Deerfield vigil laments, criticizes gun violence that is 'our reality right now'

The speech was enough to make a United States representative cry.

Deerfield High School junior Rebecca Harfield delivered an impassioned speech on gun violence May 26 on the steps of the Bernard Forrest Deerfield Village Hall.

It was part of a community vigil assembled by village employees David Fitzpatrick-Sullivan and Justin Keenan less than 48 hours after an 18-year-old male with an assault rifle killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Nine days prior, as Harfield noted, 10 people were killed in a racially motivated attack at a Buffalo supermarket.

"It's scary that this is just our reality right now," Harfield said after Thursday's vigil. (Her full speech accompanies this article.)

"I'm scared," she said. "I go to school and I talk to my friends, and there's times throughout the day where I think, what would I do, where would I go, what would happen.

"I feel for these kids. I feel horrible that all this is happening, and I think something needs to happen because this just keeps happening over and over and over again, and something needs to change," she said.

After addressing the approximately 75 people gathered outside village hall, Harfield stepped back from the podium and, tearful, found comfort in the arms of Congregation B'nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim Rabbi Jason Fenster, who had asked the high schooler if she might read something for the event.

"I said yes. I quickly wrote my speech and that's kind of just how we got here," said Harfield, recruited on the spot by a Deerfield Public Schools District 109 official to repeat her presentation at that night's board meeting.

As she stood with her parents, Steve and Cindy, and younger brother, Matthew, U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider (D-10th) approached.

"You did fabulous. You made me cry," Schneider said.

There was room for that, and there was room for prayer. Congregation BJBE Rabbi Karyn Kedar closed proceedings with one while cantors Jennifer Frost and Alexandra Kurland harmonized, "If not now, tell me when."

North Shore Unitarian Church Rev. Lucas Hegert's prayer, however, was one of "white, hot anger."

His invocation indicted "casual indifference, turning our backs on our children for the love of our guns," he said.

"When we choke on hopes and prayers that are untethered to actions, those are proverbs of ashes," he said.

Fenster's message: "This is not normal."

Deerfield Mayor Dan Shapiro provided statistics to the contrary - more than 200 mass shootings of four or more people in the United States in 2022, he said, 33 in May alone. He said so far in 2022 more than 17,000 people have been killed by guns, 650 of them children.

Shapiro heads a village that on April 2, 2018, approved an ordinance banning the possession, sale and manufacture of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines in Deerfield, modeled after a similar ban in Highland Park.

Shapiro discussed the ordinance after the vigil while standing next to former Deerfield Mayor Harriet Rosenthal, who presided over its creation.

"It was right after Parkland" - the Florida city where 17 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students were killed by another gunman with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle - "when our students came from the high school and marched here to these very steps and said, 'Enough, what are you going to do,'" Rosenthal said.

"And we said, 'Enough, we're going to do something.' At our very next meeting we went to work on an ordinance to ban assault weapons," she said.

A legal challenge by the National Rifle Association and a Deerfield resident, Shapiro said, questioned Deerfield's ability to enact such an ordinance under State home rule authority. It rose to the Illinois Supreme Court.

With one justice recusing himself, Deerfield records state, on Nov. 18, 2021, the court's 3-3 decision upheld an appellate court's December 2020 ruling that the village had the authority to adopt the ordinance.

Shapiro said Highland Park's ban went through federal courts on Second Amendment issues before it was settled in the city's favor.

Rep. Schneider - who on Friday with California Rep. Norma Torres reintroduced a 2019 bill that would require federal firearms licensees to report the sale of two or more "long guns" such as the AR-15 and AK-47, and has previously helped pass background check acts out of the House of Representatives - told vigil attendees he'd read to a third-grade class at Deerfield's Kipling Elementary School on Tuesday.

Later that day came the news out of Texas.

"This is not acceptable!" Schneider said, nearly yelling. He recited each name of the predominantly 10-year-old Texas children who had been killed.

"Every one of these kids, just like the wonderful, beautiful children I read to on Tuesday at Kipling, could be our kids," he said.

"They are our kids."