Gun violence opponents take protest to downtown Rock Hill

Diane Rudulph is having difficulty keeping track of the increasing number of mass shootings around the United States this year.

The day after the Dec. 2 shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., which left 12 people dead and 22 injured, Rudulph, a Rock Hill resident of 12 years, wondered if there would be another mass shooting that day.

“And I thought, ‘I shouldn’t have to wonder that,’ ” she said. “We shouldn’t have to say, ‘This week’s deadly shooting.’ We shouldn’t be assigning Roman numerals to these things.”

Less than two weeks after the deadly California shooting, Rudulph organized a dozen other people to walk from the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in downtown Rock Hill to The Herald, where they delivered letters to the editor urging reform of the country’s gun laws.

Participants wore orange, the color hunters wear for safety, Rudulph said, but also the color worn by friends of Hidaya Pendleton, a Chicago teen gunned down in 2013 just a week after performing at President Obama’s inauguration. The movement adopted orange as a color to represent the value of human life.

Monday’s walk and others around the country on the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newton, Conn., were organized under Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, an anti-gun-violence organization.

Rudulph said she and her husband for years have donated money to organizations like Moms Demand Action. Their daughter was working across the hall in an El Paso, Texas, Veterans Affairs office in January when a gunman entered the building and killed a psychiatrist before turning the gun on himself.

The shooting in San Bernardino this month was the breaking point, Rudulph says.

“It was kind of an impulse; I think we all have a tipping point we reach,” she said of deciding to organize the walk. “I decided giving money and signing online petitions just wasn’t enough. I’ll bet nobody pays any attention to these (petitions) anymore.”

Rudulph and her husband are both gun owners, she said, and the group isn’t against people owning guns, they simply favor “reasonable” gun control.

“It seems to me that if I cannot buy more than a couple packages of Sudafed without having to sign, and if I cannot buy more than a certain amount of fertilizer without the FBI being notified,” she said, “then I should not be able to order over the Internet 6,000 rounds of ammo without somebody checking to see if I’m going to do an awful lot of target practice or use that ammo for a bad purpose.”

This story was originally published December 14, 2015 at 6:56 PM with the headline "Gun violence opponents take protest to downtown Rock Hill."