TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — America’s top doctor, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, is stepping up his attack on easy to get guns as a threat to public health. The fight for better gun control has become a special mission for the wife of a University of Arizona professor killed on campus.
At the University of Arizona, the Surgeon General’s warning about the risk of easy to get guns, carries a sad, special weight. The campus and the campus family there still feel the weight of a professor’s murder—on university grounds.
By coincidence, Dr. Murthy launched his campaign connecting guns to public health risk, just one day after a judge sentenced the killer of Dr. Thomas Meixner to life in prison.
“Even with everything that happened leading up to Tom's murder, I never would have thought that this could happen to us.”
Kathleen Meixner is a living example of the Surgeon General’s warning that gun violence is a public health hazard and that 54 percent of us will feel the impact of guns in some way..
After months of threats, an expelled graduate student named Murad Dervish went to the University of Arizona’s Climatology and Atmospheric Science Department, chased down department head Doctor Thomas Meixner and shot him nine times.
A jury rejected the plea that Dervish should be confined to a mental hospital. On Monday, he went away to life in prison for first degree murder.
Kathleen Meixner loved the way her husband stayed active in public issues. Now gun safety is an issue that drives her.
“I think that's really critical to make sure that guns are not getting in the hands of people who might hurt themselves or others.”
Mrs. Meixner wants what’s often called a red flag law that would make it easier to confiscate guns from people with a history of threats or violence.
After Doctor Murthy’s statement, the NRA said gun crime persists because the Biden Administration hasn’t done enough to prosecute criminals. The organization said, in part. “This is an extension of the Biden’s Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners,”
Even before the killing Murad Dervish had a criminal record that should have stopped him from buying a gun from a licensed gun dealer. But Kathleen Meixner says gun laws as they are now, made it too easy to put a gun in the hands of her husband’s killer.
She says, “The person who sold the gun to Murad Dervish did it in a parking lot with no questions asked, and no background check.”
You can watch Kathleen Meixner's full interview with KGUN9. It is linked inside this additional storyabout how she and the Meixner family reacted to the murder, the killer's trial and life sentence.
