Gun violence survivors tell their stories, rally at Kentucky Capitol for solutions

FRANKFORT — One after another, gun violence survivors and anti-violence advocates told their stories in the Kentucky Capitol rotunda Wednesday, calling on lawmakers to do more to protect them. 

Calvin Polachek, a graduate student at the University of Louisville, shared that when he was a high school student in Pennsylvania, he walked past his best friend lying in a pool of blood after a school shooting. 

“A week later, I go back to that school, and that was the worst part,” Polachek said. “(I) had to walk past that spot where I saw my best friend and pretend it was all normal. It was not normal.”  

Joanna Lee and Viet Pham, volunteer leads with duPont Manual High School Students Demand Action, recalled their experience living through the “fear” of a swatting incident after someone made a fake school shooting call to police. 

“Our generation refuses to continue living with this fear,” Pham said. “No student should have to worry about their safety at school. No one should fear getting shot at their jobs. We must fight for a future where we feel completely safe from gun violence in the places that we live, where we work, where we play and where we learn.” 

Those who rallied during the event organized by Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action didn’t have a specific list of bills to support, but spoke in general about the need for greater education and training about guns, safe storage laws and crisis aversion and rights retention orders (CARR), which establish a process for temporarily removing guns from people at risk of hurting themselves or others — a “red flag” law, in other words. 

Rep. Adam Moore, D-Lexington, a former Moms Demand Action volunteer and freshman legislator, spoke at the rally about his support for gun safety training and making parents civilly liable when their kids access their guns and cause harm. 

Moore filed House Bill 214, which would offer a tax credit to Kentuckians who enroll in a firearm safety course and has gained bipartisan support. 

“I had my first real experience with gun violence in the fall of 2003. My grandfather shot himself,” Moore said. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988. “We all have someone like that. We wonder, what if he could have gotten the help that he needed? What if we could have had those more years left to spend with him?”  

Many years later, Moore said, “my next big gun violence incident was when my son was in preschool and a 3-year-old pulled a trigger on a handgun on the playground because someone had thrown a weapon onto that preschool playground.” 

“When guns are so readily accessible because they are not locked up, because they are not secured, because anyone can get them, it means a 3-year-old can fire a handgun on a playground,” he added. “Something is not right with that.” 

Davita Gatewood, who lost her children’s father and “first love” to gun violence in 2017, said the state needs to do more. 

“I don’t discount what members of our community did for us,” she said. “But as I look back on that time I have to ask a question: What about the responsibility of our elected officials? What about the Kentuckians who took oaths to represent us and do the works of the highest goods for all Kentuckians?”  

Nathan Thompson, who works with Moms Demand Action, survived a school shooting in Eastern Kentucky in the early 1990s. After witnessing the bloodshed that day, Thompson said, he developed post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression. 

“We’ll never know what could have been different that day, if things like safe storage laws had existed in 1993,” he said. “What about … reform of background checks? One can only speculate how the story might be different if (CARR) had been in place at that time.” 

“I wholeheartedly believe in the right to own a gun,” Thompson said. “I just happen to believe in the freedom from gun violence a bit more.”