Michigan State Mom, Activist Hopes Shooting Will Lead To Gun Reform

BIRMINGHAM, MI — Kelly Dillaha and her husband, Scott, were watching television in their Birmingham home Monday evening when their phones started blowing up with texts asking if their twin sons, Aidan and Brandon Johnson-Hill, students at Michigan State University, were OK.

They switched to a news channel and learned the East Lansing campus was on lockdown. A gunman had opened fire in two buildings, killing three students and wounding five others.

Dillaha told Patch a long minute followed as she searched for her phone, hit the call button and waited through five rings until her son answered. The twins live off campus and didn’t feel immediately threatened. But that changed with community-wide shelter-in-place warnings that lasted for about three hours until the suspect, 43-year-old Anthony Duane McRea was found dead of what authorities described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“Is he coming this way?” the twins wondered, Dillaha told Patch, describing the panicked worry of her sons and their two roommates. They barricaded their doors with furniture, sending Scott Dillaha a text and photo, asking if that would be enough to keep the door secure

Her sons are fine except for the very real trauma of America’s gun violence epidemic hitting so close to home — again — but parents elsewhere in suburban Detroit are grieving.

All three students who died are from suburban Detroit — Brian Fraser and Arielle Anderson, both of Grosse Pointe, and Alexandria Verner of Clawson. Five students who were injured in the shooting remained hospitalized Tuesday in critical condition.

The news reports and the chatter around town were verses in a recurring nightmare for Dillaha and others in Oakland County and metro Detroit.

“This is not our first rodeo,” Dillaha, 52, told Patch. “My children had a friend in seventh grade who died by suicide by gun. I have a friend who passed away from gun violence. We’re not far from Oxford.”

The reference was to the Nov. 30, 2021, Oxford High School shooting, in which four students were killed and seven others were wounded.

“To keep reliving this violence — and I’m just one person,” Dillaha said. “Our communities are sick of it.”

As the state program director Red Wine & Blue: Michigan, a nationwide organization founded in 2019 to encourage suburban women to engage in politics and fight extremism, Dillaha also sits on the steering committee of End Gun Violence Michigan.

That organization, whose members include mothers, state lawmakers, policy leaders and others tired of the toll of gun violence, is considering whether to put a gun safety measure on the Michigan ballot in 2024, in effect circumventing lobbyists and giving the say to the citizens of Michigan.

Since the Oxford shooting, calls for stricter state and federal gun laws to make schools safer — including those from No Future Without Today, made up of Oxford shooting survivors and other students — haven’t made it from committee to the full chamber for a vote.

• Related: ‘Slippery Slope’ In Firearms Legislation Is Doing Nothing: Gun Owners

Red Wine & Blue: Michigan takes big national issues and makes them local by engaging women, one conversation at a time, in the multiple ways politics can affect their lives. One example: Members were invested in the passage last November of Michigan Proposal 3, which enshrines a woman’s right to an abortion in the state’s Constitution.

And while reproductive rights may have become a bellwether issue for Red, Wine & Blue after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and sent the matter of abortion back to states to decide, “we have known for a while that gun violence is an important issue” for mothers with children in public schools and universities, Dillaha said.

She said gun violence dovetails with other issues involving extremism — including book ban and other policies that single out LGBTQ kids, making them feel “otherized” and as if they don’t belong, which can be a precursor in school violence.

Polls show Michigan citizens support tighter gun laws. An EPIC-MRA poll last fall found 66 percent of people statewide back gun safety laws and laws aimed at preventing gun violence. Of 13 specific gun safety measures that could have prevented the Oxford school shooting, eight were supported by a majority of Democrats, Republicans, independents, gun owners, concealed pistol license holders and National Rifle Association members.

Pollster Bernie Porn noted at the time that years of school shootings — whether Oxford, the Sandy Hook school shooting a decade ago, the Parkland school shooting five years ago Tuesday, or the Uvalde school shooting last spring — are starting to register with Michigan citizens.

Other polls show a supermajority of Michigan voters “support these basic, commonsense gun violence laws, so we don’t have to keep living through this,” Dillaha said.

The Michigan State shooting was the 67th mass shooting this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Overall this year, 5,231 people have lost their lives to gun violence in 2023.

“Whether it’s one person or a mass shooting, we can’t let this become the norm,” Dillaha said.

“Sadly, we’re desensitized to inner city violence,” she said. “We need to remember that all people experience the pain of gun violence, and to look at the larger issue.

“The problem is access to guns. It’s mental health too, but guns are the common denominator,” she said.

And, Dillaha said, the conversation can’t go silent when the horrors fade from public consciousness.

Through Red Wine & Blue, “we keep women talking about the issue they care about with their friends, neighbors and families on a regular basis — not in a preachy way, but ‘we share this value,’ ” Dillaha said. “It begins with conversations with people who already know you and trust you, and finding common ground. In this case, nobody wants to see a family member or someone they love killed in gun violence.”

Often, support for stricter gun laws spikes after mass shootings, but can wane once memories fade, according to Gallup. Dillaha sees the opposite happening in suburban Detroit.

“We’re still talking about Oxford,” she said. “We shouldn’t stop talking about it.”

A year from now, people will still be talking about the Michigan state shooting, Dillaha said, adding she hopes the story peg will go something like this:

“We learned that when a violent act happens, it has a ripple effect that goes around the world and lasts for generations. We finally learned something and did something about it.”

More On The Michigan State Shooting

• MSU Shooting Victims Were University Students; Gunman Identified
• Grosse Pointe, Clawson Graduates Killed In MSU Shooting: Police
• Michigan State Shooting: What We Know About Shooter
• Accused Michigan Shooter’s Deep New Jersey Ties Explained
• ‘It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way,’ Whitmer Says After MSU Shooting

Editor's Note: The date of the Oxford High School shooting has been corrected.