Jumaane Williams Takes Lead On Combatting Gun Violence

Twenty-five people were shot across New York City over the weekend, with three killed. At the midway point of the year around 272 people have been shot in Brooklyn alone, 530 in the entire city. New York City Councilman Jumaane Williams held a press conference Monday to say that while the news of the plethora of shootings is disheartening, it is not necessarily discouraging.

“This is a major spike and we want to make sure it doesn’t happen [again],” said

Williams, deputy leader and co-chair on the Council’s Task Force to Combat Gun Violence, standing on the steps of City Hall, flanked by anti-gun organizations, such as New Yorkers Against Gun Violence and Guns Down, Life Up, launched the National Network to Combat Gun Violence (NNCGV) on the last day of Gun Awareness Month to show residents of the city that leaders are pushing to make a change in communities.

The coalition, which is without a formal leadership structure, was born out of a realization that collaboration among local legislators is the best course of action to take in order to stop shooting outbreaks like this past weekend from happening again by preventing guns from entering communities, and even worse, getting into the hands of the youth.

Williams announced that NNCGV will make it a mission to ensure that there is an open channel between the cities that signed on--a list that includes Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle--so they are able to actively discuss the issue plaguing the nation and work towards an effective solution.

“[It] enables local legislatures from across the country to share their best practices, to share their lessons, to share policy ideas, programmatic ideas and legislative ideas in how we can combat which we know is a pandemic across the country,” Williams said at the press conference. 

Cities will be able to share their ideas, experiences and practices relating to gun-violence within their borders by way of video conferences and potentially even an annual conference.

Unity on a nationwide scale in an effort to tackle gun-violence is nothing new and Williams even noted how former mayor Michael Bloomberg led the charge in funding and founding Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.

“I think it’s a fantastic thing that Michael Bloomberg started. I thought he didn’t do so well locally with the gun-issue, but nationally I really believe that he had the right idea,” Williams said.

Williams butted heads with Bloomberg over the controversial stop-and-frisk policing tool, and Williams co-sponsored the Community Safety Act – the spiritual predecessor of NNCGV – which passed last fall, as a response to the growing unconstitutional use of the practice. Williams cautioned that there was no correlation between the amount of stops and shootings during Bloomberg’s tenure while also stressing that police play a crucial role in the fight against gun-violence, but that more resources are needed. 

“I said at that time that we’re about safe streets and better policing and so we’re going to do both of those as hard as we can and as fast as we can, because we mentioned the numbers, but there are families behind each one of those numbers – there are faces, there are names and we don’t always get to that but people are really suffering," Williams said. 

More suffering occurred during the press conference when news arose that two men were shot in Gowanus in Brooklyn. Upon hearing the news Williams was visibly affected, eventually managing to say, “it’s ridiculous.”

The news was all too familiar to Tamika Mallory, the city’s co-chair of June’s Gun Violence Awareness Month whose son’s father was shot and killed. Mallory said that she and other anti-gun advocates would be working tirelessly to reduce the amount of violence going forward to supplement Williams' efforts. 

“Please do not think June is the end of our work,” Mallory said. “It is the beginning of a collaborative effort to save our children’s lives.”