Parents of Uvalde, Buffalo shooting victims ask Congress for tighter gun laws ahead of key votes

Kimberly Rubio broke down in tears as she described her 10-year-old daughter Lexi to a room full of lawmakers who are weighing tighter gun laws following the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that took Lexi’s life along with 18 of her classmates and two teachers.

“We don’t want you to think of Lexi as just a number. She was intelligent, compassionate and athletic. She was quiet, shy unless she had a point to make,” Rubio said Wednesday, crying next to her husband Felix at a hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Parents, law enforcement and one of Lexi’s classmates who survived that May 24 mass shooting testified before Congress about the Texas massacre as well as one in Buffalo, New York, last month that left a combined 31 Americans dead and horrified the nation as the latest examples of mass shootings carried out by lone teenage gunmen.

“We understand that for some reason, to some people — to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns — that guns are more important than children,” Rubio continued. “Somewhere out there, there is a mom listening to our testimony thinking, ‘I can’t even imagine their pain,’ not knowing that our reality will someday be hers. Unless we act now.”

Robb Elementary student survivor Miah Cerrillo, 11, told lawmakers she covered herself in a friend’s blood and played dead during the May 24 shooting in Uvalde.

He “shot my teacher. Told my teacher, ‘Good night,’ and shot her in the head. And then he shot some of my classmates and the whiteboard,” Cerrillo said in a recorded question-and-answer sequence submitted as testimony. “He shot my friend who was next to me, and I thought he was going to come back to the room, so I got a little blood and I put it all over me.”

Asked if she feels safe at school, Cerrillo shook her head no. Pressed why not, she replied: “Because I don’t want it to happen again.”

Zeneta Everhart, mother of 20-year-old survivor Zaire Goodman, detailed the injuries suffered by her son on May 14, when an 18-year-old gunman carried out a racist rampage at a supermarket in Buffalo.

“To the lawmakers who feel that we do not need stricter gun laws: Let me paint a picture for you,” Everhart said in her testimony. “My son Zaire has a hole in the right side of his neck, two on his back and another on his left leg caused by an exploding bullet” from an AR-15 assault rifle.

“I want you to picture that exact scenario for one of your children,” she continued. “This should not be your story or mine.”

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/08/watch-live-parents-of-uvalde-and-buffalo-mass-shootings-testify-before-congress.html