March for Our Lives rally goers at State House call for lawmakers to enact gun control now
Amy Husmann’s 11-year-old son stayed at home Saturday because he was afraid he was going to get shot if he went to a rally at the State House.
“They shouldn’t be afraid,” said Husmann, one of about 300 people at the rally put on by the South Carolina chapter of March for Our Lives, a youth-led organization committed to eliminating gun violence. The Columbia rally was one of hundreds held across the country Saturday, including one that drew hundreds in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Rally-goers and speakers made their message clear. They want lawmakers to enact gun control measures.
The midday rally came together on the north side of the State House grounds. Humidity boiled up despite clouds covering the sun as people held signs with messages like “Guns don’t vote but I do” and “No more dead children.”
Wade Fulmer, a Vietnam combat veteran, took to a podium on the State House stairs and told the crowd that he was there with them to “demand decades of overdue protections.”
The crowd bust into applause in agreement.
He called State House and Washington, D.C., lawmakers “do nothings” obstructing “the gun laws we need.”
“Every time there’s another mass shooting ... they just let it go by and they make their excuses,” Fulmer said.
The rally came in the wake of mass shootings at a school in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers and wounded 17 others; and in Buffalo, New York, where a white supremacist with a gun killed 10 Black people and wounded three others in a supermarket.
Those mass shootings were at the forefront of speakers’ and rally-goers’ minds, but so were South Carolina shootings that have claimed dozens of victims, including the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that left nine people dead in Charleston, and more recent violent episodes at a Clarendon County graduation party, Columbiana Centre mall and on a street in Charleston.
Two recent studies showed that South Carolina had the fifth most mass shootings this year and fifth most children killed by gun violence in the nation.
Inga Carey, a South Carolina teacher, told the rally-goers about her experience clearing out closets of musical instruments in schools to create a place for students to hide if a shooter attacked and about buying a fire extinguisher with her own money to be used in her classroom, not for fires, but to fight off a shooter.
She said lawmakers don’t know the trauma of active shooter drills in schools.
“We need someone who understands that we have a teacher shortage (in South Carolina) because we don’t feel safe,” she said before pitching candidate Lisa Ellis for state superintendent.
Speakers and attendees also expressed their concern with personal shootings that grab fewer national headlines and the weapons used in those shootings.
In an emotional speech, Saleemah Graham-Fleming told the crowd about the shooting of her daughter by someone the daughter considered “her best friend” and the shallow grave where her killer and others buried her.
“You never imagine that you walk into the house and your child is not on the other side of the bedroom door,” Graham-Fleming said. Lawmakers who haven’t experienced gun violence personally are putting off gun control measures, she said.
“The people we put into office, we have to hold them accountable,” she said.
Dr. Vanessa Du Guyton of Hush No More, a victims advocacy group, told the crowd that guns were the primary weapon used to kill women by domestic abusers and that South Carolina laws did not adequately address gun violence against women, men or teenagers.
Speakers called on lawmakers to enact a requirement for background checks on gun buyers and to ban assault rifles and high capacity magazines.
Husmann said she came out because she’s a mom and she wants her son who was at home afraid of being shot to live without that fear.
“We need commonsense gun laws,” she said.
She joined the crowd of about 300 as they marched around the State House and through Main Street, chanting “No more silence, end gun violence.”
This story was originally published June 11, 2022 at 3:14 PM.