Highland Park parade survivor finds herself at another mass shooting after latest lobbying mission
Ashbey Beasley rushed to Covenant School in Nashville on Monday, the site of America’s latest mass shooting, and the Highland Park parade massacre survivor felt a familiar wave of grief, anxiety and anger.
“Are you freaking kidding me right now?” she told the Chicago Tribune by phone as she drove to the scene. “What are our lawmakers doing? Like, what are they doing? I cannot believe this is happening.”
Beasley had stopped in Nashville on her way back from her 12th trip to Washington since the July Fourth Highland Park tragedy, where she was on a no-holds-barred mission to convince members of Congress one by one to pass a federal assault weapons ban.
She was about to meet her new friend, Shaundelle Brooks, the mother of a young man killed in a 2018 Waffle House mass shooting, when Brooks called frantically to say her surviving son’s school in Nashville was on lockdown because of a mass shooting nearby.
A wave of emotions washed over Beasley as she changed her plans and made her way to meet Brooks at the scene of Monday’s mass shooting.
“Aren’t you guys tired of covering this?” Beasley said, as she commandeered the microphones following a news conference on the school shooting in a scene that went viral.
“I have been lobbying in D.C. since we survived a mass shooting in July,” she continued. “I have met with over 130 lawmakers. How is this still happening? How are our children still dying, and why are we failing them?”
By midafternoon, her message was echoing throughout online and national media outlets, as well as being widely shared by activists who share Beasley’s cause.
“Gun violence is the number one killer of children and teens,” Beasley said shortly before Fox News, which ran her comments live nationwide, cut away. “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 shootings will continue to happen until our lawmakers step up and pass gun safety legislation,” she said.
One by one
Name a member of Congress, and there’s a good chance they’ve met with Beasley.
The Highland Park mother has met with legislators as far apart politically as controversial Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz and former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, as well as Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to talk about guns.
When approaching legislators, typically through their staffers, Beasley looks for what they might have in common with activists seeking to limit access to, and the frequency with which assault weapons are used to carry out mass violence.
She doggedly pursues availabilities for one-on-one meetings, and rarely gets discouraged when the answer is “no” or “not now.”
In some meetings, Beasley gears her pitch around how American weapons are funneled to Mexican cartels, and how she believes those weapons are furthering the fentanyl crisis. In others, common ground can be found around improving laws governing safe gun storage.
All Beasley wants, no matter how unlikely it is in a divided Congress, is a chance to turn the tables on gun violence.
Through her efforts, Beasley has become acquainted with figures known nationally and among gun violence survivors for their activism, such as Newtown Action Alliance co-founder Po Murray, and has earned the respect of local legislators such as U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Highland Park.
“Ashbey Beasley is a tireless and fierce gun violence prevention advocate,” Schneider said, “and I am proud to consider her my friend and neighbor in Highland Park.”
Beasley was on the front lines of the push to enact an assault weapons ban in Illinois, and was present with other advocates when Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the bill, soon to be challenged in court, into law in January.
“It’s to the point where (Schneider) recognizes me now and says’ hello,’” Beasley’s husband Chip said of the effort. “She’s a force of nature.”
Chip Beasley, who bankrolls the travels, said he and Ashbey have the D.C. trips, “down to a system.”
‘Generation Lockdown’
Even 7-year-old Beau Beasley is onboard with his mother’s mission.
On Friday at the National Mall, the Beasleys attended a “Generation Lockdown” summit where speakers, including Pelosi and young Beau, gathered to call for Congressional action on guns.
“I am a mass shooting survivor,” Beau said, as his mother held a megaphone for him. “I ran for my life at a parade. I am never going to a parade again. Assault weapons don’t belong at parades.”
Beasley said her son has been deeply impacted by their experience fleeing the parade as a shooter rained bullets down upon a large crowd, killing seven people and wounding dozens of others.
The anxiety stemming from the violence is “just nonstop,” Beasley said Monday while driving to the Nashville school.
She recalled how Beau has often appeared sad since July, struggling to deal with the violence he will forever have imprinted on his mind.
That knowledge stung in particular as Beasley made her way to a place where she knew dozens of other families were only starting to experience their own version of a similar, unmistakably American tragedy.
“(Beau) saw grown men running in such a panic they tripped and fell and crashed on the ground in front of us,” she said. “He saw mothers wailing uncontrollably as they ran with their children holding onto their arm. These are things you can’t un-see, and you want me to just act like it didn’t happen and shield him from the truth?”
Concluding his address Friday, Beau did his best impression of his mother.
“Assault weapons don’t belong in America,” he said. “We deserve to be safe. Assault weapons should be banned at once. My name is Beau. I am 7 years old, and I am asking our lawmakers to ban assault weapons now.”
