Philip Andrew certainly knows about guns.
During 21 years as an FBI agent, he qualified on virtually everything in the bureau’s formidable arsenal. But more importantly, at the age of 20, he was shot at point-blank range in one of America’s first school shootings.
“These incidents are preventable,” he says. “And we need to do everything we can to make sure that our children are free from violence.”
It is with those life experiences that Andrew has been tapped as the first-ever chief of anti-violence initiatives for the Archdiocese of Chicago.
“There are 2.2 million Catholics in Chicago,” he notes. “Many of them that I’ve heard from, want to do something solve this problem.”
For Andrew, the journey began May 20, 1988. Early that day, a 30-year-old mentally deranged babysitter named Laurie Dann engaged in a rampage which began when she delivered poisoned treats across the North Shore and attempted to set fire to a Highland Park grade school. She then trapped a suburban family in their basement before setting their house ablaze, and most frightening of all, entered the Hubbard Woods School in Winnetka where she shot six children, five of them in a second grade classroom.
Eight-year-old Nicholas Corwin died from his wounds. But Dann managed to escape the school, fleeing to a nearby home where she shot the then 20-year old Andrew in the chest, and eventually killed herself in an upstairs bedroom.
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“This has been my life’s work,” Andrew notes today. “Since that incident, I have worked every day and endeavored to try to make the community safe.”
In his new role with the Archdiocese, Andrew will focus on building coalitions in neighborhoods, increasing charitable presence in distressed areas, and revitalization of various anti-violence programs.
“I am delighted to welcome Phil, someone with years of experience working to address violence,” Cardinal Blaise Cupich said in a release. “He has known firsthand the impact of violence as a shooting survivor himself, and will help build bridges as we collaborate with people of good will to strengthen a culture of peace across the Chicago area.”
That effort comes at a troubling time in Chicago and across America, where shootings like the one Andrew experienced first-hand have become all too common, and the debate over weapons has divided the nation.
“Anything we can do to reduce the unreasonable access to firearms to youth, and to the dangerous, we need to be doing,” Andrew observes. “I can tell you as someone who has used an assault weapon, that the effect of a weapon like that is nothing that needs to be in civilian hands.”
Indeed, some of the details of the Dann incident have echoes today. The fact that she was mentally ill was known to many. But she owned her guns legally.
“I think that each one of these incidents is an opportunity to learn, but there’s no reason why we should be re-learning them,” he said. “I think many of those mass shootings involve somebody that if we had gone upstream, we could find an opportunity with the right wraparound services to prevent those things from happening.”
As divisive as the issue has become, Andrew speaks positively about his new role, noting that people on both sides of the gun issue have a common goal of wanting to reduce violence.
“We are going to be safe,” he says “If we are looking out for each other.”
