Just days after the deadliest mass school shooting in Texas history, the National Rifle Association (NRA) – America’s leading gun lobbyist group – will meet a few hours away in Houston on Friday. According to the Guardian, Ashton P Woods says they are not welcome in his hometown.
“These people are coming into our community. The city of Houston needs to kick them out,” said Woods, an activist and founder of Black Lives Matter Houston. “We have to be just as tough about these things as they are.”
Woods is helping organize one of several protests planned just outside the George R Brown Convention Center, where NRA members will browse through exhibits of firearms and gun paraphernalia and hear speeches from key Republican leaders.
The goal of the Black Lives Matter protest, Woods said, is to “get loud” outside while powerful speakers – including the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, Texas senator Ted Cruz and former US President Donald Trump – take the podium inside. Woods said the issue of firearms was particularly important to the civil rights group that primarily tackles issues of police brutality in America.
Meanwhile, Teresa Kim Pecinovksy says that she will never forget witnessing the death of a child. Hearing a mother keening over her son or daughter isn’t a feeling she can articulate. “We don’t have a word in English to encapsulate the sound,” she says.
When she learned about the May 24 elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas — which has claimed the lives of 19 children and 2 adults — Pecinovksy thought she would throw up.
She is pregnant with her third child; a Houston resident and ordained minister with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), she is geographically far from the scene, but it feels near to her as a Texan. She says she felt called to do something with the rage and indignation she feels. “As clergy, we should be at the forefront leading the way,” she says.
So Pecinovsky is organizing an interfaith demonstration on May 27 in downtown Houston to protest the presence of the National Rifle Association, which is hosting its annual meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center over Memorial Day weekend.
She and Megan Hansen, a Presbyterian elder based in the Houston suburbs, are inviting dozens of followers from several different faiths — Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist — to pray outside the convention center before leading a silent march through the building during the convention.
