'How Is This Still Happening?': Highland Park Shooting Survivor

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — A Highland Park mom who survived the 4th of July parade mass shooting commandeered a live cable news broadcast Monday at the site of another mass shooting to deliver a passionate plea for stronger gun laws.

Ashbey Beasley approached assembled news crews and addressed them directly following a Metropolitan Nashville Police Department press conference.

"Aren't you guys tired of being here and having to cover all of these mass shootings?" Beasley asked.

"How is this still happening? How are our children still dying? Why are we failing?," she continued. "Gun violence is the number one killer of children and teens — it has overtaken cars. Assault weapons are contributing to the border crisis and fentanyl. We are arming cartels with our guns and our loose gun laws, and these shootings and these mass shooting will continue to happen until our lawmakers step up and pass gun safe legislation."

Beasley has made a dozen trips to Washington, D.C., last year's massacre to push for a federal assault weapons ban and stricter firearm relations., meeting with more than 130 lawmakers, she said.

On July 4, 2022, she and her 6-year-old son were attending the parade when gunman with a semiautomatic rifle began shooting into the crowd, sending them running for their lives as more than 50 people were shot, seven fatally.

Beasley said Congress has even been incapable of passing a law mandating that guns be stored safely.

"Aren't you guys tired of this? You guys sick of it? We have to do something," she said, speaking into a bank of microphones on a live cable news broadcast.

"We all have to call out our lawmakers and we all have to make our lawmakers make a change now, or this is going to keep happening," Beasley said. "And it's going to be your kid, and your kid, and your kid next, because it's just a matter of time."

Beasley found herself at the site of Monday's school shooting in Tennessee after stopping on her way back from D.C. to meet a friend, the mother of a man killed in a 2018 mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House, the Chicago Tribune reported.

On her way to meet, Beasley got a call that the latest mass shooting had led to a lockdown at the high school attended by her friend's surviving son, and they met instead at Covenant School, where three children and three adults were slain by an intruder who was later killed by police.

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Beasley and the man facing murder charges for the Highland Park shooting have crossed paths before, Patch has reported.

As the summer of 2020 drew to a close, Beasley organized a downtown Highland Park counter-protest to a demonstration in support of then-President Donald Trump, which was attended by accused parade shooter Bobby Crimo, who has authorities say has confessed to carrying out the parade shooting.

A couple months earlier, he had legally acquired an arsenal that included two semiautomatic rifles, two pistols and a shotgun. One of the rifles was found abandoned at the site of the July 4 massacre. The other was found in his car when he was arrested upon his return from Madison, Wisconsin, where authorities said he considered carrying out another shooting.

Illinois lawmakers in January passed the Protect Illinois Communities Act, which bans some categories of semiautomatic rifles, pistols and shotguns, as well as large-capacity magazines. The state's assault weapons ban faces numerous challenges in state and federal courts.

After state court judges declared the ban an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause, Gov. Pritzker, Attorney General Kwame Raoul and state legislative leaders have appealed directly to the Illinois Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in the Southern District of Illinois is set to convene a hearing in several consolidated cases asserting the ban violates Second Amendment rights articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court last year in its New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen opinion, which included a more expansive reading of constitutional gun ownership rights.