Pushing every available emotional button, the New York Times and reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg used the anger and grief of two fathers to advocate for gun control with front-page placement in Sunday's edition: "Guns Took His Daughter; Anger Fuels His Crusade." Stolberg never even mentioned the Second Amendment while portraying gun-rights protesters as potentially dangerous in her run-down of campus shootings over the last decade.
Two days after yet another gunman opened fire on yet another college campus, Peter Read, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, was eating lunch on a paper plate in a gray cinder-block church basement here before two of his sons, Brendan, 11, and Patrick, 12, received Boy Scout badges and honors.
But Mr. Read’s mind, after the mass shooting in Oregon, was on the first of his six children, his daughter Mary, murdered at age 19 in the 2007 campus massacre at Virginia Tech. His blue eyes rimmed with red, he drew a large circle in the air with his hands, in the shape of a giant hole.
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Like so many Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence, in places etched into the national psyche -- Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown and now Roseburg, Ore. -- Mr. Read has sought to fill that hole through advocacy, in his case by pushing for tougher gun safety laws.
Forfeiting objectivity, Stolberg transformed a complex policy issue involving individual rights into a simplistic, heartbreaking emotional appeal.
It has been a long and often dispiriting fight -- one grieving father’s frustrating crusade.
The Virginia Tech massacre, on April 16, 2007, holds a singular place in American history. Thirty-two students and faculty members were killed, and 17 others wounded, in what remains the nation’s deadliest shooting rampage by a single gunman.
But with each new mass shooting, the circle of families like the Reads expands. Many have grown close, through gun safety vigils and rallies around the country. After each tragedy, text messages begin flying among survivors and families, asking, “Are you O.K.?” said Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was wounded at Virginia Tech. Today, Lori Haas is the Virginia director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
Stolberg never even mentioned the Second Amendment while lamenting Virginia's "hostile" attitude toward gun control.
Virginia, home to the National Rifle Association, has long been hostile to limiting gun rights. Mr. Read, a well-built, ruddy-faced former intelligence officer who has “carried semiautomatic and automatic weapons all over the world in places where bad guys wanted to kill me,” knows that even some families of victims at Virginia Tech, in Oregon and elsewhere think the solution is more guns, not fewer. Still, Tim Kaine, a Democrat who was governor at the time of the Tech shooting and is now a United States senator, “thought for certain,” he said, that the massacre would spur action. He thought his legislature would expand background checks, now required only for those who buy guns from federally licensed arms dealers, to all gun sales. So did Mr. Read.
Instead, Mr. Kaine made other changes. He used his executive powers to require mental health records to be entered into the background check database for gun buyers, signed legislation requiring colleges to have safety plans and increased funding for mental health services.
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Born in Seoul, South Korea, Mary Karen Read was a freshman, an aspiring elementary school teacher and an avid clarinet player. The daughter of Mr. Read and his first wife, she became a high school homecoming princess and faithful Christian who hoped to lead a campus Bible study group.
The last time her father saw her was the day before she died.
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Mr. Read’s advocacy began in May 2007, four weeks after he buried his daughter, when he learned the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group whose president boasts it is “to the right of the N.R.A.,” planned to raffle off firearms at a government building just miles from his home.
Stolberg shamelessly hit manipulative hot buttons in her front-page "news" story:
Incensed, he called another Virginia Tech father, Joseph Samaha, a commercial real estate broker whose daughter, an accomplished 18-year-old dancer named Reema, had been killed in the same French class as Mary. They decided to stand outside in silent protest, holding photographs of their beautiful, dark-haired, murdered daughters.
Gun rights advocates were portrayed as dangerous:
Lobby Day in 2008, the first one after the Virginia Tech shooting, was particularly intense. Virginia is an “open-carry” state -- anyone over 18 who is legally permitted to own a firearm may carry it in public -- and the Reads were startled to find themselves surrounded by people toting weapons at the bell tower on the Capitol grounds.
“It was scary,” Mrs. Read said; she was glad she had worn flat shoes, in case she felt the need to run.
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Virginia has expanded gun rights at least twice since the Tech massacre. In 2010, then-Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, signed a bill allowing people with permits to take concealed weapons into bars -- so long as they do not drink. In February 2012, he signed a repeal of a nearly 20-year-old law barring Virginians from purchasing more than one handgun a month. Before he did, he spoke to Ms. Haas and Mr. Read by phone....That December, a gunman in Newtown, Conn., shot and killed 20 schoolchildren and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School; President Obama vowed to make changing gun laws his top priority....
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To ask Mr. Read how he goes on is to see a man struggling to contain his rage. Sometimes his wife will motion with her hands to try to quiet him. (“My adviser is telling me I’m being too angry,” he will say.) But he is angry, so he answers the question with questions of his own.
When Stolberg did pause the emotionalism to report on the policy aspects of the debate, the results were heavily one-sided in tone.
Today, some advocates of gun control see progress in the states. Over the past two years, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Oregon and Washington have expanded background checks; Nevada voters will consider an initiative to do so next year. Daniel Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, says a state-by-state strategy -- much like the movement for same-sex marriage -- may be the answer. But not in Virginia, vowed Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
“Background checks are a waste of time,” Mr. Van Cleave said. As to Mr. Read, he said, “I have to write him off as a grieving parent who is not being rational.”
Stolberg ended with Read making a visit to his daughter's grave.
