On a grey, drizzly Friday morning in Newark’s Branch Brook Park, dominated by the view of towers of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, a press conference was called to demand federal action on gun control measures in the wake of the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia.  US Senators Bob Menendez and Cory Booker joined with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura, members of Moms Demand Action, Students Demand Action, and the Asian-American community to call upon President Biden and members of the US Senate to enact what they described as “common sense” gun legislation: universal background checks for purchases and universal gun licensing.

Menendez also called upon the administration and his fellow senators to pass another Assault Weapons Ban, such as the since-expired legislation he voted for in 1994.  Next to the podium was a table of firearms that Sheriff Fontoura said had been taken off of Essex County streets, among them rifles classified as assault weapons and 30 round capacity magazines.  Thirty-round magazines are illegal in the state of New Jersey, where the maximum capacity was formerly 15, then lowered to 10 by Governor Phil Murphy.

DiVincenzo said, “I feel like I’ve been here for 25-30 years trying to help get this bill done, it’s just so sad what’s going on… what they are trying to pass is a commonsense bill, universal background checks.  How could anyone be against that?  The other thing is the magazine: a limited number of bullets.  How could anyone be against that?  What happened in those places could happen right here tomorrow, today, and something we should all be concerned about… I have all the confidence and trust in the world in Senators Booker and Bob Menendez.”

“This is like a broken record,” Baraka said.  “Mass shootings are happening all over the country and they’re using these automatic weapons, particularly the AR-15, over and over again.  As the county executive said, it could happen here, but unfortunately it is happening here.  There has to be a connection made between the mass shootings that are happening around the country and the proliferation of guns that find themselves in communities like Newark, New Jersey.  There is no difference to me in my mind of a person going into a school or to a spa, shooting innocent people with an AR-15, or a kid getting their hands on an AR-15 or an AK-47 on Clinton Avenue or Avon Avenue or Bloomfield Avenue here in the City of Newark, and committing homicide in these cities with guns that are not manufactured on the corner of their streets.  It is imperative for us to have national legislation to try to make this happen.”

Senator Booker thanked DiVincenzo as “the greatest partner I could possibly have” when he was mayor, and recounted when 4 children where shot at Ivy Hill.  “I remember your leadership them.  You helped to heal a broken community… how many times have you and I had to stand together?  How many times have we stood with grieving parents?”  On Baraka, he said, “From the time he was an activist he has been a consistent voice against violence and injustice.  He was a teacher in a classroom and he knows the pain of standing before children and knowing that so many of our children, not just urban children, in low income neighborhoods from rural America to urban, there is no difference in violent crime rates per capita.  Poverty and violence are intrinsically linked.  Martin Luther King called poverty ‘violence in and of itself’.   The mayor of this city knows what it is to educate children who are survivors of childhood trauma, he knows when fireworks go off on the Fourth of July that there are people who call the police that tell stories about their children showing signs of post traumatic stress, not celebrating freedom or liberty, but living with shackles of fear.  Because when they hear fireworks they dive for cover or hide in closets.  The mayor of this city knows what it is to stand before a classroom of thirty children and ask them how many of them know someone who has died of gun violence and have every hand go up.”

Booker said “the state is doing their job” and that New Jersey has the third lowest rate of incidents of gun violence.  “But when you still have hundreds of New Jerseyans murdered every single year, thousands wounded, suicides, domestic violence, we should be ashamed of ourselves.  This is not an inevitable destiny; it is a policy choice….  Our state is stepping up and doing the right thing.  When a state passes background checks, violent crime goes down.  When a state has gun licensing, violent crime goes down.  But a state is only as safe as the gun laws in the states that surround it.  Most of the guns in New Jersey come from states with lax gun laws.  They come from states with straw purchases, unregulated gun shows, loophole after loophole, allows these very weapons to come on our streets and do horrible things.  You see people standing behind me, some of them know personally the unimaginable grief of losing a loved one.  Do we have such a poverty of empathy in our country that we cannot be moved to change our laws unless something happens to us?”

