“Gun Control in Great Britain After the 1996 Dunblane Primary School Mass Shooting: A Model for the United States” Full Text of the Keynote Address by Michael North, Ph.D. Presented at the Americans Against Gun Violence Annual Dinner In Sacramento, California, October 21, 2023 With an introduction by Americans Against Gun Violence President Dr. Bill Durston   Dr. Durston: During the many years that I’ve been working in the field of gun violence prevention, I’ve [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence I’ve been working in one way or another on the issue of gun violence prevention for much of my adult life – ever since 1969, that is, when I returned from serving in combat as a member of the U.S. Marines in the war in Vietnam. Having just left a war zone, I didn't want to permanently live in one. In all the years that [...]

In the aftermath of the mass shooting in which three nine-year-old children and three staff members were killed by a former student at a church affiliated elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, the PBS NewsHour conducted an interview with a child psychologist, Dr. Tori Cordiano, in which the interviewer, Amna Nawaz, asked Dr. Cordiano what parents and caregivers should tell their children about school shootings. Dr. Cordiano replied: You can start with, “I want to tell [...]

A Two-Word Summary of the Supreme Court’s New One-Step Test for the Constitutionality of Gun Laws: "Blatant Hypocrisy" A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence   The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, in its entirety: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. For most of our nation’s history, courts used [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence   It was just over a week ago - a few days after the horrific mass shooting in which an 18 year old white supremacist targeted African Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people and wounding three others - that I posted message concerning what had turned out to be a tragically prescient winning essay that a 9th grade high school student in Arizona [...]

A message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence May 18, 2022   We’d scheduled a Zoom call weeks in advance for the evening of Sunday, May 15, to make the final decision concerning the winners in this year’s Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest. The prompt for the contest was the following statement made by the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger during an interview on the PBS NewsHour [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence March 2, 2022   On the evening of February 28, my wife and I watched the segment of the PBS NewsHour concerning the military attack on Ukraine launched by Russian president Vladimir Putin.[i] The program host, Judy Woodruff, warned at the beginning of the segment, “Images in this story may disturb some viewers.” The television coverage included a segment showing a mother sobbing as her [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence Four days after the Oxford High School mass shooting, in which a 15 year old student killed four fellow students and wounded six other students and a teacher, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted the photo below of himself and his family on Twitter.   Apparently not wanting to be outdone, four days later, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted the picture below of herself and [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence December 5, 2021   On the morning of Tuesday, November 30, a day that had been declared, “Giving Tuesday,” I sent out a message to our supporters in which I posed the question, “Are you unknowingly contributing to ‘The Other Big Lie.’” The “Other Big Lie” to which I was referring was the fraudulent claim that the Second Amendment was intended to confer an individual [...]