The “Slippery Slope” of Gun Control   A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence December 27, 2017   With winter fully upon us and snow covering many parts of the country, I’m reminded of the gun lobby’s worst fear – the “slippery slope.” The NRA warns its members that enactment of even the most modest gun control laws will lead the United States down the slippery slope toward the adoption of – [...]

Congress Should Be Ashamed: The Concealed Carry Criminal Act of 2017 Following the mass killing of 20 first grade children and six adult staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December of 2012, former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically wounded herself by a gunshot to the head in a mass shooting in January of 2011, issued the following statement: In response to a horrific series of shootings that has sown terror [...]

The Tehama County Shooting, Laura's Law, and Laura's Mom You’ve probably heard about the mass shooting in Tehama County in Northern California on Tuesday, November 14. Or maybe not, if you don’t live in Northern California. It was the 18th mass shooting in the United States this month, if one defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which four or more people, not including the perpetrator, are shot. And it was “just a [...]

The Air Force Is Not the Problem...and A Good Guy With A Gun Is Not the Solution   In the aftermath of the horrific mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on November 5, in which 25 people were killed, including eight children and a pregnant woman,  and 20 others wounded, it has been revealed that the gunman, Devin Kelley, had been hospitalized involuntarily for mental illness and imprisoned for domestic [...]

I’d like to share with you a true story of two countries and how they reacted in the 13 days following the worst mass shootings in their nations’ histories.   Country #1 On April 28, 1996, a lone gunman killed 35 people and wounded at least 19 others with a semi-automatic rifle and self-loading shotgun in the Australian resort town of Port Arthur. The Port Arthur massacre was the worst mass shooting in Australian history. [...]

The Las Vegas Massacre and the Bump Stock Diversion A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, the gun lobby was able to insidiously and effectively divert attention away from the fact that the United States is the only high income country in the world in which, as a result of our lax gun control laws and the extraordinarily high number of guns in [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence September 2, 2017 I’d like to invite all Americans Against Gun Violence supporters and other gun violence prevention activists to our first annual dinner on the evening of Sunday, October 22, in Sacramento, California. The dinner will mark the milestone of the first year that Americans Against Gun Violence has been in full operation, and it will be an important opportunity for us to get [...]

The Continuum Between Handguns and Nuclear Weapons Most organizations working to prevent gun violence don’t also address the threat of nuclear weapons. On the 72nd anniversary of the US atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), however, it seems appropriate to point out that there is a continuum between handguns and nuclear weapons. As former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan stated in 2006: The [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence July 3, 2017 "Be Courageous, Be Bold" My wife and I were on short vacation in Monterey, California last week when we learned about the two latest mass shootings in our country. On Friday, June 30, at least 17 people were wounded in a mass shooting in a club in Little Rock, Arkansas. On the same day, a doctor shot and killed a female physician [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence June 24, 2017 The Elephant in the Dugout During the mass shooting on a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia on June 14, 2017, about 20 Republican members of Congress and their staffers hid in the first base dugout while their colleague, Representative Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana), lay critically wounded on the field near second base. Three members of the Capitol Police assigned to protect Scalise exchanged [...]