the purpose of the group. “We don’t want to remove the right to own guns. We are trying to educate people that you really don’t have a good reason to have one.”

Jeanette Ashmun is a founding member of Washington CeaseFire. After she had made a contribution to the organization that later became the Brady Campaign, a local attorney, whose colleague had been gunned down by the husband of a client, contacted her about doing something to stop gun violence. He and Ashmun went to work organizing Washington CeaseFire.

“We had no model,” Ashmun says. “We just decided we wanted to get this issue up front.” And for 25 years she has been with the group doing just that.

The group’s Web site (washingtonceasefire.org) is crowded with statistics about accidental deaths and shootings around the state, and Fascitelli knows them by heart. “Gun violence costs the country $100 billion a year and the state $2 billion,” he says. When pressed to explain how the group comes up with the numbers, Fascitelli says they factor in the cost of a life lost, the cost of incarceration, the cost of litigation for prosecution of perpetrators, the costs of medical care for injured victims and the increased costs for insurance coverage. Other numbers are firmer. There were 567 gun-related deaths in Washington in 2004, and Fascitelli says about half of them were suicides.

Board member Sandra Elman joined WCF out of concern for those kinds of statistics. She was looking at increased gun violence on college campuses when the shootings at the Seattle Jewish Federation occurred two years ago. “I felt compelled by the energy and leadership and commitment of this organization to really do something,” she says.

Vanessa Hardy is the board events coordinator for WCF. She sought out a group to help her work for gun safety and the Brady Campaign sent her to Washington CeaseFire. “If we can get more people to really understand the issue and that it is a nonpartisan, health and safety issue, I’d be happy,” she explains. Although she thinks guns affect men and women equally, she admits that if she had children she’d think gun safety was “really important.”

Washington CeaseFire focuses its efforts on outreach and education, research, and policy advocacy. WCF members conduct workshops and presentations on reducing gun violence for schools and community groups, and work with the media to try to increase awareness.

Through research, the organization obtains information and statistics from local, state and national studies to spur action and get the attention of a public used to seeing shootings on television, video games and in the news.

Member Megan McQueen has been with the group since 2001, hoping to get that information out to the public. “I see it as a public health issue,” she explains, but like Comer, thinks women may care a lot because of the impact guns have on children’s safety as well as in domestic violence situations.

Lobbying the state legislature is the third approach the organization takes to pursue its goal of reducing gun violence. A legal team does analysis and an offshoot political action group called CeaseFire Action Committee advocates for reasonable gun control legislation. The group worked to ban assault weapons in Washington, and is looking at closing a loophole in the legislation that allows firearm purchasers to buy guns at gun shows or through private sales without a background check.

“Background checks can show a history of mental illness,” says Fascitelli, as well as raise red flags about criminal history or a history of violence. Comer says the group wants to “make sure firearms aren’t getting into the hands of the wrong people.”

Washington and federal laws prohibit felons, the mentally ill, and domestic violence perpetrators from buying guns, and federally licensed gun sellers have to do the check through the National Instant Criminal Check System (NICS). But without that background check, there is no way of knowing whether someone shouldn’t be sold the weapon. “Background checks are haphazard and vary depending on the type of weapon,” Comer says. “And the state and federal agencies don’t talk to each other.”

In this state, anyone who passes the background check and registers his or her weapon has to be granted a concealed weapons permit to legally carry their gun on their person. There are federal laws about selling guns with secure gun storage or safety devices, but they aren’t specific about what those are.

Both Fascitelli and Comer are concerned about attitudes toward firearms, too. “There is a tendency in our young people,” he says, “to increasingly seem to be able to use a gun for an immediate fix without realizing the finality of what they are doing.” He cites the violence and mass shootings that are happening more and more at high schools and colleges.

The women of WCF advocate hard for gun safety, but that does not come without a cost. Fascitelli reports that Executive Director Comer “gets death threats from time to time.”

But such threats don’t divert Comer or the others committed to gun safety. “The women of Washington CeaseFire,” she says, “are strong, courageous women who are committed to making our communities a better place to live, and are not afraid to take on a controversial issue to achieve that.”?

Heather Stark is a frequent contributor to Seattle Woman.

©2008 Caliope Publishing Company