Two days after 58 people were gunned down at an Oct. 1, 2017, outdoor concert in Las Vegas, Sharon Miller walked down the historic Las Vegas Strip where she stopped at a makeshift memorial.
Almost instinctively, her eyes turned to the boarded windows of the Mandalay Bay, the hotel from which the shooter rained down shots on the festive crowd.
In the aftermath, the concert arena was still strewn with shoes, ball caps, purses and coolers.
“You could feel the disbelief. The raw terror,” she said of the scene. “I wondered, why was nothing being done to stop these types of senseless mass shootings.”
Miller spotted a mother, father and brother kneeling by a cross marking the loss of their daughter and sister.
“My heart was breaking for the mother, knowing her life was never going to be the same. She will never have another normal day in her life.”
That day, Miller silently vowed that she would no longer sit and wait for someone else to do something.
“I decided I would no longer wait for the politicians to take action. I would be part of the change.”
JUST PREVIOUS to attending the convention that brought Miller and her husband, Mark, to Las Vegas, Miller said she had been in prayerful search for how to move on from a trying period with a family member.
“But I told God he was going to have to use a loud voice, because that’s the only way I could hear him,” she said.
Miller took the Las Vegas tragedy as her sign.
“I vowed then and there that I would work to fight senseless gun violence,” she said.
Miller, a resident of Lawrence, joined her local chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, formed by Shannon Watts, a mother of five, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012. On that Friday morning of Dec. 14, a young man shot and killed 20 six- and seven-year-olds and six adult staff members.
Kansas has 11 Moms Demand Action chapters. Nationwide, more than 6 million are registered supporters.
Miller describes Moms Demand Action as a nonpartisan organization that “respects the Second Amendment,” which grants U.S. citizens the privilege to possess firearms.
