Gun violence advocacy group Team ENOUGH starts chapter
Students walking between the Rice Memorial Center and McNair Hall may notice a collection of t-shirts on poles, labeled with names and phone numbers. The shirts were placed by a new Rice chapter of the national organization Team ENOUGH, a gun violence advocacy group started by Jasir Rahman and Abigail Zimmerman.
According to Rahman, the chapter co-lead and a Texas youth advocacy coordinator with Team ENOUGH’s parent organization, the club aims to combat gun violence through activism and advocacy in legislation.
“We like to do a lot of community grassroots where [we] most focus on education of young folks,” Rahman, a McMurtry College senior, said. “They don’t know that most gun violence is suicide; they don’t know about safe storage practices that are best for ensuring that people are able to safely have firearms stored away from children, because eight kids and teens are shot every single day in the United States. [There’s also] room for local advocacy and state level advocacy.”
Zimmerman said Team ENOUGH’s mission matters at local and state levels.
“We had the death of Andrea [Rodriguez Avila] this year, and gun violence affects everyone, including us here,” Zimmerman, a Sid Richardson College junior said. “So at Rice, in the greater Houston area and in Texas, there’s a lot of work to be done with safety and gun control and keeping preventable deaths preventable, and hopefully we can encourage other people to get involved.”
Rahman and Zimmerman were both active in gun violence advocacy in high school before starting the Team ENOUGH chapter at Rice. Rahman previously served on the executive council of Team ENOUGH and worked on national advocacy after incidents in his high school inspired him to take action.
“Three weeks after Parkland, a gun made its way to my high school’s campus, and people were really scared. No shots were fired, but the school was evacuated, [and] lots of people skipped school the next couple of days,” Rahman said. “[Then] I applied to be on the Team ENOUGH executive council. I had no prior advocacy experience, and then, for whatever reason, they let me be on … We have a lot of momentum because I’ve been able to work with a lot of other groups who really want to mobilize around this 89th [Texas legislative session] in February.”
Rahman said he believes that gun violence is especially prevalent in Texas, so prevention initiatives are impactful.
“We have a lot of history with Uvalde, El Paso, lots of big mass shootings that have happened here,” Rahman said.
Team ENOUGH tabled at the Election Day Block Party to introduce itself as a club and interact with students.
“I think folks are really interested in the idea of advocating for themselves. And obviously, this gun violence affects lots of young people. [It’s the] number one killer of young people,” Rahman said. “Maybe there’s hope for change, and we can elevate our voices because they’re really disenfranchised.”
On Friday, Team ENOUGH and the First Generation Legal Collective partnered with Texas Impact to host the event vidas robadas, which translates to stolen lives. Students staked t-shirts into the ground to represent local victims of gun violence.
“Each of the white shirts represents a victim of suicide by gun violence, and each of the colored shirts represents a victim of homicide,” Zimmerman said. “Each of the colored shirts have the name and the age of the victim, and then the date they were killed. And then each of the white shirts has just ‘otra vida robada,’ another life stolen, and then the suicide lifeline.”
Jessaly Chavez, the co-vice president of FGLC, said Team ENOUGH and FGLC collaborated due to shared gun legislation goals.
“I think that there’s a really deep intersection between law and public policy, and I think that gun prevention has a lot to do with public policy, especially in the legal sector,” Chavez said. “So that’s essentially what we’re trying to do, shed light on that intersection.”
The T-shirts will eventually be displayed at the state capitol in Austin. Team ENOUGH plans to bus students for a rally during the Texas Majority to Prevent Gun Violence Advocacy Day Feb. 27.
“There’s such a big barrier to entry to state and federal level change, but if we teach folks that they can make change in their communities and save lives, I think that can help build a grassroots movement,” Rahman said. “[It can] make it feel a little bit less difficult, a little bit less hopeless, which I know is the ethos of our generation.”
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