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Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Washington Navy Yard shooting is one more dash of salt in the open wound of 2013. There have been at least 17 mass shootings since the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in December of 2012, making it impossible to ignore the obvious need for changes in legislation surrounding gun control.

As coverage of the Sept. 16 shooting continued, people took to social media to express their frustrations with the lack of visible progress regarding gun control. Facebook and Twitter are viable places to discuss our aggravations about current events. They’re supposed to be megaphones for the masses. However, instead of hitting enter on those 140 characters and calling it a day, we should follow the lead of creative individuals like Brian Peterson.

On the same day as the Navy Yard incident, an online article was published describing photographer Brian Peterson’s attempts to help tsunami victims in Japan rebuild their lives. He founded the organization Photohoku, which aims to help victims heal by starting new photo albums.

Peterson and company conduct portrait sessions with the affected families who lost their homes and belongings to the disaster. He uses instant film cameras so his subjects can start new albums immediately. Now, he does the same in his home state of Oklahoma for families devastated by the tornado chain in May. They also accept new and used digital cameras to distribute to victims so they can continue the project on their own.

Kristina Anderson wept after the Navy Yard shooting, which occurred just across the river from her office. Anderson was one of dozens shot in the 2007 attack at Virginia Tech. She ended up co-founding a company and a mobile app, LiveSafe, which promotes personal safety by supporting direct interaction with law enforcement. It also provides safety information about users’ locations and alerts them to danger.

Peterson affected change using his skills as a photographer, providing a symbol of hope in the form of a brand-new scrapbook. Anderson turned her traumatic experience at Virginia Tech into a technology that could prevent a repeat event.

It’s important to write to our respective leaders. We must have open dialogues about these traumatic events on social media.

But until the wheels get turning, it might be best to turn our attention elsewhere. Let’s rally our unique talents and experiences, and, like Peterson and Anderson, provide creative relief or prevention.

Like the many spectators who sprinted into the smoke after the Boston Marathon explosions, there will always be good-hearted people to pick up the pieces left behind by perpetrators of violence.

While lawmakers grapple with each other and the current legislation to find a solution, those of us outside the White House would be wise to spend our time effecting change in ways only we can.

This writer will be the first to admit she knows little about the composition of new laws or the process to change existing ones.

All she knows is that, as citizens, we can’t storm Washington and rewrite gun control laws ourselves. What we can do is react with positivity, implementing our individual skills to piece together the lives of those still reeling from the blasts, the tsunamis or the fired shots.

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This kind of violence will not wait for Washington to react. If we want change done right, we’d better start effecting it ourselves.

Katie McPherson is a UF English junior. Her column runs on Tuesdays. A version of this column ran on page 6 on 9/24/2013 under the headline "How we should be reacting to terrorism"

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