Wear Orange In Washington To Support Gun Violence Awareness Day

SEATTLE — National Gun Violence Awareness Day falls this year on Friday — though with the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting and Wednesday’s deadly Tulsa, Oklahoma, hospital shooting still fresh in our minds, Washington residents hardly need a reminder of the ways gun violence can tear at the fabric of our families and communities.

One way to show support for Gun Violence Awareness Day is by attending a Wear Orange event — like the upcoming Gun Violence Awareness Picnic at Mercerdale Park — It’s one of dozens of gun violence awareness events around the country, sponsored by the Everytown for Gun Safety organization and its partners.

Adding urgency to the observances: In 2020, gun violence killed more children than car crashes, for many years the leading cause of death among children, according to researchers who took a deep dive into federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gun mortality data. Their findings were published as a research letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.

They found that from 2019 to 2020, gun-related deaths jumped by nearly 30 percent among Americans ages 1-19.

Overall, gun violence spiked to a 25-year high in 2020, the CDC said in a report last month.

That year, the latest for which data is available, 79 percent of all homicides and 53 percent of all suicides involved guns, and the firearms homicide rate surged 35 percent from 2019, the CDC said.

Washington has some of the strictest gun control measures in the nation, and as such has a much lower than average gun violence rate— though of course, it could always be better. In 2020, the state's firearms mortality rate was 10.9 shooting deaths per 100,000 residents.

Here are more things to know about Gun Violence Awareness Day:

How Did It Start?

The first Gun Violence Awareness Day was held on June 2, 2015, on what would’ve been Hadiya Pendleton’s 18th birthday. She was fatally shot on a Chicago playground on Jan. 29, 2013, when she was 15, and a week after she marched in President Barack Obama’s second inaugural parade.

Once a single-day commemoration, it has grown to a three-day observance in cities around the country. People are encouraged to wear orange throughout the June 3-5 weekend.

Why Wear Orange?

Shortly after her death, Pendelton’s friends began wearing orange — the color hunters wear as a safety measure — to commemorate her life.

Erica Ford of the New York-based gun violence prevention program Life Camp Inc. spearheaded the effort to make orange the defining color of the movement. Now it’s worn across the country to bring awareness to the hundreds of people injured or wounded by gun violence every day, according to organizers.

How To Show Support

One of the best ways to counter gun violence is through policy, according to the Wear Orange organization. Its website provides a link to email one's U.S. senators and urge them to vote on House-approved gun reform legislation that has been stalled since 2019.

More links take gun violence prevention activists to social media tool kits, photo and video management, coloring pages and other resources.

Related: Gun Control After Texas School Massacre: How Washington Is Responding