Rebecca’s mother and father additionally threw themselves into the battle for stricter gun legal guidelines, imploring lawmakers to tighten restrictions on who might get their palms on a firearm. Danna helped launch the lobbying group Oregonians Towards Gun Violence in 1990 and went to Washington, D.C., to assist foyer for the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.
“We face dying each morning,” Rebecca’s dad, Benson Schaeffer, advised the Los Angeles Occasions in October 1991. “Generally you are overcome with despair. You by no means stop lacking the particular person. The gun subject lets us focus our anger.” (The Brady Invoice was finally enacted in 1993.)
Among the many Schaeffers’ targets: They wished all gun gross sales to have built-in ready durations, and to have weapons solely be offered by licensed sellers.
“There’s so little we are able to do about Rebecca’s dying,” Benson, a toddler psychologist, stated. “We be ok with doing this. It is the one public solution to say that what occurred to Rebecca is not all proper.”
And along with the fallout from the tragedy, there was, after all, the spectacle of all of it: A lovely 21-year-old movie star killed by a stalker, at her house, in broad daylight. Terrifying and endlessly compelling.
An everlasting portrait emerged of a sufferer who wasn’t simply poised to be a significant star, however a younger girl who touched everybody who knew her along with her beneficiant spirit.
