It’s hard to fight a monster you can’t see. That’s the motto adopted by 21-year-old Mae McConnell Curry, an advocate who worked with the March for Our Lives movement last year and co-founded Ceasefire STL. The monster is guns, largely untracked in Missouri, where there’s no requirement to register firearms.
Almost a year after more than 10,000 St. Louisans marched downtown and demanded change in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, young activists want more accountability from owners of firearms, and they’ve decided it’s not enough to only address mass-casualty events. Their new target: everyday shootings.
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Before Ceasefire’s launch last July, McConnell Curry and co-founders 22-year-old Morgan Lowe and 18-year-old Hannah Brown worked with March for Our Lives leaders like David Hogg. But “it just kind of felt like the goals were different, because gun violence looks different in the kinds of neighborhoods they’re talking about versus the kinds of gun violence that happens in St. Louis,” says McConnell Curry. “There’s a difference between the kind of person who has experienced a mass shooting versus the kind of person who experiences everyday gun violence in St. Louis, particularly at the hands of police and particularly in impoverished neighborhoods.”
“With this movement, it put the spotlight on school shootings,” Lowe adds, “and the thing is, that’s not the majority of shootings.” (In St. Louis, the most recent school shooting was in 2013, when one person was wounded, two decades after the next most recent school shooting.)
Last year, there were 287 shooting homicides in the city, county, and Metro East, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As of late January, the St. Louis police had tallied 11 firearm-related homicides.
Along with teaching city children violence de-escalation tactics, Ceasefire is writing legislation that would require anyone who brings a firearm into the state to catalog it. If passed, the bill would provide information about how many firearms are in the state, what types, who has them, and where they’re coming from. The bill is a stepping stone, says Brown. If passed, it will allow Ceasefire to implement“different solutions to gun violence and open it up for other people to do research.”
Ceasefire’s partner on the proposed legislation is state Representative Bruce Franks (D-78th), who’s fine-tuning the bill’s language before filing it. He’s introduced similar legislation; one bill, which he’s refiling this session, would require a gun owner to report the loss of a firearm to law enforcement within 72 hours.
“One thing about young people, they’re going to call you out, they’re going to push forward, and they got a lot of energy,” says Franks, a social justice demonstrator who lost a brother to gun violence as a child. When the Ceasefire activists approached him, he recalls, they said, “We’re not just going to concentrate on mass shootings or shootings that happen in a public area. We’re also going to concentrate on communities of color that go through this every day.”
Says Brown: “More than anything, one of our major goals is to use our platform from March for Our Lives to elevate the voices of people who are being affected all the time and people who have been fighting this issue for such a long time.”
Ceasefire STL activists were featured as part of Time magazine’s “Guns in America” feature. Listen to their stories on Twitter @CeasefireSTL.
Guns in Missouri
- 1,307 Number of firearm-related deaths in Missouri in 2017, up from 1,144 in 2016
- 650 Number of firearm-related suicides in Missouri in 2016. There were 1,133 total suicides that same year.
- 48 Missouri’s gun law strength ranking out of 50, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The policy organization gave the state an F for its weak gun laws, placing it in the top three worst states for gun laws.
- 25 Percent increase in firearm-related deaths and injuries since repealing a permit-to-purchase law in 2007
- 18 Minimum age to buy a long gun in Missouri
Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence
