REMARKS BY RICK OMILIAN
ON FIRST MONDAY 2000
at Kalamazoo College, October 2, 2000
A year ago, at this time, my stepdaughter, Maggie Wardle, was a student at Kalamazoo College and an athlete on the women's golf team. She was safe and close to her family in Plainwell and surrounding communities in the Kalamazoo area. She had visited other campuses as a high school senior but we all felt those other colleges in urban settings were not safe for her. How ironic! At 19 years of age, she was mature, growing into adulthood and doing well in school.
A year ago, Maggie's ex-boyfriend of about four months, also a student at Kalamazoo College, didn't want to let her go and didn't seem to let anyone know just how angry he was at Maggie. He was planning to buy a gun, without raising suspicion.
A year ago, at this time, if a panel discussion like this one were being formed on the topic of violence, especially school violence, I might have been invited to be one of the speakers. I have worked for many years with public school students, as a teacher and administrator, dealing with conflict resolution, social skills, and anger control training. I felt, inside, that I was doing something to reduce violence in the world. I know my wife, Maggie's mom, Martha, in her job as a psychiatric nurse, also felt that way. We talked about it at times and we were pleased that both of our children were non-violent, caring people.
In the early morning hours of October 18, 1999, a booming, insistent knock by a police officer on our front door just north of here in Plainwell yanked us our of our fantasy that we were doing our part to make the world safer. Down the road from our home, the thumping multiple shots of a gun, fired in a crowded college dormitory, had taken two lives. Our beautiful, talented daughter was gone, murdered by her ex-boyfriend who then took his own life. Those few violent moments have irreversibly changed the lives of everyone who knew Maggie, especially her family and friends. And don't forget the effect on his famly and friends as well as all the students in that dormitory and on campus that night. There were many victims of this heinous crime. The ripples of those gunshots are still ricocheting across a wide, extended community.
Today a year after our daughter's death, I stand here representing a victim's family, just as you heard and saw in the video. That Maggie was a victim of gun violence and that it is our family that is left to pick up the pieces of our lives without her, is utterly unbelievable. As a parent said in the video, "If this can happen to us, it can happen to anyone's child." Too many families like ours from cities, towns, villages across the country, regardless of race or family economic circumstances know what an angry or careless person with a gun can do to our loved ones, shattering all that we believe in.
About ten days before Maggie's death, the gun used to kill her was purchased "legally," as laws currently exist. That is the issue that Maggie's family would like to take up at this discussion about guns and gun violence in our society. Maggie's murderer was able to purchase a gun at a local gun shop using a Kalamazoo College address. The purchase application gave his address as "Hicks Center, P.O. Box..." Doesn't it make sense that any background check should have raised a red flag that the address was at a college or similar type institution? Kalamazoo College has a zero-tolerance, no-weapons policy on their campus. Shouldn't the gun shop owner or the police department been required by law to notify someone on campus that a student had applied to purchase a gun.
We have made a big issue in Kalamazoo about where college students living in our town should register to vote. Shouldn't we be even more concerned that students are buying guns in our town and bringing them on campus? Any college student living in a dorm or parents of those students, should be concerned. Maggie's family was concerned but we were naïve and assumed that such an important issue whether or not guns were on campus was under control, especially in such a safe and idyllic place as Kalamazoo College.
But, it seems that guns are very prevalent on campus. According to a recent Harvard School of Public Health study, 3.5% or 450,000 college students have a firearm on campus. That is quite a potential for danger on campuses, where stress can run high. Relying on self-reporting and zero-tolerance policies just doesn't seem to be enough.
The blight of guns and violence in our society must change. In recent months, there have been many gun violence incidents in the Kalamazoo area. In some of those incidents, women have been stalked and hurt as Maggie was. The circumstances of these incidents have haunted Maggie's friends and family as they were reported almost daily there for a while in the media. Must everyone be personally touched or emotionally devastated by gun violence before we do something about this as a society? There are way too many guns in our society, more than ever in our history and more than any other county in the world. No matter how these guns are counted -- by sheer numbers, per capita, or number of guns per owner -- we have more guns than we need. Reducing violence in our society will require more than just controlling guns in our society but it is an essential part of the total answer.
Maggie's parents, family and friends ask everyone here tonight, everyone on this campus this year and everyone that was on this campus last October to remember Maggie and her life. Remember what happened to two lives, two families, two sets of friends and an entire campus community because an angry person had a gun. As you continue with the rest of your lives and distance yourself from this place and what happened here, please commit some part of yourself to reduce violence, especially gun violence and violence against women in our society.
Thank you from all of our family.
