Voices in Ramah

Emma Fernández is standing at the sandwich counter of the cafeteria at a private high school in Washington, D.C., where many of the students are children of members of Congress. She became an employee of this school to carry out a plot to get Congress to ban assault weapons. Less than a year ago a man with an assault weapon blasted into the elementary school where she was teaching, and after killing the security guard he went into the second grade classroom and killed eleven children and their teacher. One of the children was Emma's daughter. As a way of coping with her loss, Emma started doing research to understand why unlike other countries in the world America has frequent mass shootings. She learned that there are virtually no controls on gun ownership in America, and she concluded that there are so many mass shootings in America because there are so many guns. Wanting to do something about the problem, she decided to pursue a mission to get Congress to pass a law banning assault weapons. She persuaded her member of Congress to propose such a law, and she testified before the House committee that was discussing it. She joined two national organizations with gun-control missions, and she participated in a major demonstration in Washington to end gun violence. But Congress did nothing, and in the meantime there were almost two mass shootings per day in America. Finally, she devised a monstrous plot to get Congress to do something.