Reggina Jefferies, 16, was not a kid who ran the streets. She just finished her junior year at Deer Valley High School in Antioch and was raised in the church. She lived for praise dancing, a form of Christian spiritual worship where the participants use their bodies to express God’s word.

But in the end, it didn’t matter.

All it took to end the life of this talented, vivacious young woman were some unidentified gun-toting fools to get into it and start shooting, in broad daylight, just two blocks from Oakland City Hall. She had come out to praise dance at a memorial for two friends who had drowned. Jefferies was fatally wounded, and three other people were hurt but survived. And so a little over a week later, she was lying in a champagne-colored casket covered with orange and white roses.

More than 500 mourners — a sea of orange, Jefferies’ favorite color — filled Acts Full Gospel Church in Oakland for her funeral Thursday. A horse-drawn carriage transported the teen’s body to the sanctuary. The service was a celebration of life for a life that was all too brief. But it was also a call to action to end the incessant killing.

It was the day after Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives staged a dramatic 26-hour sit-in to try to force the Republican leadership to hold a vote on gun reform.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, held up Jefferies’ photo and said she also had pictures of homicide victims who were shot and killed in her district. At the funeral service, some of the speakers alluded to those events.

“I looked on TV and I said, look, your baby is a world star fighting for gun control,” said a woman who identified herself as a cousin. “She’s on the floor of Capitol Hill today.”

As is always the case after the latest mass shooting horror — this time 49 killed and more than 50 wounded in the June 12 massacre at a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida — there is a hue and cry about the need for sensible gun control.

But this knee-jerk reaction misses the point. The bills in question would ban terrorists on no-fly lists from buying firearms and impose universal background checks. Those are certainly laws that should be passed. But they would not likely have prevented Jefferies’ death or countless others, for that matter. The underlying problem is there are too many guns out there, period. I doubt that Jefferies’ killer obtained the weapon legally. Meanwhile, many of those who commit mass shootings would have still been able to legally purchase weapons even with background checks. The real issue is that when someone has a gun, it dramatically increases the likelihood of a lethal encounter.

At Jefferies’ funeral, mourners talked not of gun control laws, but of the need to change an ingrained mindset among so many young people that the acceptable way to end a dispute is with a gun.

“I’m not sure what it’s going to take, but we need to find a way to grab these youngsters who are out here with all these guns and try to find some way to turn them around,” said Eddie Mae Malone, an elder at the House of Prayer in Oakland who attended the service.

Malone said she had gone to pick up her two grandsons from the same memorial when she heard shooting. She rushed to locate her grandchildren, who were thankfully safe.

“I seen the baby lying out there, and I knew she wasn’t going to make it. It made me sick in my soul,” Malone said.

Many of the mourners were young friends of Jefferies. They were so overcome with grief they had trouble breathing. Adults told them to “breathe, breathe.”

Renee MaBon, 31, one of Jefferies’ cousins, said she’s been to almost 25 funerals since she was 12.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “We need to stop all this gang, gang, gang, start all that praise, praise, praise and start going to church.”

Oakland police Capt. LeRonne Armstrong said he hopes that this latest killing might finally be some kind of tipping point. “This lady is a symbol of someone who was so talented who shouldn’t have had to lose her life in this manner.”

He said the department has gotten leads in the case and expects to announce the names of people of interest very soon.

The Rev. Tyrone Duckett, who delivered the eulogy, said he’s officiated over many funerals but this was the most difficult. “Because of the fact that she didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

But that’s just the point. When the streets are awash in guns and in the hands of people who will use them without so much as a thought, no one is safe.

Contact Tammerlin Drummond at 510-208-6468. Follow her at Twitter.com/Tammerlin.