M. J. PARK
Park, an educator and director of Little Friends for Peace, runs a “Peace Room” based in Washington, D.C. She said today: “I’ve been working daily with my students at our Peace Room. There’s a circle of fear that’s increasing the awareness of bad people out there. The children are being deprived of their normal routine. It’s more fear than anger, though they are beginning to be angry as they realize what this will mean for Halloween…. Our society acts as though it is horrified by the sniper, but there’s a sniper video game that has as the object to kill as many people as possible. We send messages that anything is OK when you’re out to make money or get power…. Children are seeing that they need a lot of things for the daily routine and there is no way to totally protect them. We need peace education. We have computer labs and all these other facilities, but we don’t make enough room for peacemaking.”

REV. GRAYLAN HAGLER
Pastor at the Plymouth Congregational Church UCC in Washington, D.C., Hagler is participating in vigils tonight and tomorrow night with the theme “Faith Over Fear.” He said today: “We need the faith to face the difficulties and the violence before us. We have this proclivity toward violence in our society. What happens at a macro level is related to a micro level. We must have the fortitude to confront violence whether it takes place personally or globally. What we need to do is begin to reorder our priorities as a society as a whole. To my mind, there is a relationship between our wanting to invade Iraq and the violence around us. Violence filters down to our local existence.” Hagler will also be participating in protests this weekend against the planned invasion of Iraq.

WILSON RILES, wriles@pacbell.net

WILSON RILES
Principal of the new Social Justice High School in Oakland, Calif., Riles said today: “We need to examine the availability of high-powered weapons, the culture of violence that we are immersed in. It’s like a frog in water, if you heat it up gradually, it never jumps out. The violence is escalating to the extent that it is killing us.”

JOSH HOROWITZ
Executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Horowitz is available for interviews about the effectiveness of having a national ballistic fingerprint database.
More Information

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167