The news, for the past month, like so many others, has been filled with guns. There was the gun that the Tsarnaev brothers used in Cambridge, where they killed a cop—perhaps in an effort to get his gun. There were guns used elsewhere, too. In Akron, Ohio, four people were murdered, execution-style, in a basement of an apartment complex. The next weekend, another four people were shot and killed in a different apartment complex, along with their killer, just south of Seattle. A few days later, the crime scene was Manchester, Illinois, population two hundred and eighty-seven: a man allegedly shot and killed the grandmother of his daughter and four other people, including a five-year-old and a one-year-old. What happened in Manchester, in Washington state, and in Akron garnered little attention around the nation—part of what we’ve come to see as an unremarkable epidemic in which thirty-three Americans are murdered every day with guns.

In the middle of April, the Senate defeated a bill that would have expanded background checks on gun purchasers. The measure fell short despite polls showing that nine in ten Americans and eight in ten gun owners supported the measure.

For me, the defeat in the Senate brought back a familiar, sickening feeling. From 2006 to 2011, I managed a coalition called Mayors Against Illegal Guns, led by Michael Bloomberg and Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino. The organization started in 2006, with an initial group of fifteen mayors; it now includes more than nine hundred mayors, who represent most of America’s big cites and many smaller towns.

Fighting for stronger gun laws has long been gruelling and slow. In my years on the job, we tried everything—emotionally affecting television advertisements, lengthy reports and interactive Web sites, undercover investigations. I gave the project everything I had. Except one thing. I never told anyone—not the people I worked with every day, or the victims I convinced to go on camera to share their stories—how my own life was changed by a gun.

My gun story begins with a crane.

My father was also named Arkadi Gerney. He died, of colon cancer, on Valentine’s Day, 1983, when I was eight years old. Two years later, my mother, Brigitte Gerney, was walking home from the dentist on a bright day in late May. At Third Avenue and Sixty-third Street, there was a construction site—a deep pit on one side and a crane on the other, a covered plywood walkway for pedestrians in between. As she walked through, the crane toppled and caught her. It crushed my mother’s legs between its thirty-five-ton base and the pavement, and pushed her to the edge of the pit.

The weight of the crane acted as a tourniquet, preventing the blood from flowing out of my mother’s body as she teetered over the hole in the ground. For the next six hours, E.M.S. crews, the Fire Department, and men from the N.Y.P.D.’s Emergency Service Unit tried to save her. The E.S.U. cops and the E.M.S. guys crawled out onto a strip of plywood—under the crane and over the pit—to run an I.V. to my mother, to stabilize her. They risked their lives. Some of their names were Terry Smith, Paul Ragonese, Alex Terrero, and Ron Herreid. There were many others.

A team of surgeons from Bellevue and N.Y.U. Medical Center used what was then groundbreaking microsurgery to save her legs. President Reagan called. Nancy Reagan visited. Mayor Koch gave me a football helmet that Doug Flutie, the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, had given him. The News and the Post dubbed her the “crane-lady.”

Ten more surgeries followed, months of hospitalizations, years of rehabilitation. During this time, my mother got to know many doctors, among them an orthopedist named Peter Rizzo. He and my mother started dating in September, 1986. Peter was a father of three college-aged children. His first marriage ended in an annulment. He was a devout Catholic and, like my mother, he enjoyed enjoying—food, drink, and conversation. He was a kind, generous man with a great breadth and depth of friendships. And I hated him.

I hated him for the obvious reasons. I’d lost my father. I’d almost lost my mother. I wanted all my mother’s love and I feared that too much of it might be diverted to this man. I can clearly remember moments at night, trying to fall asleep under a big poster of Don Mattingly, when I wished Peter dead.

A few times that fall, I pleaded with my mother: Promise not to marry him, at least not for a year. But they were in love. By February, they had plans to marry—and then came the gun.

Peter was the chairman of the medical board of the New York City Fire Department’s pension fund. He and two other doctors were responsible for assessing disability claims. On February 5, 1987, he was at a pension-board meeting when Peter McNamee, a retired firefighter with a deferred claim, came to the meeting with a gun.

Peter McNamee shot Peter in the head with a sawed-off .22-calibre rifle. Peter was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died the next day. There was a funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with the full F.D.N.Y. treatment. Hundreds of firefighters. Bagpipes. Fire trucks. If you remember all those funerals after 9/11, you know what it looked like.

In the days and weeks that followed his death, my mother told me many times that she loved me and that it wasn’t my fault. My mother was fifty when Peter was murdered. She never remarried. She never even dated again.

The shooting changed things. Something had happened to her—and I felt that I had estranged myself from her sadness. For months and years after the shooting, she would close the door to her room and play the soundtrack to “The Mission.” She and Peter had seen the film. The composer is Ennio Morricone. There is one song in particular: “Gabriel’s Oboe.” When I heard that music, I didn’t go in.

Shootings almost always leave more than one person wounded. There’s the person who is shot, of course, but there’s also the damage to those who are left behind. About eleven or twelve thousand Americans are murdered with guns each year, and another twenty thousand or so die in gun suicides and accidents—behind them are hundreds of thousands more who suffer. I was hardly the most proximate victim in Peter’s shooting.

In 1987, Peter Rizzo was one of sixteen hundred and seventy-two murder victims in New York City. Then, as now, most murders involved guns. Last year, there were only four hundred and eighteen murders in New York City. That’s the lowest number since the first reliable records were kept, in the early nineteen-sixties.

Part of the explanation for the drop is that New York City and New York State have tough gun laws. But the city’s ability to get the numbers any lower is undermined by remarkably weak federal and state gun laws around the country. Crime-gun-tracing data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (A.T.F.) suggests that gun dealers in other states originally sold eighty-five per cent of guns recovered in New York City crimes. In each of the past five years for which data are available (2007-11), Virginia, where the N.R.A. has its headquarters, has been the leading source for illegal guns flowing into New York State.