[img]1307|left|Ms. Meghan Sahli-Wells||no_popup[/img]Confident she could convince her fellow liberals on the City Council to unanimously line up at her shoulder in standing stoutly for freshly branded gun control legislation last evening, Meghan Sahli-Wells was so disappointed that she issued a rare sheet of criticism against them.
She described herself as “blindsided.”
A proud, visible and articulate activist in several dimensions of community life, she is arguably more invested than her colleagues in aggressively plunging in, physically, where she believes wrong has been committed.
“There were four specific items we had agreed to take positions on,” she told the newspaper, and she could not even get out of the starting blocks, failing to win a second to her motions on all of them.
Back in February, she pointed out, three of four members of the public asked the Council to agendize a stance on gun control legislation, and she signaled, without flatly saying so, that the Council let down the petitioners.
Single Victory
The five of them only approved what may have been the softest element, a 2½-month old, much passed-around letter from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, calling for tightening gun laws a bare month after Newtown. “That vote was an important victory,” she said. “I don’t want to downplay it. When I made motions on the rest, I was not going off the agenda. I just was trying to follow the agenda.”
Speaking evenly but plainly set back, Ms. Sahli-Wells said that “I probably should keep my mouth shut” after charging that “it almost felt as if my colleagues had not read the item, that they were only doing so as we talked about it. It was strange.”
Conceding that it was heavily a symbolic gesture, “that does not make it any less important, especially in light of recent tragic events,” she said. “The fact it is not specific legislation for our city should make it easy for the Council.”
Returning repeatedly to her twin states of shock and disappointment, she said several times, “I am not sure what happened. I don’t know if (the other four Council members) didn’t agree with me or didn’t know” the full contents of the gun control proposals.
Looked Deceptively Easy
“Going in, I had the impression this was a no-brainer. I had the impression, that it would not be controversial for our City Council specifically, even though it is controversial in the rest of the nation.
“For instance, there was a refusal to support a statement of principles for the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns. If you take the time to quickly do a Google search, their statement is pretty clear about controlling illegal guns, guns in the hands of criminals and people who are not supposed to have them. Just a way of strengthening laws. To me, that is completely non-controversial.”
When Ms. Sahli-Wells arrived home after last evening’s meeting, Karim Sahli, her husband, asked if she would bring it back in an amended form.
“I told him that it’s dead,” she said. “If a member of the public wants to, people are more than encouraged. I tried to move this forward in the best way.”
