In The News

Past News Items

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at the Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky

Bill Durston2023-04-13T10:22:22-07:00April 13th, 2023|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee

Bill Durston2023-03-28T11:14:31-07:00March 28th, 2023|

An Open Letter to the PBS NewsHour Concerning Its Reporting on the 10th Anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre

Bill Durston2022-12-15T18:04:16-08:00December 15th, 2022|

False Assertions in December 3, 2022 Interview on NPR About Gun Violence Prevention

Bill Durston2022-12-06T22:56:54-08:00December 6th, 2022|

Americans Against Gun Violence Calls on High Court to Overturn Rogue 2nd Amendment Decision

Bill Durston2022-10-09T13:43:46-07:00September 22nd, 2021|

Americans Against Gun Violence Condemns District Court Judge’s Ruling in Duncan v. Becerra Invalidating California High Capacity Magazine Ban

Bill Durston2022-10-09T13:43:49-07:00April 2nd, 2019|

Press Release: A Critical Appraisal of Surgeon General Murthy’s Firearm Violence Advisory

Sacramento California, June 27, 2024: During Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Dr. Vivek Murthy co-founded “Doctors for Obama,” which morphed into “Doctors for America,” after Obama was elected as president. While serving as president of Doctors for America in October of 2012, Dr. Murthy “tweeted:”

Tired of politicians playing politics w/guns, putting lives at risk b/c they’re scared of NRA. Guns are a health care issue.

After the resignation of Surgeon General Regina Benjamin in July of 2013, President Obama nominated Dr. Murthy to replace her. In his opening statement in his Senate confirmation hearing, Dr. Murthy didn’t mention gun violence. When Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, an ardent opponent of gun control, read Murthy’s tweet to him and asked Murthy if he intended to use the Surgeon General’s office as a “bully pulpit” for advocating gun control. Murthy replied:

I do not intend to use the Surgeon General’s Office as a bully pulpit for gun control. That is not going to be my priority. As we spoke about, my priority and focus is going to be on obesity prevention.

Murthy was largely silent on the subject of gun violence prevention while serving as Surgeon General during the Obama administration from 2013-2016, despite a steep rise in annual numbers of gun-related deaths and multiple high profile mass shootings, including the 2016 Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, the worst shooting in U.S. history up to that time, in which 49 people were killed and 58 were wounded.

Dr. Murthy was relieved of his position as Surgeon General when Donald Trump became President in 2017, but he was re-nominated as Surgeon General by President Biden in 2021. Dr. Murthy continued to be largely silent on the gun violence issue during the Biden Administration until June 25, 2024, when he declared gun violence “a public health crisis in America.”

In a recorded video message posted on the Surgeon General’s website, Murthy stated, “Today, for first time in the history of our office, I am issuing a Surgeon General’s advisory on firearm violence.”

Actually, Dr. C. Everett Koop, who was Surgeon General from 1982-1989, and who was a practicing pediatric surgeon during most of his professional career, convened a Surgeon General’s Workshop on Violence and Public Health in 1985, with a particular focus on gun violence prevention. The recommendations from that workshop were reported by Surgeon General Koop to the Senate Committee on Children, Families, Drugs, and Alcoholism; and regional, state, and local workshops followed.

In 1992, Dr. Koop summarized his recommendations for preventing gun violence in an article he co-authored with Dr. George Lundberg in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled, Violence in America: A Public Health Emergency – Time to Bite the Bullet Back. These recommendations included a requirement that persons seeking to acquire a gun “be of a certain age and physical/mental condition;” that they “be required to demonstrate knowledge and skill in proper use of that firearm,” that they be “monitored in the firearm’s use;” that they “forfeit the right to own or operate the firearm if these conditions are abrogated;” that these restrictions “should apply uniformly to all firearms and to all US inhabitants across all states through a system of gun registration and licensing;” and that “no grandfather clauses should be allowed.” Dr. Koop and Dr. Lundberg added, “We believe that anything short of this proposed registration and licensing for gun ownership and use would be too little action to recommend at this time.” Notably, they did not recommend waiting for more research.

It’s also notable that that in 1992, there was no constitutional obstacle to the adoption of any of the recommendations of Doctors Koop and Lundberg. In 2008, however, in a narrow 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions, by ruling in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” It’s likely that the majority of current U.S. Supreme Court justices would rule that laws that encompass the recommendations of Doctors Koop and Lundberg would be unconstitutional.

In his video message recorded on June 25, 2024, Surgeon General Murthy stated, “As a doctor, I’ve seen the consequences of firearm violence up close.” It appears that in recent years, however, Dr. Murthy has had little if any direct patient contact. The Washington Post revealed that the financial disclosure form that Murthy submitted after being re-nominated by President Biden as Surgeon General showed that he’d received over a million dollars in consulting fees from companies including Netflix, Airbnb, Carnival Cruise Line, and Estee Lauder, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. This form doesn’t show any income from patient care.

The 39 page advisory, Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America, published by the Surgeon General’s office on June 25 details the seriousness of our country’s gun violence epidemic, including the facts that since 2020, gunshot wounds have become the leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the 1-19 year old age group; that the rate of gun-related deaths in the United States is 11.4 times higher than the average rate in 28 other high income democratic countries; that the total number of gun-related deaths in the United States reached a record high of 48,204 in 2022; and that while mass shootings account for only about 1% of all gun-related deaths, the frequency of mass shootings is increasing. As contributing factors to gun violence, the advisory lists “socioeconomic, geographic, and racial inequities” and firearm “lethality, availability, and access.” The advisory doesn’t include lax U.S. gun control laws or the related vast pool of privately owned guns in our country as contributing factors. As shown in the graph below, there is a direct relationship at the international level between rates of gun-related deaths and rates of private gun ownership, with the United States being an extreme outlier in both categories.

Legend: The computer generated best fit line demonstrates the direct, linear relationship between rates of per capita gun ownership and rates of gun related deaths at the international level, with the United States being an extreme outlier in both categories. The 15 other high income democratic countries represented by points on the graph are, in order from the lowest to highest rates of gun-related deaths, Japan, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Italy, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Canada, France, and Finland. Data used to construct this graph were taken from the website GunPolicy.org, which is affiliated with the University of Sydney school of public health.

