WASHINGTON — After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a group of 26 bicyclists created a tradition of riding from Newtown to Washington D.C. each spring to promote gun control. But not this year.
This year Newtown’s “Team 26” has a different destination — the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., where about six months ago, 11 people died and seven were wounded as they worshiped.
“We rode to Washington six years in a row and during that period of time, Congress has remained paralyzed and has not done anything to make our communities safer,” said Monte Frank, an attorney who organized the Team 26 rides.
The team’s focus now is to ride through communities to promote activism “with the expectation that Washington will follow as the culture changes and people are calling for safe communities,” said Frank, who ran unsuccessfully as an independent for lieutenant governor last year.
He said Team 26, named after the 26 victims of the Newtown shooting, is modeling its campaign after the civil rights and LGTB movements, which pressured politicians to move to outlaw discrimination.
As the riders approached Philadelphia Saturday, they learned of another shooting - at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego, Calif., that resulted in the death of one woman the wounding of a rabbi and two others.
“It rocked us to the core,” Frank said.
He said his mother is a Holocaust victim and he had always heard the phrase “never again.”
“Unfortunately, that’s becoming ‘yet again,’” Frank said.
Shortly after the cyclists arrived in Baltimore, the journey’s halfway point, eight people were shot, one fatally, in a neighborhood in the western part...
from News https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Newtown-cyclists-change-course-on-gun-control-13805060.php
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