LANSING, Mo. — March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg rallied with Michigan State University and Oxford High School students Monday — a week after the mass shooting at the East Lansing university — to call on Michigan lawmakers to pass long-debated gun regulations.
Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, urged residents and elected officials to unify behind policy changes that would include a red flag law, require more comprehensive universal background checks and mandate the safe storage of firearms.
"How about we focus on what we can agree on, which is the fact that we need to do something about this?" Hogg said. "We need to come together as a country."
Hogg joined students from Oxford and Michigan State, teachers, elected officials and advocates against gun violence at the Lansing press conference organized by State Board of Education Chair Pamela Pugh and held near the Michigan Department of Education. The Senate introduced legislation last week that would implement safe storage and red flag laws as well as broaden current background check rules.
The press conference came one week after police said suspect Anthony McRae, 43, entered MSU's Berkey Hall, then the Union, and shot eight students, killing three and injuring five others who remain at Sparrow Hospital. Alexandria Verner, Brian Fraser and Arielle Anderson were killed in the shooting.
McRae, who in 2019 had pleaded down from a felony gun charge to a high court misdemeanor that allowed him to possess a firearm legally, shot and killed himself when approached by police more than three hours after the shooting and nearly four miles off campus. McRae had purchased the firearms he used legally, but had failed to register them, police said.
During the press conference, the Grand Rapids-based Great Lakes Gun Rights group sent out a statement promising to begin recalling any lawmakers who supported the legislation introduced in the Senate last week. The group said the red flag, safe storage and background check proposals "would make California blush."
"Are Democrats willing to lose their majorities this summer pushing these egregious and unconstitutional gun control bills? I guess we will find out," said Brenden Boudreau, executive director for Great Lakes Gun Rights.
Sen. Rosemary Bayer, D-Keego Harbor, questioned whether it was a good way for the group to spend its resources. She argued the bills had wide support, even among gun owners.
"Over and over again, the people of Michigan have been telling us that they want this," Bayer said. "We didn't just start this this week. We've been doing this for a long time. We know the people want this."
In 2012, the then-Republican-led Legislature made it more difficult to recall Michigan officials — shortening the time period in which signatures can be collected, directing all state-level recall petitions to first go to the Board of State Canvassers, requiring an alternative candidate be listed on any recall ballot and limiting recall elections to May and November. The law also blocked the public from filing a recall petition within the first and last six months of a two-year term, or the first and last year of a more than two-year term.
Hogg noted similar red flag legislation had been adopted in Republican-led Florida after the Parkland shooting and had allowed the justice system to step in, with due process, to confiscate the guns of someone who made a death threat against his mother.
"When I'm asked the difference between somebody like the person who threatened to have my mom killed — their right to have a gun versus my right to have a mom — I don't think there's anybody who can question which one of those is more important," Hogg said.
Boudreau has argued that such laws fail to deliver on their promises and would allow individuals with a grudge against a gun owner to file a complaint to have his or her guns removed. Additionally, he said, the storage law would "disarm law-abiding Michiganders in their own homes" and is likely unconstitutional.
"Ultimately, it's humans who are enforcing the law," he told The Detroit News in January, "and they aren't using it very well."
Boudreau on Monday promised to work with the national arm of the association to file recalls, noting the group successfully recalled three senators in Colorado in 2013 over gun control measures.
But the threats didn't deter Democratic elected officials Monday. Pugh said officials aren't asking, but instead demanding policy changes to prevent against future gun violence. "The time is now for us to act in a bipartisan way," she said.
Victor Rodriguez-Pereira, vice president for MSU's union of non-tenure track faculty, noted he would reunite with his students Monday afternoon for the first time since last week's shooting. Meaningful gun reform and better mental health resources are necessary to restore universities to a "place where learning and community come together," he said.
"It is the habit of some politicians to talk the talk but not walk the walk," Rodriguez-Ferrara said. "For us, as of last Monday, the time for conversation is over. What we need is action. No amount of thoughts and prayers, no rhetorical gymnastics will make sense of what happened last week."
Nicole Beard, an Okemos schools principal and a member of the Lansing branch of the NAACP, noted two weeks ago her school district was one of several in Michigan subject to a false shooting report, or a "swatting" call. She described the trauma, before the call was found to be false, of locking her school's doors to parents beating at the glass to get in and whisk their children away from the building.
"Children are entitled to an equitable and engaging school experience, and we have not been giving them that," Beard said.
Zoe Haden, a junior at Michigan State University whose younger sister was a student at Oxford High School during the Nov. 30, 2021 shooting that killed four students and injured seven others, described the similar texts she and her sister sent 14 months apart: "There's a shooter in my school right now."
"This is the second mass shooting that has directly affected my life," Hayden said. "No one should have to experience one, let alone two events of gun violence. And I was lucky. I was lucky that both times I was safe. I was lucky that my sister survived."
