More than 1,000 women flocked to the Colorado Capitol in the first light of dawn Monday with the weighty goal of ending gun violence in the U.S., one state at a time.
Mothers in workout leggings held signs bearing photos of their children and others settled into camping chairs and picnic blankets on the Capitol lawn for a sit-in organized by Here 4 the Kids, a group founded in March by the authors and social justice advocates Tina Strawn, of Texas, and Saira Rao, of Virginia.
The women, both mothers, said they were moved to act by the mass shooting in March at The Covenant School, a private Christian institution in Nashville, Tennessee, in which six people were killed, including three children.
So far this year, the Gun Violence Archive has tallied 276 mass shootings in the U.S. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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“Banning guns isn’t radical,” Rao said last week. “What’s radical is normalizing dropping our kids off at school and not knowing if we will pick them up alive. What’s radical is going to the mall and getting murdered. Banning guns, the No. 1 killer of our kids, is sensible.”
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