On Jan. 14, when members of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV) showed up in Albany to bring attention to a proposed gun law, they were wearing T-shirts bearing the phrase “Locked and Unloaded.”
They have Janae Sepulveda, a student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), to thank for it.
Sepulveda came up with the phrase last fall while creating a class campaign for her Social Policy II: Policy Practice and Human Rights Advocacy course. She and three classmates—Jonathan Wilson, Melinda Lehman, and Krista Amato—focused on gun safety. They set their sights on supporting Nicholas’s Law, proposed state legislation dedicated to Nicholas Naumkin, who was killed in December 2010 by a 12-year-old friend playing with a handgun he found in his father’s dresser. The law would require gun owners to either secure their weapons in a safe or render them unable to be fired whenever the gun is out of their possession.
The safe-storage bill passed the Democrat-led State Assembly this year, but the Republican-led Senate has refused to pass it. This defied explanation for Sepulveda, who noted that an average of two children a week in the state are killed in unintentional shootings.
Read the rest of the story in Inside Fordham.
