Addie Polk shot herself twice late last year while being evicted from her house.  She died yesterday at 91 years old.

She’s on our mind, and our hearts, today.

From CNN:

…But Polk didn’t run from the troubling eviction notices that were placed time and time again on her door in Akron, Ohio.

She kept her business to herself.

“She wasn’t a really vocal person,” [family friend Joyce] Smith said. “She’d communicate, but you never knew what was going on. If it was anything negative you didn’t know; if it was positive you didn’t know. She was just quiet about her personal life.”

Polk, [who] made news last fall when she shot herself during an eviction, died Monday at the Arbors at Fairlawn nursing home near Akron. She was 91.

[more]

March 30, 1981 is day seared into the American memory.

Twenty-eight years ago, a mentally disturbed gunman shot four people outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, including President Ronald Reagan, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy, District of Columbia police officer Thomas Delahanty, and President Reagan’s Press Secretary, James S. Brady.

Thankfully, all four survived the attack.

While the public was not immediately aware of the severity of President Reagan’s injuries, they would later learn that he had lost three pints of blood after a bullet had lodged an inch from the President’s heart. Jim’s injury, however – a gunshot wound to the head – was more apparent as he lay sprawled on the sidewalk alongside Agent McCarthy and Officer Delahanty.

Sarah Brady, Jim’s wife, has helped carry the burden of her husband’s wounds every day since then. In the process, though tragedy changed their lives forever, together Jim and Sarah changed America for the better.

Because of their dogged determination, and with the support of President Reagan and millions of American families, the Brady Law was enacted under President Bill Clinton’s signature 13 years after Jim and the President were shot.

The Brady Law requires criminal and mental health background checks for gun purchasers at Federally licensed gun dealers. Since the law took effect in 1994, over 1.6 million dangerous people have been denied gun purchases at the point of sale.

As President Clinton said, “How many people are alive today because of Jim and Sarah Brady? How many? Countless.”

To the families of the innocent victims in Carthage, North Carolina, we offer our sorrow and condolences.

We are having too many incidents like the one at the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center in this country. In Oakland, in Alabama, on the Mexican border, even in churches like one in Southern Illinois, our weak gun laws are costing innocent people their lives.

If, in the month of March, tainted peanut butter or spinach had led to the deaths of ten people in Alabama, eight in North Carolina and four in California, Congress would be calling for investigations and legislative reform.

But 22 die in mass shootings in less than a month, and Congress and the White House do nothing.

With 30,000 Americans dying every year from gun violence in America, we owe it to our citizens to exercise a similar diligence in addressing gun violence.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

Even by the standards of the Conservative Political Action Committee event where he recently spoke, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre was over the top.

He explained to all of us in America that “the guys with the guns make the rules.”

Most of us believe that in a democracy, the voters make the rules.

Two days ago, a deranged man in Alabama killed 10, including women and children, before taking his own life. He had the firepower of assault weapons to execute his plan of mass carnage.

Americans who have lost loved ones to gun violence are tired of the guys with the guns making the rules.

Despite the Tennessee Department of Public Safety concluding this past week that some felons are able to obtain concealed carry permits in the state (and there have been similar problems in the past), the Tennessee legislature is considering relaxing state concealed carry laws instead of focusing on fixing the obvious gaps in the permitting system.

The bills the state legislature is currently considering include:
-  Forcing all city and county parks to let permit holders carry guns.
-  Allowing permit holders to bring guns into establishments that serve alcohol.
-  Closing the list of concealed carry permit holders to the public and press.

These proposals have been met with quite an uproar, with the Nashville Tennessean, Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Chattanooga Times Free Press all editorialized against these bad policies.

And yesterday, even Stephen Colbert weighed in on the controversy.