TRENTON – Senator Benjie E. Wimberly (D-Bergen/Passaic) issued the following statement:

“We can no longer permit the senseless violence in our schools, places of worship, hospitals, and public spaces to fade into the background noise of a desensitized nation. The recent tragedy in Evergreen, Colorado, where students were injured and a life was senselessly taken, is not a singular aberration. It is a glaring symptom of a crisis that has metastasized across the American landscape.

What we are witnessing is not merely a series of tragic events; it is the steady unraveling of our collective safety and moral accountability. We are watching institutions that should be sacrosanct, classrooms and sanctuaries, hospitals, transformed into hunting grounds. Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis became a site of a massacre during a school Mass. Florida State University lost members of its community to gunfire on campus. At Antioch High School, young lives were shattered by violence among peers. The Lexington crisis erupted in the span of a single day, from a traffic stop to a church, leaving destruction in its wake. In Shiloh, Pennsylvania, even a hospital, symbolic of hope and healing, was not immune.

These are not anomalies. They are the predictable outcomes of a society that treats gun access as sacred, but life itself as negotiable. This is not just about public safety. It is about our values, our priorities, and ultimately, our capacity to govern ourselves with wisdom and compassion. We must stop viewing these incidents as isolated outbursts and begin to understand them as symptoms of a deeper, structural rot. We face not only a policy failure, but a crisis of imagination and will, an unwillingness to envision and enact a society where violence is not the expected consequence of ideological division, mental illness, or social breakdown.

We must move beyond reactive grief and enter a space of proactive, sustained resolve. That requires more than legislation; it demands a cultural transformation: a shift in the narratives we tell about masculinity, power, conflict, and community; a reinvestment in the civic and emotional education of our young people; and a willingness to name and dismantle the systems that normalize violence as a form of expression or control.

And to those who grow weary of hearing this message, who call it repetitive, who wish to move on, shame on you. I will repeat these words until the violence stops, until families no longer bury their children, until teachers no longer practice lockdown drills, until nurses no longer fear for their lives inside emergency rooms.

These tragedies are not political talking points. They are human catastrophes. They are moral failures. They are avoidable. And they must not be allowed to continue.

We owe more than condolences. We owe transformation. And that transformation begins when we reject indifference, embrace courage, and refuse to allow another name to become just another headline.

The future, the victims and their loved ones will judge us not by our words, but by whether we had the vision and the will to act when the lives of our neighbors demanded it.”