Friday, June 3 is Gun Violence Awareness Day, and GOOD Morning Wilton is taking part by participating in the Wear Orange campaign and changing our background color through Sunday, June 5.

The Wear Orange campaign explains its origin on its website: Just one week after 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton marched in President Obama’s second inaugural parade, she was shot and killed on a playground in Chicago. On what would have been Hadiya’s 18th birthday, her friends and family paid tribute by starting the Wear Orange effort, encouraging people to wear the color hunters wear in the woods as protection. “Wear Orange is now observed every June. Thousands of people wear the color orange to honor Hadiya and the more than 40,000 people who are killed with guns and approximately 85,000 who are shot and wounded every year.”

Some other information, from Moms Demand Action:

“Since 2009, there have been 274 mass shootings in the United States, resulting in 1,536 people shot and killed and 983 people shot and wounded.”
More than 99% of gun deaths in the US are actually from shootings other than mass shootings, a fact that gets less media coverage.
There are more than 110 gun deaths each day in the US.
“Mass shootings are often:
- “perpetrated by someone who was legally prohibited from possessing a firearm
- “perpetrated by someone who displayed prior warning signs
- “intermingled with acts of domestic violence
- “far deadlier when they involve assault weapons and high-capacity magazines”
In mass shootings that occurred between 2009-2021, at least 362 children and teens were killed as well as 21 law enforcement officers killed and 35 wounded. One in four mass shooting victims were children and teens.
61% of mass shootings occurred entirely in the home

Moms Demand Action compared gun policies and laws among the 50 states correlated with gun deaths, they found a “clear pattern”: strong laws mean less gun violence. “Indeed, the 13 states that have failed to put basic protections into place — ‘national failures’ on our scale — have nearly three times as many gun deaths as the eight national gun safety leaders.