The advisory recommends a “Public Health Approach to Firearm Injury and Violence Prevention,” but it doesn’t include the adoption of stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries – laws that would vastly reduce the pool of privately owned guns – as part of that public health approach; nor does the advisory advocate the kind of universal licensing of gun owners and registration of guns that former Surgeon General Koop recommended in 1992. Instead, the advisory recommends expanding research “to examine short-term and long-term outcomes of firearm violence,” without providing a rationale for how such research, in the absence of the adoption of stringent gun control laws, will do anything other than document more senseless, preventable firearm related deaths and injuries. The advisory recommends generic “Community Risk Reduction and Education Prevention Strategies,” but the advisory fails to note that a critical review of such strategies by the National Research Council found no evidence that they were effective.

In the conclusion to his June 25 video message, Surgeon General Murthy states:

Firearm violence is a public health crisis. Our failure to address it is a moral crisis. To protect the health and well being of Americans, especially our children, we must now act with the clarity, courage, and urgency that this moment demands.

Americans Against Gun Violence agrees with this concluding statement. We urge Surgeon General Murthy to heed his own words and to join us in openly advocating and actively working toward overturning the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision and its progeny and toward adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all the other high income democratic countries of the world.

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Announcing the Winners of our 2024 National High School Essay Contest

Americans Against Gun Violence congratulates the winners of our 2024 National High School Essay Contest, which was open to all U.S. high school students in the United States. To enter the contest, students were required to submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer* describing their thoughts about the following excerpt from the Americans Against Gun Violence Mission Statement:

In creating constitutional obstacles, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision and its progeny are literally death sentences for tens of thousands of Americans annually.

We received more than 350 entries from high school students across the country in this year’s contest. The winners were chosen via a rigorous process in which more than 20 Americans Against Gun Violence members participated in reading and rating essays blinded to any student identifying information. In the essay contest instructions, we announced that we would be awarding a total of at least $15,000 in scholarships to twelve winners, with the option of providing additional awards, as we’ve done in most past years, if we received more than 12 outstanding essays. Again this year, our readers felt there were indeed more than 12 outstanding essays, and we are therefore awarding a total of $16,200 divided among 22 winners.

While we are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s essay contest, we are deeply troubled by the fact the high school students chosen as winners in this year’s contest demonstrate a far greater appreciation than the majority of our current Supreme Court justices of the rogue nature of the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision and its progeny and the devastating public health consequences of these decisions. We are also troubled by the fact that again this year, many students have not felt secure in having their names and/or the names of their high schools published in association with their essays. We don’t fault the students who chose not to reveal this information. Rather, we fault the toxic culture in our country that makes students not only fear for their lives every day they go to school, but that makes them fear retaliation if they speak openly about the need to take definitive action to protect our children and youth from the threat of gun violence. It is part of our mission at Americans Against Gun Violence to change this toxic culture

This year’s scholarships bring the total amount of awards that we’ve given students in the seven year history of our national high school essay contest to over $110,000. Donations to support our annual high school essay contest are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by state and federal laws, and 100% of donations to the essay contest fund go directly to student awards.

The winners of our 2024 National High School Essay Contest are:

First Place Winner – $3,000 Scholarship Award

(Author’s name withheld at student’s request)

Weston High School, Weston, Massachusetts

Heller: A Hidden Hurdle

Almost always, the use of the phrase “off-the-charts” is a vast overstatement of the truth. The gun violence epidemic in the United States is one of the few cases in which the phrase perfectly encapsulates our reality…. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision, addressing our crisis means attempting to weave a path through the legal barriers that Heller presents. The sad reality of the Supreme Court’s radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment in Heller is that we are left with few options, background checks and mental health support among them. Alas, none of these measures match the gravity of our off-the-charts problem…. Heller is the concealed barrier at the heart of our shameful crisis. Until Heller and its progeny are overturned, our rate of preventable gun-related deaths will remain off-the-charts in the worst way possible. (Read the full essay)

Second Place Winner – $2,500 Scholarship Award

Layla Kelly

Homestead High School, Fort Wayne, Indiana

The Freedom to Live

… The rate of high schoolers killed by firearms is 82 times higher in the United States than other similarly democratic and economically prosperous nations. These nations have implemented measures that limit gun ownership, which is impossible in our country as long as the Heller decision and its progeny stand as precedents. For our lives and the lives of the students who follow us, I firmly believe that it is our duty to stop allowing older generations to treat our lives as dispensable…. America is in a crisis, and the remedy is the courage of our generation to stand up and confront the twisted precedents that put a higher value on our country’s guns than the lives of our country’s children and youth. (Read the full essay)

Third Place Winner – $2,000 Scholarship Award

Janet Yang

(High School Name and Location Withheld at Student’s Request)

Now Is The Time to Fight for More Stringent Gun Control Laws

… Each day, 327 people are shot in the United States, among them 24 are children and teens…. How can this be America, the land where all “are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?” On June 26, 2008, when a narrow 5-4 majority of Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of Dick Heller who claimed that Washington DC’s restrictive handgun law violated his Second Amendment rights, the Court effectively rewrote the Second Amendment to the gun lobby’s liking…. (Read the full essay)

$1,000 Scholarship Award Winner

Carter Benson

Elk Grove High School, Elk Grove, California

Deadly Myths

Myths can exist to explain and reinforce beliefs of a community. Though they can inspire, they can lead to deadly outcomes when they rely on fantasy rather than fact. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court endorsed two deadly myths in one when a narrow 5-4 majority of justices ruled that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right for individuals to keep guns in the home for “self-defense.”…(Read the full essay)

$1,000 Scholarship Award Winner

Neal Chandran

Monte Vista High School, Danville, California

The Heller Fallout: Guns Kill People

I am sick and tired of hearing, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” This argument became even more popularized by the NRA after the landmark Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), in which a narrow five to four majority of justices reversed over two centuries of legal precedent by ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun unconnected with service in a militia…. The reality is that people with guns kill people far more often than people without guns, and we cannot neatly separate the two issues….(Read the full essay)

$1,000 Scholarship Award Winner

Zachary Tomlin

Rio Americano High School, Sacramento, California

Bad Decisions with Deadly Consequences: The Supreme Court Rules Against Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

