It’s been a year since the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings. On January 21, 2023 a gunman killed eleven people and injured nine others after a Lunar New Year festival at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, Calif.. Two days later on January 23, 2023, in a separate incident, another gunman took the lives of seven people, with an eighth person who was critically injured, at two farms in Half Moon Bay, Calif.
The victims of the incidents happened in two cities that are predominantly Asian. It was a somber moment during a time when Asian American Pacific Islander communities were still grappling from the 2021 shootings at the Atlanta spa two years before, where most of the victims were of Asian descent, as well as the rise of anti-Asian racism and discrimination fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic.
On the one year anniversary of the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay tragedies, how have things changed over the past year?
Weeks after the shootings, Asian American Pacific Islander organizations and activists spoke out and mobilized.
“The shootings made it clear that all Americans — including Asian Americans — are impacted by gun violence,” Andy Wong, the managing director of advocacy for Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition formed in 2020 focused on ending racism and discrimination against the AAPI community, said. “The back-to-back timing of these horrific shootings at the beginning of Lunar New Year, which is an important holiday for many of our Asian American communities, really compounded the pain, trauma and fear our communities were feeling.”
In the aftermath of the shootings, Wong said Stop AAPI Hate reached out to local groups serving the Asian American communities in the two cities, and offered support to help those who were impacted.
“One of the fundamental tenets of our approach to addressing hate violence is to support community-based groups that work on these issues and who know their communities best,” Wong said. “We stand with the…
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