By Mary Tipper, WOW Dems Volunteer

Hadiya Pendleton, a Chicago teen, performed at President Obama’s inaugural parade in January 2013.  A week later, she was shot and killed. She was 15 years old, just five months shy of her Sweet 16.

Hadiya Pendleton

Hadiya Pendleton

The beginning

Wear Orange Day began with Hadiya’s friends wearing orange to honor her on her birthday and to raise awareness about gun violence. They chose orange because it’s the color hunters wear to signal to other hunters not to shoot them. In turn, Hadiya’s friends asked their fellow Americans to stand up, speak out, and wear orange to raise awareness about gun violence. Since then, people across America have donned orange on the first Friday in June, every year, to raise awareness of America’s gun violence epidemic.

More than 100 lives a day

Yesterday was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This weekend, we wear orange to honor the more than 100 lives lost and the hundreds more wounded by gun violence every single day. While we mark National Gun Violence Awareness Day on a certain day each year, we actually need to fight gun violence EVERY DAY. The statistics on gun violence in the United States are staggering and very sobering:

  • More than 100 people are killed with guns every day.
  • 37,603 die by guns every year.
  • 22,926 die by gun suicide every year.
  • 13,890 die by gun homicide every year.
  • 3,062 children and teens die by guns every year. (This is the leading cause of death among children and teens in the United States.)
  • 3,191 women were fatally shot by a partner from 2014-2018.
  • Black people are twice as likely to die by guns than white people, and 10 times more likely to die by gun homicide than white people.

Source: Everytown for Gun Safety

Take Action

Here are a few ways you can take action against gun violence, every day of every year.

  1. Visit the action page for Wear Orange.
  2. Volunteer or donate; Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety are great options.
  3. Vote for gun sense candidates. Visit Moms Demand Action’s 2020 Gun Sense Candidate Lookup to find gun sense candidates on your ballot.

Wear orange this weekend and share your photos with the hashtag #WearOrange. Spread the word about ways people can take action against gun violence; it’s only through collective action that we can make the senseless loss of lives due to gun violence a thing of the past.