…. On an average day in 2022, 132 Americans, including 10 children and youth, were killed with guns. These figures are equivalent to an almost full Boeing 727 airliner crashing with no survivors every single day….The Second Amendment is a single sentence in length. The five justice Heller majority, having ignored the conventions of written English, decided in 2008 that the first half of a sentence does not pertain to the second half of the same sentence…Protecting the rights of the American people – and particularly our children and youth – to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a fundamental American value, a value that we can no longer neglect just because of the recent bad decisions of a small majority of Supreme Court justices….(Read the full essay)

$1,000 Scholarship Award Winner

(Author’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Betrayal of Trust: The Devastating Toll of the Heller Ruling on the U.S. Public

The Heller ruling, in which a narrow 5-4 majority of justices reversed over two centuries of prior legal precedent and instead endorsed the gun lobby’s extremist interpretation of the Second Amendment, left me in shock. How is private gun ownership more important than the lives of our youth? …The willingness of the court to interpret the “right to bear arms,” described in the second half of the Amendment, as being unrelated to service in the “well regulated militia,” described in the first half of the Amendment, even with the overwhelming amount of evidence of the horror that widespread private gun ownership has caused, is alarming. (Read the full essay)

$1,000 Scholarship Award Winner

(Author’s name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

The Heller Decision and Its Progeny: Guarantees of “self-defense” or “death sentences” wrongly decided?

Since 2008, over five people per hour, on average, have served “death sentences,” as described by Americans Against Gun Violence, related, in part, to the Heller decision – deaths due to gunshot wounds that could have been prevented by the adoption of stringent gun control laws that the Heller decision and its progeny have thwarted through the creation of constitutional roadblocks….There’s no mention whatsoever in the history or text of the Second Amendment of a need for private gun ownership for “self-defense.”…(Read the full essay)

$1,000 Scholarship Award Winner

(Author’s name Withheld at Student’s Request)

Etiwanda High School, Rancho Cucamonga, California

Times Have Changed

You are probably not wearing a powdered wig right now. This owes largely to the fact that times have changed since the 1700’s. What was true then (e.g. white coiffures being the epitome of fashion) is not necessarily true today. Yes, there is arguably a logical historical basis for the Second Amendment…. But we do not live in the 1700s. Debate based upon original intent is misplaced….It concerns itself with semantics and centuries-old sentiments, rather than the vastly different and infinitely more pressing issues of modern America….(Read the full essay)

$250 Scholarship Award Winner

Zev Fisher

Orange Glen High School, Escondido, California

The Elephant in the Room: The Heller Decision

Battalion, army, soldiers, troops, infantry, national guard, standing army. What do all of these terms have in common? Like the word, “militia,” they all refer to military institutions. The other thing that these terms have in common is that under no circumstance could any one of them be misinterpreted as defining a single, private individual within society. Why then did a narrow five to four majority of Supreme Court justices conclude for the first time in U.S. history in the 2008 Heller decision that the Second Amendment, which begins with the phrase, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” was intended to confer an individual right to own guns unrelated to military service?…(Read the full essay)

$250 Scholarship Award Winner

Madeline Brandhorst

Atlanta, Georga

The Day It All Went To Heller

….Who cares about a societal price tag when some men wrote an awkward sentence 219 years ago about the need for a “well regulated militia,” a sentence that five other men would dust off in 2008 and claim it to mean that it was A-okay for almost anyone in our country to own a gun? Who cares that this week, I experienced my fifth lockdown with no “drill” attached?… When in the world would it be decided that the freedom to own a gun would stand in the way of our right to live? Easy. June 26, 2008. The day it all went to Heller. (Read the full essay)

$100 Scholarship Award Winner

(Author’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Untitled

As bullets rained down from above that night, piercing the bodies of unsuspecting innocents for death to claim as his own, most people below would not have noticed initially. Enraptured by the concert performance before them, the music would have momentarily drowned out the shouts and screams of the first victims until the entire crowd realized that they were in the midst of a mass shooting. As the shooter wounded and killed with his death machines, my Mom crawled amidst the chaos with her friends and sister to find refuge under the stage, all the while a bloodbath ensued around them….(Read the full essay)

$100 Scholarship Award Winner

(Author’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Rampant Gun Violence Should Not Be Our New Norm

In 2023, school shootings reached yet another record high. Sixteen years after the Heller decision, it’s not surprising that gun violence in our country has escalated to the point of normalcy…. We need to overturn the Heller decision and ban handguns and assault rifles, like other high income democratic countries have done. Until we do, regular school shootings and other forms of rampant gun violence resulting in tens of thousands of deaths annually will continue to be the new norm in the United States of America. (Read the full essay)

$100 Scholarship Winner

Tumelo Johnson

Cedar Shoals High School, Athens, Georgia

Untitled

Over the course of two hours, 19 students and 2 teachers were shot and killed [in the Robb Elementary School mass shooting]….One day shy of the shooting’s one month anniversary, the Supreme Court showed how little they cared. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, decided on June 23, 2022, was not a slap but a shot in the face to the grieving parents of Uvalde’s victims. A radical and conservative court completely embraced the faulty and grammatically unsound reading of the Second Amendment by Antonin Scalia in DC v. Heller. Bruen overruled the common sense laws of New York state which required civilians to provide a “special need” for carrying a [concealed] gun….

$100 Scholarship Winner

John Bellamy

Blaine High School, Blaine, Minnesota

Life Over Liberty

The 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms not only in militia service but also for self-defense. While commonly portrayed as a protector of freedom, the precedent set by Heller has caused countless deaths in the United States….To those hesitant to embrace stricter gun laws, I leave you with this reminder: Your rights end where my life begins.

$100 Scholarship Winner

Aravah Chaiken

New York, New York

Trigger Price: How Gun Companies Co-opted the Second Amendment

One Friday in 2012, a gunman stormed a first grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary with an AR-15, killing twenty first graders and six teachers. The CEO of Daniel Defense later commented in a Forbes interview that, “The mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary drove a lot of sales.” Gun manufacturers donate millions every year to the NRA, which opposes gun regulation and has pushed for a shift in the interpretation of the Second Amendment. The result costs almost 50,000 American lives annually….

