A New York teacher has launched a hunger strike to protest the US Congress’ inaction on gun regulations, hoping it will spur lawmakers into passing “common sense gun control”.

Shai Stephenson, who works at a school in the Bronx, started eating one meal a day in earlySeptember, and transitioned to a liquid diet on 1 October. She began her strike following the deadly mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which left 32 people dead within a single August weekend.

“The news cycle would change, the conversation would die down, and I would go back to living my life,” Stephenson recalled thinking that weekend.

“There have been so many petitions and marches, and the change hasn’t happened. For me it became more than a political issue, it was a moral issue.”

Stephenson says she does not have as much “skin in the game” as other violence prevention organizers. She’s never been personally impacted gun violence, and describes her community as a quiet and safe place to live. However, she doesn’t think that this disqualifies her from being a part of the growing movement to address gun violence.

“The whole country has been affected. We behave differently than we used to in the past,” Stephenson says. “You might not be someone directly affected by gun violence, but I think we’re all the person to take on this issue.”

Stephenson says she will continue her hunger strike until she sees a “good faith effort from the government in the direction of keeping the public safe”. In particular, she’s urging lawmakers to take up the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019 which passed through the majority democratic Senate more than seven months ago. Democratic leaders and anti-gun violence advocates have been calling on Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to call for a vote on the bill.

Stephenson says she’s taking cues from civil rights protesters like the Freedom Riders, who rode across the south of the United States to protest segregated bus terminals, and the activists who were sprayed with fire hoses and attacked by police and their dogs in the mid-20th century.

“It’s such a powerful way to say ‘we’re willing to die for our beliefs, we’re willing to die to combat cruelty’,” Larry Salomon, a lecturer at San Francisco State University’s College of Ethnic Studies says of the legacy of hunger strikes.

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“When you protest on this level you’re [saying] that we’re fighting something so inhumane that we are willing to die for it,” he continues.

Salomon advised three of the four students who went on a 10-day hunger strike at San Francisco State in 2016 to protest budget cuts that would affect the College of Ethnic Studies. And although he is skeptical that Stephenson’s strike will move the federal government into action, he believes that the value of this kind of action can go beyond policy.

“We won’t know what the legacy of any of these actions will be for a while,” Salomon says of the different forms of activism around ending gun violence.

“When the history of gun control is written this may be a chapter of it,” he continued. “It might be the thing that got a group of student activists to say ‘I’m going to do something too’.”

Now almost a month and a half into the strike, Stephenson says she’s “feeling cold all the time, and carrying stuff is more of a struggle”. She’s had to stop exercising, and is in regular contact with her doctor who is advising her to stop the strike and resume her regular diet.

While her hunger strike has yet to get national attention, she says that the support she is getting from her co-workers, family, and local community is helping her continue her demonstration. She also says she’s donating to pro-gun control congressional candidates and working with local chapters of gun violence prevention groups like Moms Demand Action.

“We can’t afford to sit on this and wait,” Stephenson says. “I’m going to keep plugging away until something changes or [this hunger is] hurting me too much.”

“I’m a regular person and I think that enough is enough. This is something that America can do better with.”



