Palisadians Billie Weiss and Annette Verge Stopka were among a group of about 40 people gathered on Thursday, Dec. 11 under the arms of the Mother Mary statue at Wilshire Boulevard and Ocean Avenue to mark the two-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting incident.
On Dec. 14, 2012 a 20-year-old gunman killed his own mother in his Newton, Connecticut home before walking into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killing 20 children and six adults. The shooter would later take his own life.
“We are here to remember all the victims and to commit ourselves to doing something to reduce gun violence,” Weiss said at the event called Light L.A.
The effort was held to remember those killed and injured by gun violence, said Weiss, who serves as director of the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center at the UCLA School of Public Health. She is also the founder of the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles.
An epidemiologist, Weiss was working for the county health department in the 1980s when she realized that the leading cause of death for young people in Los Angeles wasn’t diseases or infections – it was violence.
“In the 1980s, we were losing one of every 200 African American men a year,” Weiss said. “Gun violence is a public health emergency.”
There have been more deaths from gun violence than from the AIDS epidemic, she explained.
State Senator Ben Allen, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, was also present for the event.
Allen said the culture of gun violence has to change.
“I am a strong supporter of gun control laws, but it’s not the only thing,” Allen said. “We can pass every law in the book, but if we don’t change the culture and don’t change that sense of responsibility for our own community and violence then we have failed.”
Holding a sign among the other activists in the crowd, Palisadian Verge Stopka was there to support her sister Suzanne Verge who is involved with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and to remember their brother Peter Verge.
Peter Verge, who loved surfing, was killed in his apartment on San Vicente and Ocean Avenue on Dec. 10, 1978, not far from where the Light L.A. vigil was held.
At the time, 18-year-old Peter was planning to move to Hawaii, but his dreams were cut short when a 33-year-old attorney who was addicted to heroin shot and killed him.
“I just wish we would take guns away from people addicted to drugs and from children. I just want to prevent other victims,” Stopka said.
“My brother would still be alive if there weren’t a gun there,” she said. “It would have just been a fight. He would have been fine.”
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