LREI Gun violence group meeting activist Donna Dees

Our social justice group got the chance to meet with creator of The Million Moms March Donna Dees. We learned so much and got many contacts from this interview. Our question was: “How did you start it (Million Moms’ March) and When did you start it?” To this Ms. Dees stated that she grew up in Louisiana where guns and violence were very common. She said she didn’t do much against gun violence until 1999 when their was a shooting at a preschool in California. “The kids at that day camp looked just like my kids.” At this she was inspired. She quit her job and dedicated her life to stoping gun violence. We met with her to get background information on our subjects and get many contacts. From this interview we learned the horrors of gun violence and some of the ways that these horrors happen. She also gave us many amazing contacts that we are now trying to contact. We discussed the movie “Bullets in the Hood”, and we pointed out important things we learned about gang violence from the film. Also she invited us to go to a march about gun violence at Poughkeepsie, in which we are going on Saturday. One interesting fact that stood out were that one of the highest type of gun related death was suicide. After learning this we had a thought provoking conversation about now “suicide is a long term solution to a short term problem”. From this field work I learned that I am very good at interacting with people, interviewing and public speaking. This is something I will keep in mind for future field works. Something that I want to remember for my teach in was that it is both guns and society that causes gang violence.