Preventing Violence - Part 5

See last Friday's post for our announcement of this blog's series featuring MVFHR members' work in the area of violence prevention.

This past Monday marked the fourth anniversary of the day Debra Fifer lost her 22-year-old son, Kirk Bickham, Jr., to gun violence on the streets of Milwaukee. Debra joined with the mothers of the other two young men who were killed along with Kirk that night, and together they founded a group called Mothers Against Gun Violence, which is now the Wisconsin Chapter of the Million Mom March.

Debra and her colleagues have been trying for years to garner support for the “responsible gun ownership bill,” state legislation that would require criminal background checks to be conducted as part of private citizen gun sales. They finally got to testify at a hearing on the bill this past May, and Debra joined Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle at a press conference in August when he announced his support for this bill.

Reducing the chances that people will die from gun violence makes more sense to Debra than the death penalty, and she was one of several victims’ family members speaking out against reinstatement of the death penalty in Wisconsin last spring. “If the death penalty could bring my son back, then sure, I’d be all for it,” Debra says. “But that’s not how it works, and in fact I believe that just as citizens do not have the right to take someone else’s life, the state should not have that right either.”

Debra received the Unsung Hero Award from the Congressional Black Caucus in 2005, and she continues to speak to school, university, and conference audiences all around the state. This article from a couple of years ago describes the public memorial she created for her son that simultaneously honors Kirk’s life and serves as a call for change.