SACRAMENTO –
Another mass shooting, another protest. Members of the local Brady Campaign say they have to hold rallies far too often.
“This is my third vigil in about three months,” said the group’s chairwoman Amanda Wilcox.
For Wilcox, this fight is personal.
“I sure wish people were working on this before my daughter was killed. It’s not we’re suddenly caring because of the mass shooting,” Wilcox said.
Her daughter Laura was killed 15 years ago next month at work in an incident similar to the San Bernadino shootings.
“We don’t want to accept this in our country as the new normal- this is unacceptable,” Wilcox said.
But longtime Executive Director of Gun Owners of America Sam Paredes says it’s people like the man behind the trigger in San Bernadino, not guns, who kill.
“How do we prevent crime? How do we prevent terrorism? Gun control doesn’t work to prevent either one of them,” Sam Paredes said. “Something made him into a terrorist. That is what we need to be looking at. Not the legal process for owning guns.”
Paredes says mass shootings don’t happen so often as everyone is led to believe.
While it’s been reported we’ve seen 355 mass shootings this year alone, the majority of those incidents don’t fall under the FBI’s definition of mass shooting where four or more are killed.
By those standards, according to FBI data, 2015 saw just 29 mass shootings.
Paredes says the numbers are exaggerated for political purposes.
No matter how you look at it, gun control advocates say it happens much too often.
“I’m just devastated by what our country has become. No other developed country has this kind of gun violence,” Wilcox said.
For those whom the issue affects directly, the loss is more than a number.
Another major piece of this debate is whether gun laws actually work. California has some of strictest, despite the San Bernardino incident.
