The Seattle Jewish Film Festival & ‘The Accidental Activist’

On July 28, 2006 Cheryl Stumbo was sitting at her desk at the Seattle Jewish Federation, when she heard an angry man in the reception area. Minutes later, Naveed Haq opened fire in the office, killing one woman and injuring five others.

“He just raised the gun and pointed it right in my face and that was when I dropped to the floor and was on my stomach,” Cheryl said. “That industrial carpet smell? That’s the smell of waiting to die, to me, to this day.”

That’s an excerpt from a new short documentary, “The Accidental Activist,” which will debut at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on March 17.

“Well, actually, not quite accidental! That wasn’t my choice for the title.”

A few years after the shooting, after 20 surgeries and years of PTSD therapy, Cheryl went back to work, doing marketing and communication for the Jewish Federation and then another company.

“I was finding that I didn’t have that same juice that I had before, around my career. So I needed to do something I was passionate about.”

She watched coverage of more shootings after shootings on the news.

“After my shooting, the ones that you heard about on the news were the Virginia Tech shooting, awful. The first Fort Hood shooting, the shooting in Tucson when Gabby Giffords was shot. The Aurora theater shooting in Colorado. Then the Clackamas Mall shooting down in Oregon and then the Cafe Racer shooting right here in Seattle. Each one of those, I would see them on the news and I would just be devastated,” she said. “That is when I made that decision. I don’t want to see this on the news on a regular basis anymore, I want to do something about this.”

Cheryl said the Sandy Hook school shooting was the last straw.

She started making herself available for media interviews as a commentator on mass shootings. Then she became an advocate for the Washington Alliance For Gun Responsibility.

She now works for Every Town for Gun Safety, an organization started by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The short film also highlights her role as citizen sponsor of Initiative 594, the bill that now requires background checks for anyone purchasing a gun in Washington state. It passed last year.

“I have never given birth, but I have a feeling that what I felt that night was what it must feel like after you’ve given birth. It’s that total elation and joy combined with total exhaustion. I had put everything on the table because I didn’t want to wake up the next morning and find out that we had lost and that I hadn’t done everything I could. I had put everything out there and then to find out we won and to go out on that stage and be with everybody, just cheering. I mean, we were so joyful. It was just a great night.”

Cheryl said the background check law will save lives, but it wouldn’t have stopped her shooter from getting a gun.

“Now we’re working on other things that would more closely tie to my own shooting, like Extreme Risk Protection Orders. If a family knows that their family member is having some severe mental health issues and has access to guns, if we have something like Extreme Risk Protection Orders in place, they would be able to go and do something about it,” Cheryl said. “That would have happened with my shooter. He had severe mental health issues, his family knew it, but there was nothing they could do to make sure that he couldn’t get his hands on guns.”