$100 Scholarship Winner

Hasset Bekele

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Virginia

Echoes of Fear

My grandma spoke with a tremble in her voice, echoing the disbelief that crossed from her quiet village in Ethiopia to the violent media headlines in the U.S. “Is it true?” she whispered hesitantly. “What they are saying on the radio about children in their schools?” I could sense her fear piercing through every word, a grandmother continents away, powerless and fearing for her grandchild’s safety. “It’s complicated, Grandma,” I replied, my voice heavy with sorrow. “The laws here about guns are very different.” Her sigh was audible, a mix of frustration and anxiety, “No child should have to learn in fear,” she said….

$100 Scholarship Winner

Aidan Brody

Saint Johnsbury Academy, Saint Johnsbury, Vermont

The 9-1-1 Call

… The Second Amendment never conferred individuals the right to own guns, apart from serving in the militia. The Amendment is clear: “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.” The Heller decision, giving people the right to own a gun, regardless of their militia status, has created a nation of out-of-control gun violence. It has changed the quality of life in America, the essence of America….Our country is calling 9-1-1. The cry for help rings as loud as the gunshots themselves. It’s time to act.

$100 Scholarship Winner

Mark Mukminov

Mountain View High School, Mountain View, California

Untitled

…[I]nfatuation with the right to bear arms stems deeper than the public sentiment, instead uncovering a story of decades-long legalized bribery on a national scale….Following a 1993 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing that gun ownership increased rates of homicide, the NRA successfully lobbied Congress to rewrite the CDC’s budget, banning them from using any funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” In 2003, the NRA gave a $1 million endowment to promote [its version of] the Second Amendment at the George Mason University Law School….

$100 Scholarship Winner

Arshia Zargarani

El Camino Real Charter High School, Woodland Hills, California

Untitled

The Second Amendment…used to have a straightforward purpose. Within the bounds of its own constraints, the right to keep firearms was only for the “security of a free State,” achieved by a “well-regulated Militia.”… Its single purpose has now become obsolete….When the right to possess firearms lost constitutional relevance, five Supreme Court justices took the liberty [in the 2008 Heller decision] to interpret the Second Amendment outside of its exact wording and the founder’s intentions….So what have been the consequences of conveniently breaking up the Second Amendment into two separate clauses?…. As you would expect, gun violence, murders, and suicides have risen exponentially….

* Note: Students were given the opportunity to edit their essays between the time that they were chosen as winners and the time that essays were posted on the Americans Against Gun Violence website if they wished to clarify major themes or add supporting evidence. The 500 word limit for the original essay submissions was waived for edited essays.

Current Year Essay Contest|

Note: The deadline for students to enter our 2024 National High School Essay Contest was April 20. The contest is now closed to new entries. Return to this page in late May to read the winning essays.

Americans Against Gun Violence is pleased to announce that our 2024 National High School Essay Contest is now open for student entries. We’ll be awarding at least $15,000 in total scholarships again this year distributed among 12 winners, with the option of giving additional awards, as we’ve done in most past years, if there are more than 12 outstanding essays. The deadline for students to enter the contest is 11:59 PM in the student’s own time zone on Saturday, April 20. Here are the full contest details, including the link to the online entry form:

· Essay Topic

To enter the 2024 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, students must submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer describing their thoughts about the following excerpt from the Americans Against Gun Violence mission statement:

“In creating constitutional obstacles, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision and its progeny are literally death sentences for tens of thousands of Americans annually.”

The full mission statement is posted on the home page of our Americans Against Gun Violence website.

In describing their thoughts about the essay contest prompt, students don’t necessarily need to endorse the above statement or refute it, although they may do so if they wish. Other aspects of the prompt that a student may wish to address include:
- How does the essay contest prompt compare with what you’ve learned about the Second Amendment and/or the Heller decision from other sources, including teachers, parents, elected officials, the popular media, the gun lobby, other gun violence prevention organizations, etc.?
- Does the essay contest prompt stimulate you to learn more about the history of the Second Amendment and/or court decisions concerning the scope of the Second Amendment?
- Have you actually read the Heller decision and/or other related court decisions yourself, and if so, what’s your own impression of the decision(s)?
- Why do you think that some people and some organizations might be reluctant or afraid to challenge the commonly held view that the Second Amendment was intended to confer an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.”
- Does the essay contest prompt stimulate you to learn more about the differences between gun control laws in the United States and the laws in other high income democratic countries?
- Does the essay contest prompt stimulate you to think more about what might be the main causes of our country’s extraordinarily high rate of gun violence – including the high number of school shootings – and what are the definitive measures needed to stop our country’s epidemic of gun violence?
- What role do you think that you and other high school students can play in helping to stop our country’s epidemic of gun violence, including school shootings?

· Contest Eligibility and Rules

Contestants must be high school students in good standing attending school in the United States or its territories.
Students who entered high school on track to graduate in 2024 but who graduated early are also eligible.
Americans Against Gun Violence Board members, employees, and paid consultants and their first and second degree relatives are not eligible. Students who have worked as summer interns with Americans Against Gun Violence on an independent contractor basis and who are still in high school are eligible.
Students are encouraged to access information posted on the Americans Against Gun Violence website, including, in particular, information on the Facts and FAQ’s and Links to Other Resources pages, among other resource materials, and to discuss the essay topic with teachers, parents, friends, and other mentors; but students must write their essays themselves, in their own words. Essays that are largely or entirely computer generated will not be considered for scholarship awards.
Students who are under the age of 18 must have the consent of a parent or legal guardian to enter the contest.
To enter the contest, students must submit their essays and demographic information via this link: (The essay contest is now closed to new entries)
Essays may include a title and footnotes, but these elements are not required. If titles and footnotes are included, they don’t count toward the 500 word limit.
Only one essay will be considered per student. If a student submits more than one essay, the most recent submission will be the one that is considered.
The deadline to enter the contest is 11:59 PM in the student’s own time zone on Saturday, April 20, 2024. Late entries will not be accepted unless the lateness was caused by a malfunction of the Americans Against Gun Violence online entry system.

