How do we keep safe -- and preserve liberties of the Second Amendment?
It's about safety.
It's also about school shootings and urban violence.
It's also about guns. And gun rights.
It's also about mental illness. And criminal behavior.
And even violence in movies and video games.
But mostly, it's about safety.
Safety. Something we should all be able to agree on.
Safety is not a liberal agenda, just as ignoring safety isn't really what conservatives want.
What we disagree on is how to keep our country's school children, city dwellers, movie goers, mall shoppers, sports fans -- and everyone else -- safe.
It's the age-old question about our Bill of Rights. How much freedom are we willing to give up for the public good?
But agreeing we all want to be safe is a good place to continue the conversation about violence in our country.
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The people organizing New Jersey's March for Our Lives tomorrow want to hammer home that message.
"We don't want to take away the right for people to safely own guns," said Rev. Melissa Hall of the St. James Episcopal Church in Upper Montclair, which is holding a March for Our Lives event tomorrow at 5 p.m., one of two dozen in the state.
"But we want our kids, our people, to be safe," she said. "Isn't that what we all should want? To be safe."
Elizabeth Meyer, a Branchburg mother and teacher, who has helped 29 student leaders organize the March for Our Lives event in Newark tomorrow, echoed that mission.
"This isn't about the Second Amendment," she said. "It's about keeping people safe everywhere -- in school, on the streets, in the movie theater and the mall."
The Newark march, which begins at 10 a.m. in Military Park (www.marchforourlivesnj.org) was organized by students from places as economically disparate and geographically distant as Princeton and Newark, and Ridgewood and Toms River. The student leaders represent those towns and Howell, Marlboro, Randolph, Somerville and the Oranges.
Newark was chosen because of the mass transit options and because the students want to connect and bring attention not only to school shootings but also to the gun violence that plagues our cities.
One of the student leaders, Elijah Brown of East Orange, has had two cousins in Baltimore murdered.
"One was about my age, and still in high school," he said. "The other was a Marine."
Brown, a sophomore political science major at Rutgers-Newark, will speak to the crowd about how the deaths left "a void that's hard to heal" in his extended family.
"It creates holes in a family," he said. "You never get to know those people."
For those not directly impacted, Brown said, there is constant fear. Gunshots reverberate down city streets, making people feel uneasy and at risk.
"Entire communities live in fear," he said. "It's crazy. People should be able to feel safe in their towns."
Safety. It's on all our minds these days as mass shootings have breached the boundaries of the unthinkable in the past few years.
- Fifty-eight people killed and more than 500 wounded during a country music concert in Las Vegas.
- Twenty first-graders and six adults killed in Newtown, Conn.
- Twenty-six parishioners killed in a rural Texas church.
- Fourteen county employees killed at a work event in San Bernardino.
- Twelve moviegoers killed and 58 wounded in a Colorado movie theater.
- Forty-nine nightclub patrons killed and more than 50 injured in Orlando, Fla.
- Thirty-two students killed at Virginia Tech.
And then there is the urban violence, where the murders, usually one or two at a time, add up to thousands. Nearly 500 a year in Chicago, about 350 in Baltimore, roughly 300 a year in both Philadelphia and Detroit, and 150 a year each in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Milwaukee.
Newark, with 74 homicides last year, doesn't make the list of the worst cities for murder. But, as police and politicians like to say, one is too many.
"Parkland was the catalyst, but inner-city gun violence is one of the reasons we chose Newark," said Sarah Emily Baum, a senior at Marlboro High School and an organizer of the Newark event. "For white picket-fence communities, the school violence is shocking. But in the cities, this is an old problem and nothing is being done."
She referred to a budget amendment signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 that prohibited funding for the national Center for Disease Control to study gun violence. A new spending bill will make funding available in the wake of the Parkland shooting.
"Government stripped funding to study gun violence. How can we solve the problems if we don't educate ourselves?" she said.
A spending bill passed by the House on Thursday will make that funding available in the wake of the Parkland shooting.
After that attack at Stoneman Douglas High School left 17 students dead last month, Baum wanted to organize a local March for Our Lives.
"I wanted to do a sister march (to the national march in Washington tomorrow) but I knew I was in over my head," she said. "I wanted to reach out to the people who organized other marches."
Simultaneously, Erin Chung of "Women for Progress," and Brett Sabo of "Moms Demand Action," reached out to Elizabeth Meyer, who was fresh off organizing a Trenton event as part of the national Women's March in Trenton on Jan. 21.
"She is an dynamite organizer," said Chung, who lives in Wyckoff. "I texted her and said, 'We have to do something.' We decided almost immediately that we should do something in Newark."
"We also knew we wanted the kids to be the driving force," said Meyer.
Through social media and old-fashioned networking, the word went out.
"My mother knew of Elizabeth, so I got in touch," Baum said.
She was the first. Within a week, other students were on board.
The Newark students came in through Eliza Armstrong, a teacher at North Star Academy and Kim Gaddy, a member of the Newark Board of Education.
"I heard from a woman whose daughter went to camp with (Parkland victim) Alex Schacter," Meyer said. "She was devastated and wanted to be involved. She brought in another girl who knew Alex from camp."
Darcy Schleifstein of Randolph and Samantha Levy of South Orange are those two girls and will speak at the Newark event.
They, like Brown, will talk about personal loss. But all of us sense a loss of security these days -- that unnerving feeling we may not be safe. Wherever. Whenever.
"Just the other day," Meyer said, "one of our student organizers, Christian Martin of Princeton, began texting me. He was on lockdown (at school) because of the guy with the gun at Panera Bread."
Police killed the armed man, Scott Mielentz of Lawrenceville, after a five-hour standoff. No one else was injured. This time.
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.