Outcry from residents and officials after mass shootings

Recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, have evoked stronger-than-ever local outcry for gun-control reform.

Social media posts by state and county officials and a rally in Uniondale expressed the public’s outrage that more has not been done to limit access to guns, especially assault weapons.  

In Uniondale, Sergio Argueta, founder of STRONG Youth, a Uniondale-based youth outreach organization, coordinated a rally on May 25, a day after the Uvalde tragedy, in which 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed. 

Argueta spoke to about 70 people who filled Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Park, a small park at the corner of Uniondale Avenue and Nassau Road. 

“Yesterday the unthinkable happened,” Argueta said. “There are individuals here that know all too well the tragedy of losing a loved one to gun violence, here in our own communities.” 

Argueta connected the teenage gunmen in Buffalo and Uvalde to the loss of his own best friend in a gang shooting nearly three decades ago. He described the shooters, then and now, as “young people who find it easier to get their hands on guns than it is getting their hands on jobs —individuals that find it easier to buy a box of bullets than it is to get access to a college or a university, or a trade to move forward.”

To emphasize the pain and fear the shootings have incurred for children, Argueta called several middle-schoolers and teens to speak from the terraced platform surrounding the metal statue of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Richard Paul, an intervention counselor at STRONG, acted out a dramatic poem he had written, which read in part:

“Once you pull that trigger you can never take it back. 

Mother loses her son, a son loses his father, 

Ill feelings are harbored because of that revolver.”

Paul added, “If it was double-digit numbers of young people from Uniondale, Roosevelt, Freeport, Hempstead, our communities would be devastated! We can’t wait for somebody to magically come and save us.” He urged everyone to contact their elected officials.

Lawyer and community advocate Fred Brewington, who serves on the STRONG board of directors, followed up Paul’s comment. 

“I stand before you right now,” Brewington said, “noticing that while the community is here, those people that need to be here are not here.” 

Brewington held aloft one of the small electric candles that had been placed near the MLK statue, while he exhorted his listeners to contact their elected officials relentlessly. 

“Just remember, it only took two minutes for the lights to be extinguished,” he said, referring to the rapidity of deaths by gunfire in Uvalde and in Buffalo. “Take two minutes. Attend a school board meeting, go to the county legislature, be the itch that they can’t scratch and force them to make a change, and if they won’t make a change, vote them out.”

Gun control reform will not fall on deaf ears as area politicians are already calling for exactly the change that the speakers at the rally are demanding. 

State Sen. Kevin Thomas (D-Levittown) tweeted May 24, “Gov’t inaction is immoral. At what point do we say enough—and work harder to get guns off our streets?”

Also on May 24, State Assemblywoman Judy Griffin (D-Rockville Centre) posted on Twitter, “This nation is awash in guns and unwilling to confront the truth: gun violence is a national scourge that demands national solutions.”

Griffin promised continued pressure in the State Legislature for common-sense gun regulation, but expressed frustration at judicial decisions beyond state control. 

“Even now, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering overturning New York’s existing gun control laws,” Griffin’s post continued, “a kind of legalism that defies human logic. How many more families have to suffer the incomprehensible loss of their loved ones?”

Legislators Debra Mulé and Kevan Abrahams expressed their frustration with federal legislation.

Mulé sent a statement to the Herald that said, “Although we have witnessed this type of depraved carnage so many times in our nation, the political will to do anything about it federally has been smothered over and over again. It’s long past time for the vast majority of Americans who support common-sense gun safety laws to have their voices heard in the halls of Congress.”

“When will enough be enough,” Abrahams posted to his Facebook page May 24, “that the powers that be make common-sense gun laws? When will we take mental illness seriously?”

At a rally at the Hicksville Fire Department Station 3 last Saturday, State Sen. John Brooks addressed gun control reform with characteristic bluntness. 

“We’re told it’s not the gun,” he said. “In Uvalde, it was an assault weapon. In Buffalo, it was an assault weapon. In Parkland, Vegas, and so many other places, it was an assault weapon. It is the gun! We need to stop this madness and take action now.”