Va. victim’s father going to be working on gun limits ‘for a long time’

The father of one of the journalists murdered live on the air in southwest Virginia is pledging to keep up a sustained fight to enact new gun restrictions. 

“I am going to be working on this for a long time,” Andy Parker, whose 24-year-old daughter, Alison, was shot to death last week while reporting live on camera, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

{mosads}“I know that this is not a sprint — it’s a marathon.”

“Chris Hurst — her boyfriend — and I, because of our backgrounds, are uniquely qualified to galvanize all the different groups to speak with one voice and hold the politicians’ feet to the fire,” Parker added. Hurst is a reporter with Virginia’s WDBJ-TV, as was Parker’s daughter.

Parker has become a vocal advocate of gun control legislation in the days since his daughter’s killing.

On Sunday, he worried that last Wednesday’s shooting would fade from people’s minds and fail to prompt new laws, just as mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo. and other places had before.

“That’s my fear, is this is going to be a big news story for a weekend and then it’s going to go on to the next one,” he said. “We cannot let this one go.”

In particular, Parker praised a state law in California allowing a judge to individually bar people who might cause damage to themselves or others from obtaining a gun and forcing them to temporarily turn in firearms they already own.

“Say what you want about California … but they passed a gun violence restraining order out there that probably would have prevented this from happening,” Parker said.