NEW ORLEANS — The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas has once again shined a national spotlight on firearms and the sad consequences of gun violence.
Nineteen children and two teachers lost their lives in the gunfire.
Gloria Brown feels for the parents.
“My heart is just so broken for the parents,” Brown said. “I can only imagine how they are feeling at this moment and the days to come.”
Brown doesn’t have to imagine; she knows the pain all too well.
She lost her only son, Shane in March.
The aspiring filmmaker was found shot to death in a canal near Morrison and Gannon roads in New Orleans East.
He had just turned 20.
“I wake up in the morning, his bedroom is empty,” Brown said. “The laughter, the joy we had, not being able to see him live the dream that he wanted to live. It going to be many, many days they are going to go through those moments. It’s a very, very long and a very, very hard process.”
The chief medical officer at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans grew up along the Texas-Mexico border.
“Uvalde is a neighbor and I have family in that area,” Dr. Mark Kline said. “I have daughters and grandchildren in that part of the world and so, when I heard about this it really hit close to home for me.”
Dr. Kline joined the American Academy of Pediatrics in calling for common-sense laws to address gun violence.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns have now replaced automobile accidents as the number cause of death for children and adolescents in the U.S.
“This is pervasive,” Kline said. “It’s an epidemic across the United States, but it is particularly prevalent in urban areas like New Orleans. We just have to do better as a society. We have to be able to talk about background checks and a number other just really common-sense measures that could reduce the risk.”
He says the National Rifle Association has warned doctors to stay in their lane when it comes to gun control.
“This is a huge, huge public health problem. It would have to be near the top of the list of things that we have to do to help make the world safer for our children," Dr. Kline said.
Gloria Brown says the pathway to real change starts when some lawmakers stop politicizing lives.
“Put down the guns,” she said. “Love, not hate, truth, not lies.”
Firearm deaths for all Americans set an all-time high in 2020 with more than 45,000 lives lost.
According to the CDC, gun deaths for those under the age of 20, saw a nearly 30 percent jump from 2019 to 2020.
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