Zoe Moore remembers the day her baby took her last breath.

It was Jan. 10, 2010.

Dana Harvey was 27 and lived on the south side of Seattle. She had been battling mental health issues for most of her adult life. But that didnt stop her from buying a gun.

She bought her gun from a pawnshop, Moore tells me.

Were speaking in a ballroom in downtown St. Louis, where Moore is gathered with more than 500 other people most of them moms, many of them survivors of gun violence for Gun Sense University, a yearly event sponsored by Moms Demand Action. Moore lives in a poor, mostly black neighborhood in a part of her city in which gun violence is a daily occurrence. She describes a place that could be the Ville, Fairground Park, Gravois Park, College Hill.

The kids grow up thinking dying at the hands of a gun is normal. They can tick off the names: brothers, uncles, moms, cousins, friends. Dead. Dead. Dead.

She worries about their futures. Growing up around such death can be toxic and lead to the mental problems that killed her daughter.

What are we bringing them up to? Moore asks. What kind of future?

Thats a question that Victoria Anwuri and her colleagues at Washington Universitys Institute of Public Health are trying to answer. Since the spring of 2015, when the university launched its gun research initiative, researchers have been focusing on gun violence as a public health issue like smoking, like seat belts, like drunk driving.

Because Congress has discouraged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying gun violence, there is a lack of data available to judge its effects in neighborhoods such as Moores. But the toxic stress that comes from experiencing daily shootings in places such as Seattle and St. Louis is very real, Anwuri says. She was on a panel with me at Gun Sense University to talk about the effect of gun violence in America.

The real experts were in the crowd.

Moore found her daughters body the day after she shot herself.

She was mentally ill and she was able to get a gun, Moore says.

Whenever the next big shooting happens at a school like in Newtown and Littleton, or at a public gathering place like in Orlando and Aurora the American narrative will repeat itself.

We cant talk about guns now. Its too soon.

The problem is mental health, our political leaders will say.

Then theyll slash funding for treating mental illness, and another person with easy access to a gun will kill again. Rinse. Repeat.

Becky Morgan has lived through the cycle.

The first time was 1991 in St. Louis, where she lives.

A mentally ill person who was under treatment bought a gun and killed her father.

Morgan was 19. For her, it wasnt the right time to talk about it. She buried herself in school work, finished college, started her own family.

Then Sandy Hook happened. Twenty children and six adults were mowed down by a mentally ill man with a gun.

It was time for Morgan, now a mom, to talk guns.

When Sandy Hook happened, it really made me look for the first time at what happened in my life, Morgan said.

So she joined Moms Demand Action, which was founded by Colorado mom Shannon Watts after the Sandy Hook massacre. Watts, a 1995 graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, was a stay-at-home mom who turned to Facebook and started a page where moms could talk about gun violence prevention.

Her organization gathers this weekend in a state that politically is a poster-child for the National Rifle Association. I dont know whats happened in my old state, Watts says. After college, she worked in the Missouri House, and later for then-Gov. Mel Carnahan. Missouri was a bellwether for the nation then, and it had relatively strong gun laws. Thats no longer the case. Missouri is more extreme than even most of the Southern states.

Last year, Missouri lawmakers passed a bill making it legal to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. Morgan and hundreds of other moms in the five growing state chapters of Moms Demand Action descended on the Capitol to fight against the bill. They lost.

Its frustrating, Morgan says. She leads a St. Louis chapter with about 1,000 members. Its also motivating.

Next year, the Legislature will be back with more pro-gun bills. Morgan and the other moms will be there to talk guns and mental health. For more than 20 years, she didnt want to talk about those issues. They were too personal. Too painful.

Then a sick man with a gun killed 20 children and helped her find her voice.

She will be quiet no more.

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