Rosanne Cash Speaks Out on Gun Control, Stirs Controversy on Facebook

On Friday (Oct. 2), Rosanne Cash decided to take a stand against gun violence -- but her call to action didn't sit well with some fans.

"If you are as sick of gun violence in this country as I am, then let's stop talking about it and just do ONE simple thing. Today," the Grammy-winning singer posted on her Facebook page. "Sign the petition on the White House website to reinstate the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons."

Cash's daughter, Chelsea Crowell, created the petition via We the People, and it needs 100,000 signatures in order to be reviewed.

"It's a very, very small step," notes Cash, "but a first one."

After a heated debate broke out, on both sides of the issue, in the comments section of her post, Cash posted a follow-up statement on Sunday (Oct. 4).

Dear Followers and Likers -- If you can't maintain basic courtesy on my page, please allow me to show you the door. This is my page, and I do have a right to my beliefs and convictions, as all of you do. I was raised to have the courage to stand behind those convictions, and it's too late in life for me to sacrifice my integrity by keeping the most passionate of them secret. Those who tell me to "stay out of politics and stick to music," or, in other words, "keep your mouth shut," are perhaps so obsessed with the Second Amendment that they haven't noticed the First.

Cash goes on to explain in the post that she was on the board of PAX -- an organization dedicated to preventing gun violence among children -- for 10 years. But, after her decade of working with the organization, she had to quit because "I couldn't take the endless parade of innocent people with shattered lives. It was eating at my soul."

"More pre-schoolers die by guns every year than police officers in the line of duty, and people seem to accept it as collateral damage for ‘freedom,'" Cash continues. "Whose freedom are we talking about? Certainly not a classroom of first-graders lying in a pool of blood. And we’re not talking about the freedom of their parents either, whose lives are utterly destroyed.”

Cash isn't simply speaking out about gun control because of her political beliefs; rather, a very personal experience lit a fire under her. The singer's daughter was once held up at gunpoint while working at a jewelry store.

Concluding her second Facebook post, Cash asks her followers if gun control would be worth it if it saved even just one innocent life.

“If the answer is no, or the answer is just more vicious rhetoric, then we should be ashamed,” she writes. “That child could be yours. It was almost mine. So don’t tell me to keep my mouth shut.”

Cash will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame on Oct. 11, in a ceremony in Nashville. She recently wrapped up an artist-in-residence stint at the Country Music Hall of Fame.