GREENFIELD — Two passionate advocates spent time outfitting the Greenfield Common with orange decorations to raise awareness on National Gun Violence Awareness Day last week.

Robin Neipp and Kathy O’Rourke strung up ribbons and paper hearts inscribed with the names of gun violence victims as part of “Hearts in the Common,” an official event organized on behalf of Grassroots for Gun Violence Prevention (Grassroots4GVP), an advocacy group of Massachusetts volunteers who are committed to reducing gun deaths.

“I’m a retired schoolteacher and Columbine was the first [wake-up call], but then when Sandy Hook happened, that was the limit for me. I taught elementary school,” O’Rourke said. “I just said, ‘We need changes,’ and so I got involved with Robin ... and one of the ways we felt that we could make a difference was remembering the victims of gun violence, because all of us were very hopeful that after Sandy Hook we were going to get legislation to really make a difference … but nothing ever happened.

“It’s hard to think about and to know that this country is on such a violent path and guns are just rampant,” she continued. “I mean, there’s more guns in this country than there are people.”

O’Rourke said she saw first-hand how gun violence changed school culture.

“It’s hard to explain to children why you have to have these plans in place in school where you have to lock your classroom door, get into a corner, pull all the shades, stay as quiet as you can possibly be,” she said, adding that these plans have become as commonplace as fire drills. “Now we’re doing drills for mass shootings, intruders … and that’s just not OK.”

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, 257 people die and 648 are wounded by gun violence in Massachusetts in an average year.

Neipp said her first foray into the world of gun violence prevention was a Mother’s Day demonstration in Washington D.C., not long after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, during which two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed 13 people and wounded 24 others before taking their own lives. She learned about Wear Orange, a gun violence awareness movement, and decided to join the effort after reading about a 2-year-old who found a loaded gun under his father’s pillow.

“It just really hit me,” she recalled. Neipp then organized an event in Leyden, where she lives.

Wear Orange started as a tradition on June 2, 2015, which would have been the 18th birthday of Hadiya Pendleton, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in Chicago. Her friends decided to remember her by wearing orange — the color hunters wear in the woods to protect themselves from errant gunfire.

According to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023 and suicide accounted for nearly six out of every 10 gun deaths that year. Gun violence is also the leading cause of death for Americans under age 19, more than vehicle crashes, cancer and heart disease combined. According to the Massachusetts Violent Death Reporting System, people ages 15 to 34 accounted for 63% of all gun death victims in the state in 2022, representing a 15% increase from the prior year.

According to the NAACP, homicide has been the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 to 44 for more than a half-century, and at least 87% of homicides in Black communities involve firearms. Neipp said the NAACP and other groups have done a wonderful job focusing on gun violence as a public health crisis, just as the U.S. surgeon general categorized it last summer.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-930-4120.