The Gun Fight in Congress

On June 14th, Reggina Jefferies, a seventeen-year-old high-school student, attended a vigil in downtown Oakland for two friends who had drowned in a reservoir. As she stood with mourners outside the service, gunfire broke out among a group of men who had been arguing nearby. Four people were wounded; Jefferies was shot dead. The next day, Luis Villot, a twenty-nine-year-old father of four, attempted to defuse a neighborhood dispute at the Farragut Houses, in Brooklyn, and usher some children out of harm’s way. When a woman he was trying to calm fired a gun, a bullet struck him in the forehead, and he died three days later. The same day that Villot was shot, Antonio Perkins, a twenty-eight-year-old Chicagoan, was broadcasting a Facebook Live feed of himself talking with people on the street. A car could be seen passing by and returning a few minutes later. Then the screen went black, but the feed captured the sound of gunfire and people screaming. Perkins was shot in the neck and the head, and was pronounced dead that evening.

Last Wednesday, in the same week that Jefferies, Villot, and Perkins were laid to rest, some fifteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives, led by John Lewis, of Georgia, began a sit-in to demand that Congress enact gun-control legislation. (The sit-in lasted nearly twenty-six hours and, eventually, involved a hundred and sixty-eight members.) Barbara Lee, who represents the part of Oakland where Reggina Jefferies was shot, held up a picture of the young woman and said that she had photographs of many more victims of gun violence in her district.

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