Dear Editor:
Over the coming weeks, PACs, special interest groups, and members of Congress will be pushing two innocuously named pieces of legislation from their agenda: HR 2406, Concealed Carry Reciprocity (CCR), and HR 38, the SHARE Act. These bills would maintain loopholes that circumvent the background checks required to buy silencers, and allow people to publicly carry concealed weapons in any state, as long as their home states’ laws would allow it.
Many will say that to discuss gun safety legislation right now is opportunist, given the massacre in Las Vegas. We disagree. The horrific truth is that we’ve seen this before. We’ve seen this eight times this year alone. Innocent people have been killed in one of the grisliest ways imaginable, and “thoughts and prayers” are not enough. But when it comes time to do something concrete, to make sure Americans can go to concerts, and movies, and kids can go to school, the gun lobby says that would be taking advantage of the situation. We can discuss these issues academically and ideologically, but the fact is Americans are dying.
It is our right and our patriotic duty to those killed and those we can still save to make sure our laws don’t empower people who put Americans in their crosshairs. Please, call your members of Congress and ask them to vote “No” on the upcoming silencer and CCR legislation. We can and will do better.
Emily Ball Jabbour, Hoboken
Eytan Stern Weber, Jersey City
Members of Hudson County Chapter, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America
