Days after a shooting at a screening of Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck at a Lafayette movie theater, the daughter of a Sandy Hook shooting survivor posted an open letter to Schumer on Medium.
Sarah Clements, whose mother lived through the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut shooting, shared a letter that both supported Schumer’s work — she called the film an “an honest, unapologetic celebration of women’s rights to our bodies, decisions, and independence “ that is “so well-received, so brilliant, so you” — and implored Schumer to be an active, vocal leader in a movement for better gun control. From the letter:
I know deep down that the tweet you sent after the shooting was not all that you’ve got. And we need your voice in this movement. We need your help.
Join your colleagues Sarah Silverman and Kristen Schaal. Join our movement. Write an op-ed. Support an organization. Demand change. Be a voice for our generation and for women — two groups who make up most of the victims of the gun violence in our country.
Saturday morning, Schumer responded to Clements’ letter on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/amyschumer/status/627474594417381376
Clements’ letter initially misspelled the name of Mayci Breaux, who was killed along with Jillian Johnson. Gunman John Russell Houser also injured nine others when he opened fire in the theater and then took his own life.
Even as Schumer’s profile rises and the stakes for all her decisions rise accordingly, it’s heartening to see that she refuses to walk back what some could consider to be her more politically-charged views. She easily could have sidestepped the volatile, incendiary issue of gun control and stuck to the “thoughts and prayers are with the family” narrative. But her movie, as Clements wrote, celebrated the very things the shooter reportedly hated: women taking ownership of their bodies and their lives. Houser had a history of domestic violence. He was an active member of online communities that hailed white supremacy and anti-gay beliefs; he left comments on such sites that raged against “the Black” and “the Jew.” (Schumer is half-Jewish.)
Last season, Inside Amy Schumer included a sketch that mocked how absurdly difficult it can be to get birth control — Schumer is sent, as the commercials say, to “talk to your doctor about birth control,” only to then be forced to ask her boss, her boss’ priest, a boy scout, a mailman, strangers on the internet, an old black man and an Asian boy playing chess in the park, the Supreme Court.
At the end of the sketch, Schumer is told she’ll need to run through this rigamarole every single month. As she walks away from the pharmacist, a little boy steps up to the counter.
“Can I have a gun?” he asks.
“Yup!” the man replies, sliding one over to the kid. “Remember: that’s your right.”