Silence often greets gun-violence victims’ efforts

“We have to make people understand what it feels like,” Barton told her.

“It has to make their skin crawl,” she said. “It needs to physically hurt.”

“Make them uncomfortable,” he agreed.

Their event in Washington on Thursday was the final stop of a 100-day summer bus tour: 25 rallies in 25 states organized by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, involving more than 100 survivors who told their stories and showed their scars, hoping to inflame a country that they fear has gone numb.

They traveled by bus to mark six months since Newtown and the first anniversaries of gunfire at a movie theater in Aurora and a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. They went to Ohio, where a gun rights counter rally drew twice the crowd; and to Fargo, N.D., where the mayor told them guns didn’t present a problem.

Then, just last week, hours before the bus arrived in Washington, a dozen people were slain at the Washington Navy Yard.

Another Newton. Another Aurora or Oak Creek.

Now Barton stepped up to the lectern in Washington and studied a crowd that included some of the latest survivors of a mass shooting. The 100-day bus tour had not been enough to change national gun laws.

Trips to lobby in Washington had not been enough. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s money had not been enough. Neither had 20 first-graders, or 70 people killed or wounded in a Colorado theater, or 32 dead at Virginia Tech University, or 13 at an immigration center, or the 35 people who are killed with guns in the U.S. on an average day.

“We should probably begin with another moment of silence,” Barton said.

Turned away repeatedly

That silence was all around them now. It was a Senate that had no more plans to take up gun control, and the members of Congress who refused to meet with them, and the state lawmakers who had been voted out of office for supporting background checks, and President Barack Obama’s apologies that he had already done what he could do, and a general public that sympathized and sent flowers and, yes, even mostly agreed with their positions on gun control but had lost its capacity for outrage nine months and more than 9,000 shooting deaths after Newtown.

Just before their rally in Washington, five survivors met near the Capitol to discuss strategies for breaking through the malaise. They’d spent the morning in meetings with aides to lawmakers, who offered condolences and water.

“Thoughts and prayers and it ends there,” said Lori Haas, whose daughter was shot and injured at Virginia Tech. “I can’t do anything anymore with thoughts and prayers.”

“I’m learning that you have to be brutal with these people,” said Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away a magazine clip and disarmed the shooter at a 2011 event in Tucson, Ariz. where Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot. Maisch took out a picture she carried of the six people killed at that event and set it on the table. “Now I show this to people and start getting graphic,” she said. “This is not a pretty death like you see on ‘NCIS’ or ‘Law and Order.’ This is six people murdered on the sidewalk on a beautiful Arizona day.”

“Bloody and scared,” said Bill Badger, who was shot in the back of the head that day.

“Oh, and by the way, loved ones aren’t lost. They are killed,” Haas said.

“Murdered,” said Roxanna Green, whose 9-year-old daughter was murdered at the Arizona event.

“I just want to shake people,” Badger said. “If this was some disease … we’d be in a national emergency.”

“You’d see planes dropping medicine,” Maisch said. “Instead, it’s another day. It’s nothing.”

Some of them remembered what it felt like to be oblivious, a part of the audience they were trying so desperately to reach. Barton learned about the 2009 killing spree at an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y., only three years later, in 2012, after he was shot in Aurora and started to research mass shootings. “Thirteen dead and I didn’t notice,” he said.

Other survivors at the table had remained uninvolved even after their own traumas. It was one thing to be shot in a fluke incident, they said; it was another to be made aware that those flukes were in fact occurring constantly in the U.S., where a mass shooting involving four or more people happens about once each day.