· Selection of Contest Winners

A minimum of twelve contest winners will be selected from the essays submitted.
The Americans Against Gun Violence Board of Directors will establish a panel of reviewers to rate essays based on accuracy, originality, clarity, cohesiveness, and overall impact.
Essay reviewers will be blinded to all student identifying information.
Contest winners will be notified by email by Monday, May 20, 2024.
At the time that students are notified that they’ve been chosen as contest winners, they’ll also be sent a signature form that includes the following elements:
A statement that the essay submitted is the student’s own original work
A statement signed by a parent or legal guardian, if the student is under age 18, confirming that the parent or guardian approves of the student’s participation in the essay contest
A statement by a school official confirming that the contestant is a high school student in good standing or that the student entered high school on track to graduate in 2024 but graduated early
In order to receive a scholarship award, students must return the signed signature forms within 30 days of being notified that they are contest winners.

Scholarship Awards (Total of at least $15,000)
Scholarship awards will be sent to essay contest winners with the understanding that the awards will be used to pay for future qualified expenses that lead to a college degree or a professional certification in a recognized occupation, in accordance with IRS guidelines for non-taxable scholarships.
Scholarship awards will be sent in the form of a check by U.S. mail to the home address listed on the students’ entry forms within five business days of receipt of winners’ completed signature forms.
The first place winner will be sent a check for a $3,000 scholarship award; second place a $2,500 award; and third place a $2,000 award.
The fourth through tenth ranked winners will each be sent $1,000 awards, and the 11^th and 12^th ranked winners will each be sent $250 awards.
If any of the students chosen as one of the top 12 winners don’t submit their completed signature forms within 30 of being notified, their awards may be given to other lower ranked student entrants.
Americans Against Gun Violence reserves the option of also offering additional scholarship awards of $100 each to students not ranked in the top 12 if the essay contest reviewers feel that their essays merit such awards. (In past years, up to 20 additional $100 awards have been offered.)

Publication of Essays and Release of Students’ Names and High School Affiliations

By entering the contest, students agree to allow Americans Against Gun Violence to publish their essays in part or in whole in any way that the Board of Directors deems to be appropriate, but without the students’ names, high school affiliations, or other identifying information.
When the contest winners are notified that they have been chosen to receive awards, they will be provided with forms to indicate whether they would like to have their names and/or high school affiliations released in association with their essays. Americans Against Gun Violence will not publish the students’ names and/or high school affiliations without the written consent of the student, and, if the student is under 18 year of age, the consent of a parent or guardian.

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline
The deadline for entering the contest is 11:59 PM in the student’s own time zone on Saturday, April 20, 2024.
The students selected as winners will be notified by Monday, May 20, 2024.
Students chosen as contest winners must return completed signature forms within 30 days of being notified that they have been chosen as winners in order to receive their monetary awards.
Scholarship award checks will be mailed to the winners upon receipt of their completed signature forms.

For additional information or questions, please email essaycontest@aagunv.org or call (916) 668-4160. Click on these links for a downloadable copy of the essay contest rules and/or for an essay contest flyer in PDF format.

Past Essay Contests|

Interview with Dr. Michael North on Capital Public Radio “Insight” Program After the Lewiston Mass Shooting is Available for Online Listening

Americans Against Gun Violence brought Dr. Michael North of Scotland to be our keynote speaker at our annual dinner in Sacramento, California on Saturday, October 21. 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 other children were killed and ten other students and three other children were wounded. Great Britain already had a ban on automatic and semi-automatic long guns, including so-called “assault rifles,” but the Dunblane massacre was committed by a man who legally owned the handguns he used to commit his horrific crime. Following the Dunblane mass shooting, Dr. North helped lead the successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns 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 homicides in Britain is currently 1/100th the rate in the United States.

In addition to speaking at our annual dinner, we lined up several other speaking engagements for Dr. North while he was in California, including an interview on Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio “Insight” program on the morning of Thursday, October 26. Coincidentally, the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, in which 18 people were killed and 13 other people were injured, occurred on the evening of Wednesday, October 25, after the “Insight” interview had already been scheduled. You can listen to the interview with Dr. North by clicking on the “Listen” icon under the heading, “How Other Countries Reduce Mass Shootings” at this link.

AAGunV in the News|

Make Your Reservations to Attend Our 2023 Annual Dinner Featuring a Keynote Address by Dr. Michael North of Scotland

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.

Events|

Americans Against Gun Violence Calls on the Supreme Court Once Again to Reverse a Death Sentence, Wrongly Decided, for Tens of Thousands of Americans Annually

Sacramento, August 23, 2023: Americans Against Gun Violence filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief on Monday in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Rahimi. In this case, the Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether a federal law prohibiting individuals subject to a domestic violence restraining order (DVRO) from owning a gun violates the Second Amendment.

Earlier this year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of Zackey Rahimi, who was under a DVRO, for illegally possessing firearms. Rahimi was also a drug dealer and had been involved in five shootings in a two-month period before his arrest for gun possession. The Fifth Circuit had previously upheld Rahimi’s conviction, but following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, the Fifth Circuit ruled that according to Bruen’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, Rahimi had a constitutional right to own a gun. The Bruen decision is in turn the progeny of the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision, in which a narrow 5-4 majority of justices reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions and scores of lower court decisions, in ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred any kind of individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.”

In our amicus brief in Rahimi, we point out that it should take the Supreme Court very little time to conclude that any of its prior decisions that might be reasonably construed as conferring a constitutional right for someone like Zackey Rahimi to own a gun must be deeply flawed. As we’ve done in our amicus briefs in prior Supreme Court Second Amendment cases, though, we go much farther in or brief in Rahimi than merely calling on the Court to reconsider a prior appeals court ruling.

We note that the Heller and Bruen decisions endorsed an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Chief Justice Warren Burger had called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime. We document that there is overwhelming evidence that guns in the homes and in the communities of honest, law-abiding Americans are far more likely to be used to harm innocent people than to protect them. We point out that the rate of gun related deaths in the United States is ten times higher than the average rate in the other high income democratic countries of the world; and that the main reasons for this vast difference are our extraordinarily lax gun control laws as compared with the laws in other advanced democracies and the related extraordinarily large number of privately owned guns in circulation, as demonstrated by the graph below.

