U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Naperville, center, speaks with a family Tuesday before the start of the Community Vigil for Uvalde hosted by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense at Rotary Hill in Naperville. (Suzanne Baker / Naperville Sun)

The Rev. Mark Winters said he’s called upon to offer words of comfort in Naperville during difficult times, including for Tuesday’s Community Vigil for Uvalde held the same day on which the first of 21 funerals began for the Texas school shooting victims began.

“I am supposed to have things to say. In awful moments like this I don’t have anything comforting to tell you,” Winters, pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ, told the group of 80 gathered at the foot of Rotary Hill for the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense event.

“All of that’s been said. It’s all been insufficient. I have no words of comfort because nothing about this is comfortable.”

Instead, he cited a biblical passage in which God, talking to Amos, says, “I despise your festivals and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. … But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Winter said he’s tired of the violence and wondering whether his children or wife, who works in a public school, will come home, and urged those in attendance not to get “comfortable with the unbearable.”

Becky Simon, outgoing president of the League of Women Voters Naperville, said what is needed are educated voters who research candidates’ views on guns and incumbents’ voting records.

“Gun violence prevention is not a partisan issue,” she said.

Leslie Ruffing, a group leader with Moms Demand Action in Naperville, welcomes people Tuesday to the Community Vigil for Uvalde hosted by the group at Rotary Hill in Naperville. (Suzanne Baker / Naperville Sun)

Dr. Dana Bussing, a Naperville rehab physician, said she’s seen patients who’ve survived gunshots forced to deal with spinal cord and brain injuries, severe chronic pain, amputation and paralysis.

“This is because firearm injuries are a public health epidemic, and it’s getting worse,” Bussing said.

Getting shot is a “big deal,” she said, and nothing like in the movies where the action hero gets shot and wears a sling, only to have full use of the arm in the sequel.

“That’s not how it works,” Bussing said, adding the hero wouldn’t be able to move the arm at all.

What needs to be done, she said, is to find ways to decrease the death and disabilities from gunshot wounds.

“We have to look at the data and treat it like a public health problem and not a political talking point,” Bussing said.

Sue Topp, president of the AAUW Naperville, said she heard a woman on the radio who was afraid to send her child to school.

“This is terrible. We do not want to live in a society where we can’t send our kids to school,” Topp said. “And we don’t want our aunties and our uncles and grandparents to get shot down in grocery stores or at concerts, or at church or anywhere else. I feel like we have become the hunted.”

The majority of Americans support universal background checks and other common sense gun legislation, she said, and “we need to make sure that the majority gets heard.”

“What about our rights? What about our rights to be free and pursue happiness?” Topp said.

Naperville resident Tim Thompson said the Uvalde tragedy was very personal.

“Last Tuesday, 19 parents did the same thing I do every day: kissed and hugged their kids goodbye and wished them a good day at school,” Thompson said.

Not only were the children 9 and 10 years old, the same age as Thompson’s oldest daughter, 19 is the same number of students in his school classroom in Joliet, he said.

“We all know the difference between me, my children and my students and those 19 students and two teachers — we all got to go home,” he said.

Thompson said worries about who will draw the short straw the “next time,” whether it’s his two daughters who don’t return from school or if he must decide between leaving his family without a husband and father because he put himself between his students and a gunman.

The answer is not a good guy with a gun, but common sense gun laws, he said.

“There can’t be a next time. We need to make a change, and it has to happen now,” Thompson said. “We have to be the change. It won’t just happen. We have to make it happen.”