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 [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence June 11, 2017 "Pious Condolences Will No Longer Suffice" On the eve of the first anniversary of the horrific Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, the words of a U.S. Senator from Connecticut ring true: "Pious condolences will no longer suffice….Quarter measures and half measures will no longer suffice….The time has now come that we must enact stringent gun control legislation comparable to the [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence June 5, 2017 On Gun Control, Like Climate Change, the United States is a Rogue Nation On June 1, 2017, Donald Trump announced that the United States would no longer abide by the Paris Climate Accord, putting the USA in solidarity with Syria and Nicaragua, the only other two countries in the world that have not signed on to the accord. Many Americans were appalled, [...]

A Message from the President of Americans Against Gun Violence May 20, 2017 “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Reading the bumper sticker on the car in front of me, I immediately thought of Donald Trump. It seems that almost daily, either he or one of his appointees does or says something outrageous, on issues ranging from interfering with the investigation of Russian meddling into the US 2016 presidential election to supporting legislation [...]