We note that since the 2008 Heller decision, the annual number of gun related deaths in our country has risen from 31,593 deaths per year to 48,830 deaths per year, and that if we were to adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in other high income democratic countries, we could expect to reduce our rate of gun related deaths to one tenth the current rate, saving more than 40,000 American lives a year. We note, though, that we cannot adopt such laws until the Heller decision and its progeny are overturned. We conclude by calling on the Supreme Court to not only reverse the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Rahimi, but to also reverse its own Heller and Bruen decisions which are literally death sentences for tens of thousands of Americans annually.

Click on this link to read our amicus brief in its entirety.

AAGunV in the News|

Announcing the Winners of our 2023 National High School Essay Contest

Americans Against Gun Violence congratulates the winners of our 2023 National High School Essay Contest. To enter this year’s contest, students were asked to submit an essay of 500 words or fewer in response to the following prompt, which was chosen based in part on input from some of our past essay contest winners:

“Describe your thoughts about lockdown drills conducted in response to the threat of shootings on American school campuses.”

We received over 1,100 submissions this year from high school students across the country. In the essay contest rules, we stated that we would award at least $15,000, distributed among 12 winners, with the option of giving additional awards if our essay readers felt that they were warranted. It was extremely difficult for us to select even the top 10% of essays from among the innumerable compelling, and in many cases, heart wrenching essays that were submitted. Ultimately, we decided that in addition to the $15,000 distributed among the top 12 winners, we would give $100 awards to 30 additional students.

We asked Dr. Michael North of Scotland to make the final decision concerning the first, second, and third place winners. Dr. North lost his five year-old daughter, Sophie, in the 1996 mass shooting at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland. The Dunblane massacre was committed with handguns, and Dr. North subsequently helped lead the successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Britain. (Britain already had a ban on civilian ownership of automatic and semi-automatic long guns, including so-called “assault rifles.”) 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 1/70^th the rate in the United States.

Dr. North has recorded a moving video concerning the impact that reading the essays had on him, the basis for his choosing the first, second, and third place winners, and his hope that the United States will eventually follow the example of Britain and take definitive action to stop our epidemic of gun violence, including shootings on school campuses. We’re pleased to announce that in addition to agreeing to choose the top three winners in this year’s essay contest and record the video, Dr. North has also agreed to come to the United States to be our keynote speaker at our annual dinner this fall.

We are also pleased to announce that we have engaged nine of this year’s essay contest winners to work with us as summer interns in preparing a detailed report summarizing the content of all of the more than 1,100 essays that we received this year. Once the report is completed, we will be posting the full report on this website, and we’ll be sending an executive summary of the report to President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, in addition to disseminating the report widely via other means.

We give winning students the option of withholding any personal identifying information when we post their essays on their website. In past years, approximately half of the winners have chosen not to have their names. We appreciate the fact that this year, most winning students did give us permission to publish their names. At the same time, though, we understand why again this year, given the current toxic atmosphere in our country that makes students not only fear for their lives every day they go to school, but also fear retaliation if they speak out openly about our country’s epidemic of gun violence, some students did not wish to have any personal identifying information published along with their essays. It’s part of our mission at Americans Against Violence to change this toxic atmosphere.

The top 12 winners in this year’s contest and a representative sample of the $100 winners are posted below. We’ll be posting the essays (or excerpts from the essays) of other $100 winners in the near future. Note that some of the essays are longer than 500 words as students were given the option of editing their original essays and expanding them somewhat beyond the 500 word limit prior to them being posted on our website.

Donations to support our annual high school essay contest will help ensure that we are able to continue to offer the contest in future years. Donations are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by state and federal laws, and 100% of donations to the essay contest fund go directly to student awards.

Here are this year’s winners:

First Place Winner ($3,000 Award)

Mackena Weber

Mira Loma High School, Sacramento, California

A Typical Day in America

Sitting on the floor of a dark room, your mind tends to wander. You think about the word “lockdown”. You think about the annoyed grumbles from classmates, from teachers, asking why we have to do this…You think about what this would be like if it weren’t just a drill… You never leave yourself with time to ponder: Why is this our normal? Maybe you can’t bear the answer. [Read the full essay]

Second Place Winner ($2,500 Award)

Julia Burnham

Davidson Academy, Reno, Nevada

What Are We Really Locking Down by Lockdowns?

… We cannot continue to pretend that sitting in a classroom with the lights off and locking the doors and covering the windows like lambs awaiting a slaughter will solve the issues of gun violence in our schools. Active shooter drills are a band-aid solution. The only true way to end school shootings is through the enactment of stricter gun-control legislation….[Read the full essay]

Third Place Winner ($2,000 Award)

Aadya Khazanchi

Lynbrook High School, San Jose, California

A Cosmetic Reply to Gun Violence

Parallels are being drawn between school lockdown drills and Civil Defense exercises during the Cold War. Both tactics are of questionable value if the threat materializes; meanwhile, they add to the culture of fear and normalize the status quo…. By the early 1950s, American schools were training students to dive under their desks and cover their heads in the event of thermonuclear war, implying that would protect them…. It was a grossly inadequate response…. The similarity with school lockdowns is alarming….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Ashley Ferland

Campo Verde High School, Gilbert, Arizona

Will I Be Next?

… We beg, pray, and hope for effective legislation while the American government hands out its “Deepest condolences.” Meanwhile, children plan their escape routes, we freeze at any noise that resembles a gun, we fear walking to the bathroom thinking someone will shoot us on the way there, we cry as we see yet another school shooting, and we mourn the loss of our fellow Americans…. seriously America, how many more children and youth must die – and will I be next – before you adopt laws that show that you love your children more than your guns? [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Clare Hann

Scranton Preparatory School, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Something Is Wrong Here

I have never known a world without gun violence. I am in my last year of high school, graduating class of 2023, and I was born in 2004. Five years after Columbine, three years before Virginia Tech, and eight years before Sandy Hook…. People with guns are not going to be stopped by darkened rooms and drawn blinds. Lockdown drills do nothing but frighten children and give a paper-thin illusion of safety. They have never stopped a killer, and they have only been a distraction from the real solution to school shootings the whole time, gun control. [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

