America
Father of murdered US reporter calls for gun control
Washington, Aug 28
The father of reporter
Alison Parker, who was shot to death on Wednesday along with her
cameraman while doing a live news piece, said on Thursday that he will
not rest until the US has a way to keep weapons out of the hands of
mentally ill people.
"I'm not going to rest until I see something
happen. We've got to have our legislators and congressmen step up to
the plate and stop being cowards about this," Andy Parker told CNN,
saying in several other interviews that people who are mentally unstable
must be prevented from obtaining guns
Alison Parker, 24, worked
for CBS affiliate WDBJ7 and was killed at 6:45 a.m. on Wednesday along
with 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward by a disgruntled former workmate,
Vester Lee Flanagan, known on air as Bryce Williams, while she was doing
a live report at the Bridgewater Plaza in Moneta, Virginia, a rural
town about 350 km southwest of Washington.
Vicki Gardner,
executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of
Commerce who was being interviewed by Parker, was wounded in the
shooting, WDBJ7 reported.
Flanagan, who had been fired by the
station two years ago, fled after the shooting and remained at large for
more than five hours until he finally shot himself after being cornered
by the authorities. He died later in a Virginia hospital.
"I'm
for the second amendment but there has to be a way to force politicians
that are cowards and in the pockets of the NRA to come to grips and have
sensible laws so that crazy people can't get guns. It can't be that
hard," said the reporter's father.
In his statements to the
media, Andy Parker rhetorically asked how many times more we were going
to have incidents like this one before lawmakers take action to try and
prevent shootings by mentally unstable people.
He noted a number
of shootings and massacres over the past several years by mentally
unstable people, including the one at a school in Newtown, Connecticut,
in which 20 children died and after which President Barack Obama began
pressuring legislators to approve more restrictive gun control laws.
Obama's
efforts so far have been unsuccessful and on Wednesday the White House
insisted that it was urgent for Congress to act with "common sense" to
reduce gun violence in the country.
In a Thursday press
conference outside the television channel, the station's general
manager, Jeffrey A. Marks, said that Flanagan, an African-American,
worked from WDBJ7 from March 2012 and February 2013, and when he was
fired he became enraged and had to be escorted from the building by
police.
The gunman sent a 23-page fax to ABC News after the
shooting, a video of which he had posted online, to justify his anger,
which he said had been "building steadily" due to alleged cases of
racial discrimination and sexual harassment, for which he had filed a
lawsuit against the network, although it is not known whether that was
the motive for the shooting.