Local Moms, Students, and State Leaders Address Gun Violence and Safe Gun Use

Creating safer communities in northern Michigan

On Nov. 15, 2025, 32-year-old Traverse City Parking Services employee Larry Boyd was shot and killed while confronting two individuals engaged in car break-ins in downtown Traverse City.

Just a few months prior, on July 26, 2025, law-abiding gun owner Derrick Perry held Bradford Gille at gunpoint and detained him with the help of other community members after Gille had just stabbed 11 people at a Walmart in Garfield Township.

The two high-profile incidents gripped northwest Michigan throughout the second half of 2025, putting firearms back into the public conversation and reminding Michiganders that a firearm can be a threat to public safety or a protector of it, depending on how it is used and who is using it.

According to local organizations and state leaders, communities must take the threat of gun violence seriously and do what they can to keep their neighborhoods safe.

“Everyone Must Do Their Part”

“When you’re scheduling a playdate at the home of your child’s best friend, do you think to ask their parents if there are firearms in the home, and if so, are they safely locked away?”

That’s how Molly Stanifer, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action (MDA) in Traverse City, opens her conversation with us.

Stanifer explains that Michigan is almost squarely at the median in terms of gun violence. Annually, the state loses 13.9 people to gun deaths for every 100,000 residents (about 1,423 gun deaths per year), placing it 28th in the nation. The gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety (which works closely with MDA) ranks Michigan 20th in the nation for strong gun laws, a ranking that improved significantly in 2023 after several new legislative reforms.

Stanifer lays out how gun violence is a measurable problem with concrete factors that, when addressed in whole or in part, can be mitigated.

“Take safe storage, for example,” Stanifer explains. “According to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, most unintentional firearm injury deaths among children and adolescents result from firearms being stored both loaded and unlocked. When gun owners within the community safely store their firearms, unintentional injuries and deaths among young people plummet.”

Stanifer says the gun lobby is very good at preventing gun law reforms on the federal level, but progress is being made on the state level. Keeping with the safe storage issue, Stanifer points to the landmark legislation passed in Michigan in 2023 that made it mandatory for “[i]ndividuals to keep unattended weapons unloaded and locked with a locking device or stored in a locked box or container if it is reasonably known that a minor is likely to be present on the premises.”

“We try to bring the issue down to, ‘what can we do, today, to make our communities safer, and to address what’s in front of us?’” Stanifer says.

“This is an extremely frustrating issue, because we are talking about people’s lives," she adds. “An overwhelming majority of Americans want common sense gun reforms, but a powerful minority in Washington D.C. is preventing us from making progress. That’s why we focus on individual communities and on making each town safer, in addition to making annual trips to Lansing to advocate for better policies on the state level.”

A Tragic Reality for Students

“The Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and even some Millennials just don’t get that if you’re a kid in school or college today, you’ve either been in a school shooting, or you know someone who has,” says Alisha McMillan, co-president of the Students Demand Action (SDA) branch at Interlochen Arts Academy.

McMillan tells us about Emma Riddle, a Michigan student who survived the Oxford High School shooting in 2021 and then went on to survive the Michigan State University shooting in 2023. “Now we have students who are experiencing multiple school shootings throughout their lifetimes,” McMillan says quietly.

That revelation is a gut punch, yet McMillan continues with a grace and composure that belies her age. “At our Interlochen chapter, we’re using art to break through all the politics and propaganda and just show adults what we’re going through.”

In April 2026 (exact date to be announced), SDA Interlochen plans to host an art exhibit and awareness event at the Traverse Area District Library. The event is a collaboration with other SDA groups, and it will include open invitations for students to submit their art for display.

“Art is our biggest strength for getting our message across,” McMillan says.

Using art to convey what life is like for students in 2026 is just one part of SDA Interlochen’s advocacy approach. Like MDA, SDA volunteers travel to Lansing annually to advocate for better gun laws on the state level. Also, students frequently talk with business owners and elected officials to advocate for gun reforms so that schools can be places of learning, not fortresses.

“Please get educated on the current scope of gun violence and school shootings,” McMillan says. “Learn about the gun laws in your state. Are they sufficient? Where and how should they be improved?”

She adds that a lot of the opposition she and her peers run into comes down to misconceptions or outdated beliefs. “Be willing to consider a perspective that you were previously opposed to, because times change, and the gun violence issue today isn’t the same as it was before. Be willing to listen to us and hear about what we’re experiencing in our day-to-day lives. We shouldn’t have to grow up in fear of the next school shooting.”

A Public Health Issue

Because both Stanifer and McMillan referenced their efforts to pressure Lansing legislators to enact state-level gun reforms, we thought it prudent to speak with someone in the Michigan government who’s at the center of addressing gun deaths.

An infectious diseases doctor and epidemiologist, Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian is the Chief Medical Executive for the State of Michigan. She is also the chair of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.

“I didn’t expect to be involved in gun violence prevention,” Dr. Bagdasarian says. “But as a mom, I started looking at the data. Firearms are the leading cause of death for our nation’s children, so I began to see this problem as a public health issue.”

According to Dr. Bagdasarian, states are limited in what they can do to make communities safer without federal support, but Michigan took the issue seriously and, in 2023, passed landmark gun reforms. These included:

Universal Background Checks: Expands background check requirement to all firearm sales, including long guns.

Safe Storage Law: Mandates that unattended weapons be stored unloaded and locked when minors are likely to be present.

Extreme Risk Protection Orders: Allows family members, household members, or law enforcement to petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed a danger to themselves or others.

Domestic Violence Prohibitions: Prevents those convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from possessing firearms for eight years.

Tax Exemption: Reduces the cost of purchasing firearm safety devices and storage equipment.

The laws may have provided a clear starting line, but Dr. Bagdasarian says the road ahead is not yet clear of obstacles.

“It’s one thing to have laws on the books,” she says. “But now we have to continuously find better ways of enforcing them. Just last month two children under the age of five in southern Michigan were injured as a result of unintentional firearm discharges.”

Dr. Bagdasarian says there’s another less-talked-about element of gun violence. “We’re also raising awareness of the fact that more than half of all firearm deaths in Michigan are suicides, and most of those suicides are occurring in rural Michigan among primarily white men over the age of 55, a fact that not many people know about yet. So our current mandate is to get out into communities and find out what Michiganders need from us in order to ensure the laws are being enforced and communities are being protected.”

Pictured: An advocacy day in Lansing. Photo courtesy of Moms Demand Action.

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