McKenna Shelly

Upper Perkiomen High School, Pennsburg, Pennsylvania

Untitled

Earlier this week, I found myself scrolling on TikTok when I came across a video that did not surprise me, but also made me feel ill. It was a video of a woman describing how to use a fire extinguisher in case of an active shooter in the classroom…. Lockdown drills are security theatre. Lacking any proved effectiveness, these drills are merely there for the illusion of safety…. The best way to protect innocent children from being shot in their schools? Do what every other wealthy country has done in response to this issue; enforce better gun control….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Chai Turner

Abington High School, Abington, Massachusetts

Locked on Emotion

As much as lockdown drills maintain awareness of the threat of school shootings, they tend to obscure the fact that the United States of America is doing a horrendous job of protecting its children and its youth…. If this essay sounds too angry- good. I refuse to apologize. “Fury” is too tame a word for what I feel. For what my generation feels. For what parents should feel as they buy bulletproof backpacks for their children who are too young to spell “lockdown drill.” [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Katherine Wilbur

University High School, Tucson, Arizona

I Don’t Want To Die

…Seventh Grade: As my teacher turned off the lights and locked the doors, the only sound in the room was steady breaths. Then, suddenly, the silence was broken. The door handle began shaking, and hands banged against its frame. We would later learn that the person on the other side of that door was our fellow student. She had gone to the bathroom and, when the announcement sounded, was locked out of the classroom. She didn’t know it was a drill. None of us did. So, as panicked tears fell down her face, she continued to frantically hit the door, begging us to let her in. Tears fell down our faces too….[Read the full essay]

$1000 Award Winner

A Student Attending High School in Texas

(Other Identifying Information Withheld at Student’s Request)

Firearms Are Not Freedom

“Lockdown, lockdown. Lock all doors and close all blinds.” These were the words we heard from the intercom. It was our monthly drill. As a senior, our grade had gotten accustomed to these drills since kindergarten. It also meant that we understood why such lockdown drills had become normalized in our schooling system. For us, it was a drill, but for many kids everyday it was a fight for their survival….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

A Student Attending High School in Wisconsin

(Other Identifying Information Withheld at Student’s Request)

It’s Not Funny

…On Tuesday, we practice watching our brand new high tech digital clocks from our classroom, where messages from administration can be displayed. We read messages such as, “INTRUDER IS IN THE MATH WING”, and we have to decide if we will stay in class and hide or evacuate. Around me I hear giggling and chatting. Nothing about the messages telling us where an intruder is in our building is funny to me….[Read the full essay]

$250 Award Winner

Kalia Bond

Okemos High School, Okemos, Michigan

February 7, 2023

“It’s just a drill,” my gym teacher says as he checks his phone for the third time…. I count – 6, 7, 8 – eight times our principal’s voice repeats on the overhead speakers to remain in lockdown position and follow lockdown procedure. Seems a bit long…. My eyes are locked on my teacher and his every anxious move…. Strange. His eyes widen and his hands shake uncontrollably as he slowly places his keys into his pockets with a tight grasp. He turns his head and silently mouths to the class, “This is not a drill.” [Read the full essay]

$250 Award Winner

A Student Attending High School in Maryland

(Other Identifying Information Withheld at Student’s Request)

A Lifetime of School Shootings

…I was born in 2004….I have to admit that I have known school shootings all of my life. I say that and sometimes I can’t believe it….Our country MUST pass stronger gun control laws and take a stand against gun violence. Children must feel safe going to school so they can learn, make friends and not worry about getting killed by a gun….[Read the full essay]

$250 Award Winner Meghan Peot

Hackett Catholic Prep High School, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Every Day Fear in Schools

…I wish that I could recall a time in which my fellow classmates and I did not have to practice these procedures. Truthfully, lockdown drills fill be with emotion….I am filled with fear, with sadness, and with anger….[Read the full essay]

$100 Award Winner

Petra Kresic Kuna

Pompano Beach High School, Pompano Beach, Florida

Sniffles Turn to Snickers

… In my district – Broward County Public Schools [which includes Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School] – lockdown drills are conducted monthly. And this was initially frightening, but I’ve seen the way the mood is changing…. Half the students are on their cell phones…. Many make faces at each other, giggling and snickering…. [W]hat does it say about our nation that rather than normalizing heavier restrictions on guns, we’re normalizing heavier rules on teenagers hiding in classroom corners?…But most frighteningly, what does it say about us that we’ve developed the ability to laugh it all away? [Read the full essay]

$100 Award Winner

Noah Gilligan

Weston High School, Weston, Massachusetts

Untitled

…Lockdown drills are traumatic, but our society’s refusal to enact definitive gun control laws, and the deaths and injuries that are the result of this refusal, are the ultimate trauma….For now, some argue that we need lockdown drills, but what we really need is to adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all the other high income democratic countries of the world, if for no other reason, so that students in American schools will not have to continue to try to learn with one eye on the whiteboard and the other on the exit. [Read the full essay]

Past Essay Contests|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at the Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky

Sacramento California, April 13, 2023: We at Americans Against Gun Violence extend our heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and colleagues of the five staff members who were killed in the mass shooting at the Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 10, 2023. We also send our sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to the eight other people who were wounded, including police officer Nickolas Wilt, who was critically wounded by a gunshot wound to his head. We applaud the bravery of Officer Wilt and other members of the Louisville Police Department who immediately engaged in an exchange of gunfire with the shooter, killing him before he could kill or injure additional bank staff.

At the same time that we commend the immediate and courageous response of the Louisville Police Department to this latest mass shooting, just as we commend the similarly prompt and courageous response of the Nashville Police Department to the mass shooting at The Covenant School two weeks ago, we are compelled to once again point out that such mass shootings are preventable, but that we, as a nation, choose not to take the definitive measures needed to prevent them. In fact, for the most part, we choose not to even talk about the definitive measures needed to prevent them.

It has been reported that the Louisville shooter, Connor Sturgeon, had legally purchased the AR-15 rifle that he used in the shooting at a local gun shop the week before he committed the massacre, and that he had told at least one person that he was suicidal.[1] In the aftermath of the Louisville and Nashville mass shootings, there have been calls for stricter gun control laws that focus on the enactment of so-called “red flag laws;” renewing the federal “assault weapons ban,” and expanding “background checks.”

