Benefield: Rock the Ride is about action, accountability

Liz Russell says that recalling that horrific day in 2018, when three of her colleagues and friends were gunned down during a workplace party, is not a burden.

It’s become, in some ways, a tool. Or perhaps, a mission.

“It’s worth it to me, to go through the emotional response,” she said.

Today, she’s a senior survivor fellow for Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun control advocacy group backed financially by Michael Bloomberg.

The Napa resident is also federal legislative lead for the California chapter of Moms Demand Action.

And she’s co-organizer of Rock the Ride, the 6-year-old cycling event co-founded by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and geared to both raise funds and amplify calls- to-action for those sick of being rocked by gun violence.

“It’s going to take all of us standing up and doing something about the issue,” she said. “Just because you think it can’t happen to you doesn’t mean it can’t.”

Saturday’s 25-mile bike ride (there’s a 10-mile ride option as well as a 3-mile walk) ends a mile from where Russell’s life changed forever five years ago — at the highly regarded Pathway Home, a residential treatment center for combat-stressed veterans that was housed at Yountville’s Veterans Home of California.

“The gunman walked in with an assault style rifle, a shotgun over his back, protection over his ears,” she said. “We all thought we were going to die that day.”

The killer, an Army veteran and former client, allowed some people at the party, including Russell, to leave the room.

He then shot and killed three women: Christine Loeber, the program’s executive director; and clinicians Jennifer Golick and Jennifer Gonzales, before killing himself.

“I was sitting in that room when he walked in and I’m thinking, ‘My children are going to grow up without a mother,’” Russell said. “No one should have to think that at their place of employment, or grocery store, or place of worship, or driving down the highway.”

The Pathway Home closed months later. The mass shooting there remains the deadliest incident of gun violence in the North Bay in at least a decade.

But there were 329 mass shootings in the U.S. that year, 2018. It was the year 17 people, mostly students, were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

It was the year 12 people were murdered, including Vintage High School graduate Alaina Housley, at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks.

It was the year a killer armed with AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue killing 11 congregants.

It was the year 10 were murdered at Santa Fe High School in Texas.

Map: Mass shootings in the U.S. by year

Russell joined countless other Americans that year as a “survivor” of gun violence.

Russell uses that term now not so much to wield power but to ask from experience: When are we going to do something substantive to curb the American epidemic of gun violence?

And the when are we going to stop watching the list of those who have survived gun violence grow by the day?

“It’s not all mass shootings, though that does tend to garner the most press attention,” she said. “But every day there is gun violence, domestic gun violence, unintentional gun violence with children where firearms at not properly stored.”

The number of people in the United States who have lost their lives to gun violence in 2023 was 19,923 as of Monday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan, nonprofit tracker of gun-related incidents in the nation.

Suicides made up 11,220 of those deaths.

“So suicide prevention is gun violence prevention,” Russell said.

There are so many ways to be active on the issue. Rock the Ride aims to put a number of those options on the literal table Saturday at the park post-ride to let people find their place, find their voice.

“Not everyone is a survivor. And not every survivor is capable and ready to become an advocate,” Russell said.

“Regardless of the amount of time you have, there is a place for something,” she said.

And Rock the Ride backers hope the time and place to start is Saturday.

Curious about what you can do with limited time? They’ll have people there. Interested in finding an organization to support financially? They’ll have people there.

Interested in doing your part but don’t where to start? You are exactly who Rock the Ride seeks to include.

“This is a way to give the community ideas about where they can plug in and hopefully it’s more than once a year,” Russell said.

Dr. Mark Shapiro, will again moderate a post-ride discussion with event co-founder Thompson, as well as Dr. Annie Andrews, founder of “Their Future, Our Vote,” and representatives from Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action, GIFFORDS and the Alaina’s Voice Foundation.

Shapiro, a Santa Rosa native and hospitalist at Providence Health’s Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, has been an outspoken and prominent voice in the demand that gun violence be tackled for what it is: a public health crisis.

The leading cause of death in the United States of those 1 to 19 years old is firearm-related injury, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

To that end, Sutter Health, a participant in the Hospitals United national campaign against gun violence, is the title sponsor of Saturday’s event.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s a public health epidemic,” Shapiro said. “It’s untenable.”

Shapiro uses events like Saturday’s Rock the Ride, as well as his considerable social media and podcast audience, to educate, to continue the conversation, and hopefully change the belief that doctors shouldn’t be involved in such campaigns.

“There is a level of inertia to overcome,” he said. “Is this a place for health care professionals to be speaking or not? I know that it is.”

When car accidents were the leading killer of kids in this nation, there were massive public safety interventions. The same for drownings, drugs, cancers.

Gun safety and awareness should be addressed in a similar fashion, he said.

“There is an opportunity for health care professionals to catch up in that space,” he said.

When he’s asking patients if they feel safe at home, if they use tobacco, if they drink alcohol — that is the time to ask if there are firearms in the home.

Shapiro points to a recent student that showed only 14% of adult patients said that at some time in the course of their life their physician had asked about firearms in the home.

“There is a huge opportunity for improvement there,” he said. “We are so good at screening. We screen for seat belt use, for sunscreen use, for depression, for people ready to quit nicotine, people on the spectrum for substance abuse.”

Saturday’s Rock the Ride is another piece to the larger community conversation, he said.

“It’s really about helping people to get more connected,” he said. “There is still a lot of fear and anxiety. Let’s turn that into activity.”

And there is something, organizers say, about showing up. Showing up to ride, or showing up to walk, but showing up to be in community with others who want to work toward an end to gun violence, too.

“There is a feeling of accountability,” Shapiro said. “This transitions you into a much more kinetic space. It breaks through, just getting out there.”

And once you are out there, you are in.

Russell has seen it. She’s here to help people find a way forward.

“It’s not just showing up this one day,” Russell said. “It’s showing up this one day and figuring out how to continue to show up.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.