The back-to-back events of the midterm election and the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California left America reeling like news that the small town football team had been killed in a car accident on the way to the state championship game. At the very moment we were meant to celebrate our democracy we were forced to mourn one of its greatest flaws.
Susan Orfanos, who watched her son survive one mass shooting only to be killed in another, offers a chilling rebuke of American inaction. She screamed into the camera of ABC7 in Southern California: “I don’t want prayers, I want gun control.” It was the kind of exhortation America saw from Emmett Till’s mother during the civil rights movement, or from Matthew Shepard’s mother after his beating death in Wyoming: a demand for our country to care for what they had lost as if these young men were our own.
For the last 250 years, albeit imperfectly, American democracy has found its way through these crises by relying on representative government to work. When Americans experience systemic injustice or suffering, they communicate that pain to their elected officials, and those elected officials — out of empathy, self-interest or a genuine sense that change is needed — implement reforms to alleviate that suffering, even if it does not effect them directly.
A Colorado legislature full of men voted to give women the right to vote; white members of congress voted to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act; straight men and women voted for marriage equality. They were pressured by activists and advocates; they witnessed the suffering of their fellow Americans and they chose to act.
That was what we believed would happen after the Aurora shooting, and then Sandy Hook and Charleston, then Orlando, then Las Vegas, then Parkland and now Thousand Oaks, and yet, we have witnessed them all without a single piece of substantive gun safety legislation making its way through the U.S. Congress.
Now we’re nearing the end of 2018 with an astounding 304 mass shootings in 312 days and a new set of American heartbreak voiced by dads like Jason Coffman who recounted how he told his son he loved him, just before losing him in Thousands Oaks. Despair like that drove parents like Tom Sullivan to do unpredictable things in their quest for justice.
Tom Sullivan’s son Alex met friends from his job for the midnight showing of The Dark Knight on July 20, 2012. He was one of the 12 victims who would never come out of theater nine. Tom, a 30-year mail carrier and clerk for the U.S. Post Office, facing the worst loss any parent could imagine, had to decide what to do next. Many couples lose their marriages after losing a kid; some retreat entirely from friends and family; some lose their jobs or their mental health. Tom Sullivan decided if others wouldn’t fight for his son, he would do it himself.
He went to work advocating at the Colorado state capitol to change the gun laws that he strongly believed contributed to his son’s death, advocating for universal background checks and high capacity magazine bans. He knocked doors for the candidates who faced NRA-organized recalls because of their courageous votes. He ran for state Senate himself in 2016 and lost a tight race.
For most people, after surviving the unimaginable, that would have been enough. But when he saw that shootings like the one that took his son were getting more common, not less, and that the legislative response to those shootings was getting weaker, not stronger, he decided to run again in 2018 in a state House district that no one believed he could win. And two weeks ago he won one of the biggest upsets in the midterm elections here in Colorado. Sullivan’s story is an inspiring political triumph, but a disturbing diagnosis of American democracy.
Colorado has known more than its share of mass shootings, with more than 40 Coloradans murdered in mass shootings since Columbine high school. We had to lose 40 Coloradans in mass shootings before we found one Tom Sullivan.
If those elected to office won’t take action on behalf of Susan Orfanos and Jason Coffman, maybe our only hope is that they will run and win. What will it mean if we need entire legislative majorities of survivors and victims to change policy. America would need 4,000 more Tom Sullivans to run for state and federal office and win to build those majorities. At the current pace, that would require 120,000 more Americans to die in mass shootings before we had leaders with the courage to act. That would mean losing twice as many Americans in mass shootings on our own soil as we lost in the war in Vietnam.
None of us should be willing to wait for that catastrophe to force our elected officials to take action on common sense gun safety like banning high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, banning bump stocks and enacting strong red flag laws to keep guns out of the hands of those who are dangerous.
If our leaders in this democracy are still unable to hear the sobbing of the families in Thousand Oaks, then the best we can hope for is that after Jason Coffman and Susan Orfanos bury their children, they join Tom Sullivan and run for office. Then we will only need 3,997 more parents like them to shake America into stopping this bloody war we keep waging on ourselves.
Mike Johnston, a former teacher and school principal, served in the state senate from 2009-2017, was a policy advisor to President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and was a Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado in 2018.
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