A year later, the AAPI community is still crying for change after mass shootings in California
It’s been a year since the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings. On January 21, 2023 a gunman killed eleven people and injured nine others after a Lunar New Year festival at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, Calif.. Two days later on January 23, 2023, in a separate incident, another gunman took the lives of seven people, with an eighth person who was critically injured, at two farms in Half Moon Bay, Calif.
The victims of the incidents happened in two cities that are predominantly Asian. It was a somber moment during a time when Asian American Pacific Islander communities were still grappling from the 2021 shootings at the Atlanta spa two years before, where most of the victims were of Asian descent, as well as the rise of anti-Asian racism and discrimination fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic.
On the one year anniversary of the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay tragedies, how have things changed over the past year?
Weeks after the shootings, Asian American Pacific Islander organizations and activists spoke out and mobilized.
“The shootings made it clear that all Americans — including Asian Americans — are impacted by gun violence,” Andy Wong, the managing director of advocacy for Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition formed in 2020 focused on ending racism and discrimination against the AAPI community, said. “The back-to-back timing of these horrific shootings at the beginning of Lunar New Year, which is an important holiday for many of our Asian American communities, really compounded the pain, trauma and fear our communities were feeling.”
In the aftermath of the shootings, Wong said Stop AAPI Hate reached out to local groups serving the Asian American communities in the two cities, and offered support to help those who were impacted.
“One of the fundamental tenets of our approach to addressing hate violence is to support community-based groups that work on these issues and who know their communities best,” Wong said. “We stand with the hundreds of groups nationwide that have spent decades fighting for gun violence prevention. We support their efforts to build safer communities for all of us to make sure dangerous people don’t have easy access to guns, and push lawmakers at all levels to pass policies to prevent gun violence and make our community safer.”
The AAPI Against Gun Violence coalition, which was formed the previous year by the AAPI Victory Alliance, MomsRising, Newtown Action Alliance, Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Hope and Heal Fund, held a news conference weeks after the shootings to demand action and education on how gun violence affects Asian Americans.
Last June, the coalition hosted its second annual convening in June where AAPI and gun violence prevention advocates gathered in Washington D.C. to listen and uplight the stories of gun violence survivors and discuss how to make communities safer around the country. The coalition also has a listserv that allows space for AAPI members to have conversations with others in the community.
“There is growing recognition that we all have to be prepared for the next time because there will be a next time,” Varun Nikore, executive director of AAPI Victory Alliance, said. “We’re having mass shooting incidents on the average of one to one and a half a day. It’s just the unfortunate reality that we all have to live through.”
This year holds a pivotal presidential election where issues like gun violence are likely to take center stage in many presidential candidates campaigns across both political parties.
Last fall ahead of the special election, AAPI Victory Alliance conducted a poll that showed gun violence has become a top issue for AAPI voters in Virginia, a state that is believed to be a bellwether for how the AAPI electorate will vote this year. According to the survey, 70% of AAPI respondents in the state said they are “much more likely” to support a candidate for state legislature who supports improving gun safety laws by requiring universal background checks — with South Asian Americans showing the highest support at 74%.
“Now that we’re in a presidential year, it was important for us to have some leading indicators and what the data points into was essentially that gun violence rose to the top of the heap in terms of the list of concerns recognized by the API community,” Nikore said. “Across the board, it did show that [gun violence] now ranked as the top issue in parity with jobs, the economy, and inflation, which traditionally always comes out on top.”
However, while more Asian Americans are supporting the issue of tighter gun safety laws than ever before, research also shows gun ownership has grown among Asian Americans in the last few years.
A 2021 National Firearms Survey found that many new gun owners in the pandemic were people of color, including Asian Americans. A National Shooting Sports Foundation survey cited that over 27% of firearm retailers and stores saw an increase of Asian American customers in 2021, while previous research from NSSF found that there was a 43% increase in Asian Americans buying firearms in 2020 compared with the previous year.
Overall, Asian Americans buyers still make up a small percentage of U.S. gun sales. Pew Research Center data found that 10% of Asian adults reported they own a gun, while another 10% said they live in the same household with someone that owns a gun.
Monterey Park, CA – January 30: Mary Ma burns incense to honor her father, Wing Wei Ma, owner of the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, in front of his photo shown at right, among a growing memorial for the 11 mass shooting victims in front of the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. Ma hopes to carry on her father’s legacy, and eventually reopen a dance studio like Star. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag
A delicate balance for Asian Americans facing dual threats
The shooters in the Atlanta spa, Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay incidents were of Asian descent, but that does not change the fact that Asian discrimination and hate has been on the rise.
Nikore said the increase in gun ownership is because groups like the National Rifle Association and NSSF are marketing directly to Asian Americans, and in some cases, featuring spokespeople of Asian descent in its catalogs and campaigns. He added that the issue of gun ownership in the AAPI community is one of the reasons the AAPI Victory Alliance made the decision to be part of the larger gun violence movement.
While gun awareness is growing and safety is becoming a top issue, the gun ownership part shouldn’t be ignored either.
Nikore said AAPI Victory Alliance and the coalition have done a lot to address that disconnect and tension in the AAPI community. Last spring, the AAPI Against Gun Violence Coalition launched the Corporate Accountability Campaign which demanded major corporations to stop financing the gun industry. For instance, in March 2023, they sent a letter to the CEO Wells Fargo Bank demanding to cut ties with the gun industry and followed up in April with another letter to inform the bank of the campaign.
They also sent two letters to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the marketing practices of the gun industry, which according to Nikore, have yet to receive a response. They also encouraged the Department of Justice to classify the Allen, Texas mall shooting — where four of the eight victims killed were of Asian descent — from last year as a hate crime. The gunman reportedly held neo-Nazi beliefs.
“We cannot allow these things to happen without pushing back on the government who’s supposed to protect us,” Nikore said. “The government who’s supposed to call a spade a spade and classify hate crimes as hate crimes. We need more out of governments, and that’s the other pillar of our organization is to put pressure on institutions and systems so they can dismantle this systemic problem we have as a country.”
As for the year ahead, Nikore said AAPI Victory Alliance will use the first few months of 2024 to ramp up their programming, including hosting a gun violence conference in Houston in April, and by the middle of the year, they’re hoping to focus their efforts on organizing and electoral communications.
In the past year, Stop AAPI Hate launched several campaigns including the Stop the Blame campaign in response to the ongoing rise of anti-Asian political rhetoric and legislation, and Wong said they plan on doubling down on their work with the presidential election underway.
“This election season, in particular, poses new threats for us,” Wong said. “We really need everyone to dial down the rhetoric so that we are not subjected to more violence — including mass shootings that we saw in Atlanta; in Allen, Texas more recently. There have been many other incidents of Asian related mass shootings in the past 10 years. That’s where our focus is going to be to ensure that this election season holds leaders accountable with respect to the rhetoric.”