After Massacre, Guns On Campaign Radar

“This brick represents my son,” Pamela Jaynez said Friday as she and other moms whose lives were changed by gun violence guided their U.S. Congresswoman down a path of remembrance — and campaign issue-framing.

Jaynez was pointing to a brick on the Magnitude Walkway, which leads visitors to the heart of the year-old New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing Dedicated to Victims of Gun Violence on Valley Street in the shadow of West Rock. The bricks are grouped by years, starting with 1976. Each brick lists the name and age of a New Havener killed by a bullet, year after year.

Jaynez and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro had entered the 1998 section of the walkway. Jaynez was pointing to a brick reading ​“Walter Jaynes Sr. Age 19.” (Note: Her son’s last name was spelled slightly differently from hers.)

DeLauro, Jaynez and fellow memorial garden organizers were walking the path Friday in response to the shooting massacre this week of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. DeLauro was joined in the garden by other Democratic elected officials looking to emphasize gun control in their campaigns.

Every massacre brings the trauma of losing loved ones — and the quest to stop gun violence — back home to the moms who led the creation of the Botanical Garden of Healing.

“I feel for the moms going through that with their fourth-grade children in Texas,” Jaynez (at right in above photo) told DeLauro during the walk. ​“It’s hard. Every time you hear a shooting you relive it: the phone call, going to the hospital.” 

Jaynez ​“had just left to go to work” the day in 1998 when she received the call to rush to the hospital. That’s where she learned that someone had shot her son. She later learned that the shooter mistook her son for someone else involved in a beef.

“That’s my son,” fellow botanical garden organizer Marlene Miller-Pratt (above at left) told DeLauro as the group stepped into 1999. The brick read ​“Gary Kyshon Miller Age 20.” 

“We hope,” said Celeste Robinson Fulcher, whose daughter Erika Renee ​“Hoppy” Robinson died in 2013 from a random bullet sprayed into a Hamilton Street nightclub, ​“people get a feeling they need to take action” after taking walks like these.

Friday’s stroll down the path took place before a press conference held at the memorial garden, billed as a call to that action.

The press conference mirrored a dynamic in races across the country: Democrats have looked upon the two recent massacres (in Buffalo and Texas) as opportunities to highlight an issue they feel has the backing of most voters: gun control. (The same with abortion.) They are looking to steer the conversation away from issues Republicans are emphasizing on which polling shows public support: inflation/rising gas prices and the economy in general.

Gov. Ned Lamont’s reelection campaign organized Friday’s memorial garden event. Lamont himself did not attend. Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who is running for reelection alongside Lamont, did show up, along with DeLauro, Mayor Justin Elicker, the memorial garden organizer moms, New Haven Alders Honda Smith and Richard Furlow, state NAACP leader Scot X. Esdaile, and the Rev. Kelcey Steele.

Speaker after speaker cast the Uvalde massacre and New Haven’s ongoing person-by-person gun massacre as prime exhibits for why people should elect Democrats who support gun control.

They noted that Connecticut has among the strictest gun-control laws in the nation, thanks in part to the legislature’s response to the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. The Uvalde massacre should now propel Congress to pass new measures to strengthen background checks and ​“red flag” permit-process notification laws, they argued, and ban assault rifles like the one used by the 18-year-old Texas shooter. 

DeLauro also vowed to keep working to pass a federal version of Connecticut’s ​“Ethan’s Law” to ensure better private storage of guns. She said that while standing alongside Michael Song, the father of the law’s eponymous Guilford teen who died in an incident involving an improperly stored gun.

“We have to take this issue back,” Marlene Pratt declared during the press conference. ​“We hurt.”

“This is a problem we can solve. It is clear from the data” that measures like assault-weapon bans and universal background checks save lives, Mayor Elicker said.

He and Bysiewicz focused on the race for governor, a rematch between Lamont and Republican Bob Stefanowski.

Elicker spoke about the governor’s efforts to close a loophole in Connecticut’s law banning ghost guns: It bans only newly produced guns, not ones previously manufactured. He noted that the homemade, 3D-printed weapons are on the rise: New Haven police have confiscated 15 of the weapons so far this year, compared to one at this point in 2021.

Bysiewicz referenced a video that surfaced this week of Stefanowski previously suggesting to a gun-rights group that parts of Connecticut’s Sandy Hook-inspired legislation went too far and should be repealed. She noted that Stefanowski has an A rating from the NRA.

“I’m not on the NRA’s Christmas card list. I wear that as a badge of honor,” Bysiewicz declared. 

“The question for voters in November is: Who do you trust to do the life-saving work” of gun control? Bysiewicz stated. She said Stefanowski is ​“on the wrong side of this issue. He’s on the very extreme side of this issue. His allies in the United States Senate are on the wrong side of this issue.”

“I support Connecticut’s gun laws. They’re the strictest in the country. I will uphold them,” Stefanowski told the Independent in a conversation after the event. He dismissed the video of his past remarks as ​“a Democratic hit piece from four years ago. They cut and pasted it.”

Asked about the proposal to close the ghost-gun loophole, he replied, ​“I’m happy to talk about that. It should be a holistic approach. We should talk about all the elements that put our kids at risk,” including school security, mental health, and gun laws.

Stefanowski called it ​“unfortunate and disgusting to use this [massacre] as a political attack on me.” He said Lamont should ​“take his politician hat off and stop attacking and put his governor hat on … You had 19 kids killed. The governor should be holding a press conference on what he’s doing to keep kids safe.”

Meanwhile, work is underway to add new bricks to the homicide memorial garden’s Magnitude Walkway, to remember the New Haveners who have lost their lives to gun violence in 2022.

Marlene Pratt noted that the moms’ walk with DeLauro took them past a sculpture (pictured above) that, up close, shows how the homicide shatters and fragments a family’s lives.

She also noted that when one stands at the Tree of Life planted at the walkway’s end, a different view of the sculpture emerges: ​“You see the restoration of that family. You see a time when that family can be back together again.”

A time, as she described it, when no more bricks will need to be added.