‘Sen. Robert Frances Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With Sen. Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife Ethel, his sisters Mrs. Stephen Smith, Mrs. Patricia Lawford, and his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, his sister-in-law Mrs. John F Kennedy. He was 42 years old.”
With those words by press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, a child watched her hero and her hope die.
I had fallen in love with the young senator from New York earlier that year, 50 years ago. Robert Kennedy was a leader of his time, and he was ahead of his time. He spoke about ending the war in Vietnam. He spoke about equality for people of color and for women. He spoke about ending poverty and ensuring education for all. He came from great wealth and yet he focused his energy and emotions on the plight of the poor across this country, traveling to the ghettos of our inner cities and the back county of the rural South in his quest for change.
Robert Kennedy was everything an idealistic and optimistic young girl of New Hampshire believed that this country’s leader should be. He was a political knight in shining armor.
I remember my parents wouldn’t let me stay up late enough to watch the results of the hotly contested California Democratic presidential primary on June 5 so I woke up early the morning of June 6 and ran to the TV to turn on the news. I was devastated when the first image I saw was my hero lying in a pool of his own blood, having been shot in the head by an assassin’s bullet. I decided in that horror that I had to dedicate my life to carrying on the work Robert Kennedy had started and to stop gun violence in the future.
What’s happened in the 50 years since then? In the quest to reduce gun violence in America, unfortunately, very little.
In reaction to the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Congress did pass the Gun Control Act of 1968, a U.S. federal law that primarily focuses on regulating interstate commerce in firearms.
Then, near silence on the issue.
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, often referred to as the Brady Act or the Brady Bill, was signed by President Bill Clinton on Nov. 30, 1993.
The Federal Assault Weapons Ban included a prohibition on the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms it defined as “assault weapons,” as well as certain large-capacity ammunition magazines. The ban applied only to weapons manufactured after the date of the ban’s enactment, and it expired on September 13, 2004.
Put simply, since 1968, 50 years after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, America continues its fascination with more guns and higher capacity weapons. And we have witnessed a rise in gun-related deaths, well beyond the mass shootings we see in the headlines.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year 33,000 Americans are killed by guns; more than 130,000 are shot.
There are more than 50 gun suicides every day, making it the most common and lethal means of suicide. A child under 12 is killed by gunfire every other day.
This has to end. We need common-sense gun laws to reduce gun violence and save lives.
We know that universal background checks have stopped more than 2.4 million gun sales to prohibited people, such as felons, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill. Unfortunately, loopholes in our laws allow up to 40 percent of gun sales to still go unchecked, allowing gun violence to become the new normal.
In states that require criminal background checks on all handgun sales, 46 percent fewer women are fatally shot by their partners, 48 percent fewer police are killed with handguns and 64 percent fewer guns traced to crime are trafficked out of state. And yet we allow the gun lobby to block passage of this measure.
On the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, it is tempting to just remember it as the death of hope and give into the cynicism, hatred and division that has consumed our nation. But if we want to truly honor and remember this remarkable man it is important we never give up hope and keep up the fight.
As RFK once said: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
I choose to remember June 6 not as the death of hope but as the beginning of a mighty current.
(Katherine Rogers, a Concord Democrat, represents Merrimack District 28 in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.)