Reservations are now open for our 2023 Americans Against Gun Violence Annual Dinner. The dinner, which is being co-hosted by the Sacramento Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, will be held on the evening of Saturday, October 21, at the Hilton Arden West, 2200 Harvard Street, in Sacramento. Doors open for social hour, including a no-host bar, at 6:00 PM PDT, dinner will be served at 7:00, and the program, featuring a keynote address by Dr. Michael North of Scotland, will begin at 8:00 PM. The dinner is open to the public, but advance paid reservations are required. The cost of the dinner is $60 per person.
Click on this link to make your reservations online, or fill out and mail in this hard copy dinner dinner reservation form. On the dinner reservation form, please be sure to enter the name of everyone for whom you’re making reservations, any title that the attendee would like to have included on his or her name badge, and the attendee’s entree choice. Entree options are chicken, salmon, and vegetarian/vegan. Note that for online reservations, we’re using a new credit card processing provider, “Zeffy.” Unlike our previous credit card processing providers, Zeffy doesn’t take a percentage out of payments to non-profit organizations like ours. Zeffy does ask for a “tip,” though, to support its operations, and Zeffy sets the default tip amount on the reservation form as 17%. If you don’t wish to leave a “tip” for Zeffy, in the field labeled, “Add a contribution to keep the platform we use 100% free,” be sure to select the “Other amount” option, and enter a zero as the “other amount.”
Our 2023 annual dinner will probably be a once in a lifetime opportunity for you to hear Dr. North speak in person. As you may already know if you’ve been keeping up with other posts on our website, Dr. North lost his five year-old daughter, Sophie, in the 1996 mass shooting at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, in which Sophie’s teacher and 15 fellow students were also killed and 10 other students and three other teachers were wounded. The mass shooting was committed by a man who legally owned the handguns he used to commit his heinous crime. (Britain already had a ban on civilian ownership of automatic and semi-automatic long guns, including so-called “assault rifles.”) Following the Dunblane Primary School mass shooting, Dr. North helped lead a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Great Britain within less than two years. There hasn’t been another school shooting in Britain since the handgun ban went into effect, and the rate of gun-related deaths in Britain is currently 1/70th the rate in the United States. Dr. North will speak about how he and other grieving Dunblane parents overcame seemingly unsurmountable obstacles to achieve the handgun ban, why they felt that nothing short of a complete ban on civilian handgun ownership would suffice in response to the Dunblane massacre, and why the British handgun ban should serve as a model for gun control in the United States. Dr. North will also address the fraudulent claim by the U.S. gun lobby – a claim endorsed by a current majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices – that the Second Amendment “codified” into the U.S. Constitution a broad individual right to gun ownership that our country’s founders inherited from their English ancestors. In fact, the English people do not have – and never have had – such a right. Instead, they and their children have a right to go about their daily lives without fear of becoming victims of wanton gun violence.
In addition to the keynote address by Dr. North, the program will include an update by our president, Dr. Bill Durston, concerning our organization’s many other activities over the past year and ways in which you can become more involved in our efforts to stop our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence. The deadline for making dinner reservations is 12 noon PDT on Monday, October 16. We hope to see you at the dinner.