During Booker’s speech, he hailed President Biden because “he has already started to directly confront the issue of violence by supporting legislation that Bob and I have been calling for, to expand the child tax credit and cut child poverty in half.  We need to make that permanent.  That will help lower violence rates.  Senator Menendez and I are calling on him to use his executive authority to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, to close the gun show loophole, and support evidence-based community-centered violence intervention programs that work.”

Booker said that when he was mayor, he could find grants to hire more police, but that police were being asked to treat the symptom of a problem.  Finding grants to support “evidence based programs that will stop violence from happening in the first place” was more difficult.  To applause, he said that he and Menendez were championing legislation to fund such programs.

“We must once and for all in the United States of America pass universal background checks,” Booker said.  “Some of these weapons with the pull of a trigger, in seconds can take multiple lives.  I don’t need to be told that, I know that from the time I was mayor.  One summer day we had thirteen people shot because someone pulled out one of these weapons.  We need to ban assault weapons, weapons of war do not belong on the streets… I was debating common sense gun laws where the majority of Americans agree—this is not controversial in America.  I listened to some colleagues on the other side of the aisle keep saying ‘we’re coming for your guns’.  Law abiding citizens, I’m not worried about that… I believe we need to keep guns out of the hands of those who want to do harm.”

The United States’ 2^nd Amendment to the Constitution states that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” and Booker likened the process of gun ownership to that of vehicle ownership.  “Of course, the extreme fearmongering from people who oppose licensing, will say if you start licensing, the next step is confiscation.  That is a lie.  When I go to the DMV, I don’t walk in there with the fear that if I license myself for a car to drive, that they’re going to take my car.  That’s just not going to happen.”

The senator continually stated that most guns used in crimes in New Jersey came from other states.  He referred to Interstate 95 as the Iron Pipeline, bringing in guns.  “If you need a license to drive a car, you should have a license to buy a gun that can kill people.  We need universal licensing.”

As New Jersey already has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws, the senators and guests were demanding that federal laws be put into place to protect New Jersey from states where gun laws are looser.  The prevalence and access to guns, they said, was directly connected to gun violence.

“You take a look at what you see here,” Fontoura said, standing next to a table of firearms and magazines.  “The cases have been adjudicated so we can display them and eventually we are going to destroy them, we’re going to burn them, we’ll never see these out here again which is the right thing to do.  They all should be burned.  There are over 350 million guns in the hands of our citizens in America, we only have 300 million people—350 million that we know of, there are many others that we don’t know about.  How many guns do we need in this country?”

The sheriff asserted that such weapons had no value for hunters.  “If you go hunting, you don’t need a thirty-round clip that can be fired in fifteen or twenty seconds.  It only takes one bullet for hunting.  No one can use any of this firepower for hunting.  This only does one thing and one thing only, it’s designed to kill human beings, out here on our streets.”  He said that last year Essex county law enforcement had taken over 600 firearms.  “Enough is enough.  I’m getting so tired of this.  We are usually the first ones, if an innocent child is shot, a mother is shot, a father, an uncle, we are usually the ones that have to break that news.  Just another heartbreaking event that we have to deal with.  We are begging you.  Our officers are subjected to this gunfire just like us citizens are, so we’re asking you to keep our citizens safe and our officers safe, by keeping this menace, these weapons of mass destruction, off our streets.”

“We are way out and away a unique nation that has now a level of gun violence in a time when we are not seeing war in our territories,” Booker said.  “Why would we as a nation allow this to continue when we have the power to stop it?”

When Senator Menendez was asked about President Biden’s response, he expressed confidence.  “In his first national press conference, [the president] addressed this issue, even to the extent of saying that, as someone who was a creature of the senate, where he spent decades, said that the senate should change its filibuster rules in order to meet some of these challenges, including gun violence.  So, anyone who feels as passionately about that, I think, will use his executive powers to do that which he can.  We also recognize what he can do, as Senator Booker outlined, in of itself won’t be everything that we need to do.  So, the Senate must act.”