“Why Do I have To March For My Life?” And Other Winning Essays in the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence In March of this year, we announced our first annual Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, open to all high school students in the United States and its territories. The prompt for the contest was a statement [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence Our country is once again reeling from yet another mass shooting on a U.S. school campus. At about 7:30 AM Central Daylight Time on Friday, May 18, a 17 year old student at Santa Fe High School, located in a town of about 12,000 people 20 miles west of Galveston, Texas, opened fire with a shotgun and a handgun, killing eight students and two teachers [...]

An Open Letter to Student Gun Control Activists From the President of Americans Against Gun Violence   Dear Student Activists, I’m writing to you on behalf of Americans Against Gun Violence to express our full support for your demands for definitive action to prevent future tragedies like the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14. Your outrage is reasonable and appropriate, and we applaud you for your activism. [...]

13 Days Later: A Tale of Two Countries (Reprise) A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence February 27, 2017   Note: If you’ve been reading my president’s messages on a regular basis, the title of this message will be familiar. I used the same title after the October 1, 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas in which 58 people were killed and 422 were wounded. I’m going to keep re-using this title [...]

Valentine’s Day School Massacre in One of our “Safest Cities” A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence   On February 14, 2018, a 19 year-old former student armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle shot and killed 17 students and staff and wounded at least 14 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Parkland had been rated as one of Florida’s two safest cities, and the 15th safest city in [...]

Sacrificing Our Children to the Gods of the Gun Lobby A message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence February 4, 2018 It was accepted practice in many primitive cultures for adults to sacrifice children to the gods in the belief that the ritualistic killing of their most beloved offspring would somehow bring good fortune to their societies as a whole. Fortunately, this barbaric practice has been abolished in modern cultures – at least, [...]

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 [...]