Elmore Has Simple Question for State and Federal Officials: How Many People Must Die Before Elected Official Say “Enough!”
Attorney John V. Elmore
John V. Elmore has a simple question for state and federal officials: How many people must die before elected officials say “Enough!” and ban assault weapons from civilian hands?
“A mass shooting doesn’t end after the last bullet is fired,” said Elmore, a long time Buffalo attorney and the founder of The Law Office of John V. Elmore, P.C. “It echoes forever in the lives changed by the gunman.”
Elmore is no stranger to gun violence. In 2023, his law firm, along with the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the owners of six social media platforms and streaming services; an Iowa-based manufacturer of body armor; a New York-based gun store; a Georgia based manufacturer of custom gun accessories; and the parents of the Tops gunman. The lawsuit was the first of its kind to hold social media companies and firearms manufacturers accountable for mass shootings in America.
The lawsuit was in response to the 2022 racially motivated massacre of 10 people at a Tops supermarket on Buffalo’s East Side. However, Elmore’s first brush with mass shootings came decades earlier, on Dec. 30, 1974, at Olean High School. Three people were killed, and 11 were injured.
It was the first mass shooting by a student in a public school in U.S. history. One of Elmore’s classmates was the gunman. One of the gunman’s victims was Elmore’s father. “He had skull and bullet fragments embedded into his brain,” Elmore said of his father, Herb Elmore. “He survived, but he came out different. His left side was paralyzed. He was crippled for the rest of his life.” The Navy veteran, Olean’s first Black firefighter, came home in a wheelchair minus a finger, suffering from muscle tremors, and with a concave dent in his skull.
“When a family member is killed, it’s not just that that one person may be gone or disabled,” Elmore said of his family’s mad scramble to make up for the sudden loss of his father’s income after the shooting. “It’s everything in the aftermath. Loss of income. Loss of help at home. Missing hugs. That empty seat at holidays, graduations, weddings, births. Possible bills for therapy. And if the shooting victim survives? Hospital bills. Maybe physical therapy. Again, loss of income. So many other factors that are rarely talked about.”
“And then, of course, there’s the unspeakable rage that this happened, and that the people we elect to ‘serve’ us didn’t act to protect us,” Elmore said. “Nearly 50 years after my father’s shooting, I’m still angry about it. There’s no ‘getting over it. ’There’s no ‘getting past it.’ And I sure as hell refuse to accept that this is the way this nation has to be. Fifty years later, we’re still dealing with the same problems. And that’s flat-out wrong.”
Compared to other nations, the United States has the weakest gun laws and the most guns, according to data from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. In addition, Americans are 25 times more likely to die from gun violence than those in other high-income nations. There were 441 mass shootings between 1966 and 2022, resulting in 3,923 victims, 1,569 of whom were killed, according to the State University of New York’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. The institute’s data notes that, while there were only 12 mass shootings between 1966 and 1975 – five in 1974, the year that shattered Elmore’s life -- that number later skyrocketed, hitting 170 between 2013 and 2022.
Elmore also warns that the U.S. Department of Justice, Congress, the news media, researchers, nonprofit groups, and others all use different criteria for their definition of a firearms-related mass casualty event.
“What should be the legal definition of a mass shooting? Does that term include or exclude survivors? Should the penalties be the same as for a mass murder? Is it or isn’t it a terrorist act? There’s no single, agreed-upon definition, either in general terms or in legal terms,” Elmore said.
“Worse, some folks use the term interchangeably, which adds to the confusion.” Indeed, the Associated Press recorded 42 “mass killings” in the U.S. in 2023. However, that term includes deaths not involving firearms. By the AP’s count, there were 39 firearms-related mass killings in 2023. By contrast, GunViolenceArchive.org recorded 40 gun related mass murders (deaths only) in 2023, but 656 mass shootings (which includes survivors).
“That’s one of the issues right there,” public location, it all matters. If 30 people are killed and two injured in one shooting in public, and two die and 30 others are injured inside a house, are both considered mass shootings? It’s almost as though there’s no effort to define the problem, which is always the first step in solving the problem.
“Our elected officials need to act,” he said. “If they don’t, then they need to be replaced by people who will.”