Out of the Ashes

I have recently watched a film that tells a story that I know all too well, but it is told in such a vibrant and refreshing manner that I hope many people see it.  The film is called Living for 32, and it tells the story of a new, young gun control activist who I have had the pleasure and honor of getting to know, and who may well follow in the footsteps of Jim and Sarah Brady and help our country make progress past tired old stone walls of fierce debate.

Colin Goddard, shot four times at Virginia Tech, is 25. When filmmakers Maria Cuomo Cole and Kevin Breslin first met with him, they planned to make a five-minute film about him. Then the film was 10 minutes, then 15, and it just kept growing – because the story of Colin kept going. Now it’s at 40 minutes, and Colin keeps going.

I once told the mother of one of the students who survived the Virginia Tech tragedy that I had enormous respect for the survivors who became activists. If my child had been shot, I told her, I would probably fall apart.  Colin is a clear example of the opposite reaction.

He went through months of grueling physical therapy, returned to Virginia Tech and finished his degree, then joined the staff of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence to lobby for tougher gun laws.  He took a second-rate hidden camera into half a dozen gun shows and captured remarkable digital film of people buying guns without background checks.  And now he spends his days going  from office to office on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. trying to convince rather spineless members of Congress to do the right thing and vote for a bill so middle-of-the-road that Senator John McCain was once its staunchest supporter. 

I’ve left the staff of the Brady Campaign, to pursue new challenges, after almost eight years of advocating for tougher gun laws. I’d feel far guiltier about leaving if I didn’t know Colin Goddard was staying behind to keep advocating.  He and others like him are the future of the movement.  I tease him all the time, calling him “Neo.” He’s tall and looks like Robert Pattinson. He could be on the cover of Tiger Beat Magazine.

One day in April of 2009, I asked Colin to come into my office to talk about a draft of an opinion article he had written that he intended to offer to the Dallas Morning News.  Texas was considering legislation to require all public colleges and universities to allow students to bring concealed weapons to school.  Colin wanted to argue that was a bad idea.

“But this is terrible,” I told him.  “This is a compilation of statistics and facts about gun deaths, geared to make the case that Texas shouldn’t be weakening its gun laws.”

“Isn’t that what we want?” he asked me.

“Heck, no,” I shouted. “You have a story to tell that relates to the bill being voted on. So tell the story.” I squirmed in my seat, realized I was being a bit harsh. More quietly, I asked, “Colin, what happened that day?”

He squinted. “Didn’t I ever tell you?” he asked. So he told me, and I took notes, and that’s what he wrote, and you can read it here.

I’ve always been fond of Lewis Carroll’s masterpieces, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  And in the former, this exchange has always stayed with me:

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. 'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.


'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'

Colin Goddard has a story to tell, and it’s a cautionary tale, and it’s only at the end of the beginning. He was shot by a man who shouldn’t have had a gun, according to the law. When the Virginia Tech killer burst in the door of his classroom and started shooting, Colin took out his cell phone and called the police. Then, when he was shot, he managed to get the phone to another student to stay on the line and aid the police in making a rapid response to the scene.

Eight minutes after that phone call began, with 32 dead and dying on the floors of Norris Hall, the killer ended his own life because he heard the police coming.  The facts suggest that had Colin not started that phone call, the police would have gotten there later, and the killer would have killed more people.

Colin Goddard is a modern-day phoenix, rising out of the ashes of a devastating calamity. He’s a solemn, thoughtful young man, looking around the world he’s inheriting, and shaking his head at it.  It’s one of the key changes between childhood and adulthood, when you start being dissatisfied with the landscape, instead of seeing it as boundlessly good, when you start surveying the territory to see what could be better, and thinking about how you can help make it so.

As Robert F. Kennedy said., “some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say ‘why not?’”  Colin Goddard hasn’t learned how to be old and cynical. That’s a good thing.

When he was 28 years old, Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden,

“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures... I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.”

The next generation of leadership is coming, and they’re aiming to do some things better than they’ve been done by the current generation of leadership. That’s a good thing.