No more thoughts and prayers.

By now, it’s just too familiar.

There’s an unspeakable act of violence. People — often children — die at the hands of a someone wielding a weapon of war. Politicians offer thoughts and prayers, but, “nothing can be done.” We vent our collective anguish into social media, into each other. Flags are lowered, bromides are offered, speeches are made. Then Congress, the law-making body we have entrusted to protect us, does nothing.

Or Congress does worse than nothing — like making it easier for people with profound mental illness to obtain high capacity firearms so they can carry out massacres like the school shooting on Wednesday in Parkland, Florida, or Sutherland Springs, or Las Vegas.

This is a public health crisis that there is a solution for. And you know who’s doing something about it? Moms.

For the last 5 years, Moms Demand Action activists have gotten busy in statehouses and boardrooms all over this country to fight the scourge of gun violence, by pressing lawmakers to oppose harmful legislation, to pass gun safety legislation and to talk about how we can protect our communities and our kids from gun violence.

Moms understand what we can accomplish when we get together and work hard for something. We understand what it means to fight for our kids.

I don’t think people would be shooting our kids in their own schools if working mothers had anything to say about it in Congress.

If I had to think of the reason I’m running for Congress, it’s this: our children’s safety, and our country’s well-being, is worth less to our members of Congress than their donors’ profits.

And this perverse ritual, whereby our own children are gunned down in schools, and churches, and move theaters, informed by unbounded rage and toxic masculinity and the culture of public spectacle, and then the shameful inaction that attends it, must end.

I’ve been very vocal about my commitments to doing everything I can to address this. You can read more here. But those commitments include:

• Overturning the Dickey Amendment, which prevents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding research into firearm injuries and deaths;
• Requiring universal background checks and universal licensing requirements (including the requirement that all gun show sales and all internet gun sales require a background check);
• Closing the “boyfriend loophole” so that anyone who commits acts of domestic violence cannot purchase firearms;
• Passing legislation that prohibits straw purchases to help stop illegal gun sales;
• Opposing concealed carry reciprocity;
• Banning the sale and purchase of assault weapons and/or accessories which turn firearms into assault weapons;
• and Preventing gun sales to people with prior violent-crime convictions or to those who have been adjudicated as mentally defective or have been committed to any mental institution.

We don’t need more politically calculated talking points. We need to address this crisis for the victims and their families and for our own kids’ safety. We need action. And my promise to you is to work as hard as I can to make sure that this does not continue to happen.

Julie