Gun victims protest violence

Many people were able to walk to yesterday's anti-gun-violence rally outside the State Office Building at Broad and Spring Garden streets.

But others, like organizer Joe Davis, were forced to use their hands.

Davis, like many other supporters and volunteers, is confined to a wheelchair: He was shot and paralyzed in 1981.

"The legislators need to do what's right and enforce gun legislation and support the one-gun-a-month bill," said Davis, flanked by other wheelchair-bound activists as they made their way from Magee Rehabilitation Center, 16th and Race, to the state building.

"They need to stop the straw-purchasing and the gun-trafficking; it's now causing crimes in other states."

Davis helped organize yesterday's rally, which featured several anti-violence organizations and individuals, including: Men United for a Better Philadelphia; Grannies for Peace; Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth; Congreso, and Phil Goldsmith, the former school district chief executive and former Philadelphia managing director, now president of the board at CeaseFire PA.

Joining them were folks who lost loved ones to gun violence: folks like Cherie Ryans, whose son, Terence, 18, and his friend Darren Norwood, 19, were killed by an illegally obtained Tec-9 firearm in 1990.

Ryans fought back tears as she recalled how her son, a first-year student at Cheyney University, who aspired to be a lawyer, was about to return to class for the fall semester when he and his friend were cut down outside a now-demolished movie theater at 40th and Walnut streets.

"Even though it happened 17 years ago, it's still fresh in my mind," Ryans said, standing on the periphery of the rally. "He never returned home. He left his bags in my living room."

Compounding Ryans' tragedy is the fact that police apprehended five suspects, but they were let go because no moviegoer positively identified the shooters.

"There were four trials, five caught and all let go; there were 300 people in the street after the movies, but no one seen anything," a dismayed Ryans said. "So I definitely support the one-gun-a-month legislation; they need to register these guns.

"Every time I see a life taken by the illegal guns, it opens up nails in my son's coffin."

Many attendees told how gun violence had altered their lives.

"I'm a victim of gun violence myself, having been shot in a robbery in December 1996, and I said it back then and I still say it, that people are able to get guns too easily and they're using them without thinking about the permanent consequences," said Mark Chilutti as he rolled his wheelchair up Broad Street toward the rally.

"It's important that legislators, elected officials and anybody who can make a difference [know that] we live with it, every day of our lives, in wheelchairs."

After his shooting and rehabilitation, Chilutti joined Magee's staff and is now assistant vice president of development.

Lance Haver, city consumer-affairs director, whose son, Daren Dieter, was shot and left a quadriplegic in a recent shooting, made perhaps the most poignant remarks, telling the crowd that no family should have to go through what his has, and that no child should go through what Daren has.

"My son was shot by a person he did not know; Daren's suffering is unbearable for us," a choked-up Haver said. "My hope is to stop this from happening to another family."

Organizers gathered signatures to take to Harrisburg to lobby legislators in advance of next month's general election.