Students from Morehouse and Spelman Colleges will join Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an organization headed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, for a rally to honor the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings on Tuesday at 1 p.m.
The rally will take place in the Morehouse College African American Hall of Fame, located on the second floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. The students and gun safety advocates will call on Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss to support the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey legislation that seeks to expand background checks throughout the country.
According to a release from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the group is an organization created in April 2006 that is made up of both Democratic and Republican mayors and has grown from 15 members to more than 900 mayors from across the country.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns asserts that it has more than 1.5 million supporters, making it the largest gun violence prevention advocacy organization in the country.
The Morehouse and Spelman students and Mayors Against Illegal Guns organization will also be joined by Georgia State Senator Vincent Fort in their call for support of the Manchin-Toomey bill.
The bill, sponsored by U.S. Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), has faced opposition in the Senate but made its way to the Senate floor for debate this week. Sen. Chambliss was one of more than a dozen Republicans who voted for a motion to proceed on the gun control bill. He was joined by Georgia’s junior U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson.
Chambliss, however, has voiced opposition to the Manchin-Toomey bill, and has made it clear that he opposes the bill that is currently headed to the Senate floor.
The date of April 16 was chosen to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two separate attacks, and then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. The massacre remains the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history and the deadliest mass shooting on a college campus.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns stated goals are: protecting communities by holding gun offenders accountable; demanding access to crime gun trace data that is critical to law enforcement efforts to combat gun trafficking; and working with legislators to fix weaknesses and loopholes in the law that make it far too easy for criminals and other dangerous people to get guns. To learn more about Mayors Against Illegal Guns visit www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org
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