Tribute · Gun Violence Awareness Month

Orange June

One dispatch a day, every day this month, on the one American fact we have all agreed to live around.

Hunters wear orange in the woods so no one mistakes them for prey. After fifteen-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was shot dead in a Chicago park in 2013 — a week after she performed at a presidential inauguration — the people who loved her put on that same color and asked the country to see them the way the woods sees a hunter: as a human being, on purpose, not to be fired on. Every June since, on what would have been her birthday, the orange comes back. This is our month of it.

§ THE MONTH14 dispatches
June 30, 2026TO · everyone who wore orange this month

On the last day of the orange month, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the rifle that did Sandy Hook is too popular to ban.

On Tuesday, June 30 — the last day of Gun Violence Awareness Month — the Supreme Court agreed to hear challenges to two laws that ban AR-15-style rifles: Connecticut's assault-weapons ban, rewritten…

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June 22, 2026TO · Montreal · the city a newsroom told the threat was gone

A newsroom put two words over your skyline this afternoon — THREAT GONE. An officer is dead, a neighbor is dead, and the rifle that did it is exactly as easy to buy tonight as it was at breakfast. The threat is not gone, Montreal. You just can't see it anymore.

A little after midday on Monday, June 22, a man with an SKS rifle opened fire in Côte-des-Neiges, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Montreal, near a grocery store and within sight of Jewish schools…

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June 21, 2026TO · Emmanuel Andre · Chicago's Deputy Mayor for Community Safety

Mr. Andre — the President says he could make your city safe in one month. You stood up and asked for something built to outlast him. Build the department.

Over Juneteenth weekend, Chicago was hit by a wave of gun violence: at least seven people killed and thirty-eight wounded since Friday evening, by the Associated Press count, including a mass…

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June 19, 2026TO · New York City · the two million who came out for the Knicks

Fifty-three years New York waited for this. Two million people, the biggest parade the city has ever thrown, not a scratch on it — and hours later a gun went off in Times Square and the party ran for its life.

On Thursday, June 18, New York City threw a ticker-tape parade up the Canyon of Heroes for the Knicks' first NBA championship in fifty-three years. Close to two million people filled lower Manhattan,…

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June 16, 2026TO · Mollie Merkel & Jackie Flavin · the mothers of Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski · Annunciation Catholic School, Minneapolis

His bedroom is exactly as he left it. Her desk is still in the classroom. Almost ten months after Annunciation, a stranger says Fletcher and Harper out loud.

On August 27, 2025, a gunman fired through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in south Minneapolis during a back-to-school Mass, killing eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel and ten-year-old…

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June 13, 2026TO · Keinon Carter · Pulse survivor

You spent hours on the floor of Pulse while a gun killed 49 people around you. Ten years later, you're building the room you needed.

Yesterday marked ten years since the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando — 49 killed on a Pride-Month Latin Night, the deadliest attack on LGBTQ+ Americans in the country's history. Orlando read the…

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June 11, 2026TO · Kewannee Allen · co-organizer, the Sherman Boulevard memorial · founder, the Amareon Allen Foundation

You lined a Milwaukee boulevard with orange signs so the city would look its number in the face. The number is down this year. It is still 43 signs.

On June 6, the median of North Sherman Boulevard across from Sherman Park filled with blaze-orange yard signs, each one carrying the face and name of a Milwaukeean killed by gun violence — a…

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June 10, 2026TO · Senator Catherine Blakespear

Dear Senator Blakespear — you said the sentence most politicians won't. Now name the next law.

A California state senator just said the sentence most American politicians won't — responsible gun ownership laws reduce gun violence — and her numbers prove it. Catherine Blakespear published her…

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June 9, 2026ORANGE JUNE

Here is every school shooting in America since 2000, counted. The line only fell the year the schools were closed.

This is Orange June, Day 6, and there is no letter today — just one line on a chart, and the question it asks. Every school shooting in the United States, counted year by year from 2000 to 2025:…

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June 8, 2026TO · Chicago

You gave America the color we wear for the dead. This weekend you put four more children in the hospital — and the boy police are questioning is thirteen.

Over the weekend of June 5–7, two shootings blocks apart in Bronzeville wounded four boys — ages 12, 13, 13 and 14 — and by Monday the person of interest Chicago police were questioning was himself…

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June 8, 2026TO · Governor Ned Lamont

A part the size of a Lego turns a pistol into a machine gun. Connecticut just said you can't sell those. That's the whole reasonable thing.

On June 5 — the day the country wore orange — you signed a law banning the sale and importation of handguns that can be cheaply, easily converted into fully automatic machine guns. Not a ban on…

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June 7, 2026TO · Kenneth Forbes, Sr. · founder, Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters of Kentucky

You lost your son in 2012 and built a place so no one walks through it alone. Yesterday, Louisville walked with you.

On June 6, dozens of people put on orange and walked through Louisville in the End Gun Violence Awareness Walk — organized by the Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters of Kentucky, the group you…

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June 7, 2026TO · Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine

You wrote thirteen gun laws and named them after Virginia. They have sat in a drawer since the morning the school fell.

On April 16 you introduced S.4339, the Virginia Plan to Reduce Gun Violence Act of 2026 — thirteen gun-safety provisions, lifted from the laws Virginia already passed, written into one federal bill.…

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June 5, 2026ORANGE JUNE

Five Gun Violence Stats to Stop You in Your Tracks

Today the country wears orange. Hunters wear orange in the woods so no one mistakes them for prey. In 2015 a group of Chicago teenagers borrowed the color for their own streets, to say the same thing…

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