Mass shootings turn Orange County, CA mom into gun control activist

Deborah Hernandez, an Orange County mother, was so disturbed by recent mass shootings that she responded by launching an Orange County chapter of Mothers Demand Action, a national organization that formed after the Newtown shootings that calls for gun control. PHOTOS BY ANA VENEGAS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

BY DAVID WHITING, COLUMNIST, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

As I chat in a neighborhood park with Deborah Hernandez, gun control activist, her 5-year-old son runs up crying.

“Mommy, that boy said he was gonna kill me.”

Yes, it’s a very different world from the one in which most of us grew up. School resource officers tell me there was a time that they didn’t hear that kind of language until middle school. No more.

Changing times and changing technology prompted Hernandez, a Laguna Hills resident, to form the Orange County chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Immediately after Tuesday’s defeat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s effort to ban so-called assault weapons, Hernandez shoots me an email. But don’t mistake Hernandez for a veteran activist.

It wasn’t until that devastating day in December when 20 first-graders were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School that Hernandez decided she needed to help America change.

The question in the escalating firearms debate is what kind of change?

Read the entire story at ocregister.com