“Red Flag Laws”

“Red flag laws” (also known as “Extreme Risk Protection Orders” or “Gun Violence Restraining Orders”) provide a mechanism whereby family members – and in some cases, other close contacts – can initiate a legal process that results in police temporarily removing guns from the possession of individuals deemed to be at immediate and extreme risk of harming themselves or others. Tennessee and Kentucky don’t have such “red flag laws” in place.

The Nashville mass shooting clearly could not have been prevented by a red flag law, as neither family nor police knew prior to the shooting that the shooter had a gun.[2] And even if Kentucky had had a red flag law in place, for such a law to be have been used to prevent the Louisville mass shooting, whoever had been told that Connor Sturgeon was suicidal would have had to have known that he had a gun and would have had to take the time and effort to fill out a petition to have the gun removed; a judge would have had to review and approve the petition and forward it to law enforcement; and law enforcement would have had to locate Sturgeon and remove the gun, all in the week’s time between Sturgeon’s purchase of the gun and the time he arrived at the bank to commit the mass shooting.

California has had a red flag law in place since 2016. A study of the effectiveness of this law showed that from 2016 through 2018, red flag laws were used to temporarily remove 52 guns from individuals deemed to meet “extreme risk” criteria.[3] During this same period of time, more than two million guns were sold in California.[4] Despite efforts in California to increase the implementation of red flag laws, in January of this year, there were four horrific mass shootings in California in just eight days.[5] The most recent data released by the California Department of Justice reveal that the number of gun homicides in California increased by 27% from 2016, the year red flag laws first went into effect, through 2021, the most recent year for which data are available.[6]

The truth about red flag laws is that at best, they provide cumbersome mechanisms for temporarily removing firearms from the possession of the tiny fraction of U.S. gun owners deemed to be at the most extreme and immediate risk of harming themselves or others with a gun, while guns are being sold to millions of other people who have no legitimate need for them.

“Assault Weapons Bans”

There is clearly no legitimate civilian use for the AR-15 style high power semi-automatic rifles that were used in both the Louisville and Nashville mass shootings, as well as in multiple other mass shootings in recent US history. This being said, the so-called federal “assault weapons ban” that was in effect from 1994 until Congress allowed it to sunset in 2004 was not really a “ban” at all any true sense of the word. The “ban” defined an “assault weapon” more based on the weapon’s appearance than on the ability of the weapon to be used to kill and maim large numbers of people in a short period of time, and it contained a “grandfather clause” that allowed millions of people who already owned so-called “assault weapons” to keep them.”[7] A U.S. Department of Justice report summarized the shortcomings of the assault weapons ban with the statement:

The [assault weapons] provision targets a relatively small number of weapons based on features that have little to do with the weapons’ operation, and removing those features is sufficient to make the weapons legal.[8]

The “assault weapons ban” currently under consideration in Congress, HB5471, suffers from similar deficiencies.

California claims to have some the most stringent gun control laws in the country, including an effective assault weapons ban, yet there were four mass shootings in just eight days in California in January of this year;[9] and one can walk into almost any gun store in the state and see racks of menacing looking semi-automatic rifles that accept readily detachable magazines but that have been modified by the gun industry in a manner that enables them to evade California’s definition of an “assault weapon.”[10]

Universal “background checks”

Clearly, anyone who seeks to purchase a weapon as potentially lethal as a gun should be subjected to a thorough background check before being allowed to acquire the weapon. The federal Brady Act,[11] which went into effect in 1994, requires “background checks” for gun purchases from federally licensed firearm dealers, but not from private sellers. It’s been estimated that 20-40% of gun purchases in the United States are done without the kind of “background checks” required by the Brady Act.[12] Multiple attempts to pass legislation requiring “background checks” for all gun sales have failed in Congress.[13]

Just as what we in the United States refer to as “assault weapons bans” aren’t really bans, though, what we call “background checks” aren’t really background checks in any real sense of the term. So-called “background checks” in the United States are done instantaneously by computer in most cases to see if a person is on a perennially incomplete federal database of persons prohibited from owning guns due to one or more relatively narrow exclusionary criteria. Serious mental illness does not usually land a person on the prohibited list unless the person has been involuntarily hospitalized,[14] and even expressed criminal content is not automatically an exclusionary criterion unless the person has a history of a conviction for a felonious crime or a violent misdemeanor.[15] Both the Louisville and Nashville mass shooters,[16] like most other mass shooters in recent U.S. history,[17] purchased the weapons they used to commit their horrific crimes legally after passing federal “background checks.”

The Definitive Measures Needed to Stop our Country’s Shameful Epidemic of Gun Violence

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses and civilian workplaces, occur on a regular basis. We know – or should know – what we need to do to prevent mass shootings, as well as most of the other more than 120 fatal shootings that now occur on an average day in our country.[18] As the late Senator Thomas Dodd stated more than half a century ago, in June of 1968:

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 legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.[19]

The main reason why the United States is an extreme outlier as compared with all other high income democratic countries in terms of our rate of gun violence is clear. It’s our extraordinarily lax gun control laws and the related extraordinary ease with which almost anyone can acquire almost any kind of a gun in our country. And the definitive measures needed to reduce our rate of gun violence to a level comparable to the rates in the rest of the high income democratic countries of the world are equally clear. We need to adopt comparably stringent gun control laws – laws that will completely ban civilian ownership of large categories of guns and that will drastically reduce the vast pool of privately owned guns currently in circulation.

Specifically, in order to prevent horrific mass shootings like the ones that occurred in Louisville on April 10, 2023, and in Nashville on March 27, 2023, as well as to stop the shameful epidemic of gun violence that now claims more than 120 lives on an average day in our country, the United States must adopt the following measures:

Change the guiding principle for gun ownership in our country from a “permissive” one to a “restrictive” one.[20]

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which the guiding principle for firearm acquisition is that a person who seeks to acquire a gun can legally do so if the person is of a certain age and can pass a rudimentary background check to see if the person is on a perennially incomplete database of people who meet one or more limited criteria for being prohibited from owning a gun.[21] This guiding principle is termed, “permissive.” In all other advanced democracies, the burden of proof is on the person seeking to acquire a gun to prove that he or she has a good reason to own one and can handle one safely. This guiding principle is termed, “restrictive.” And recognizing that there is no net protective value in owning or carrying a gun, many other democratic countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, do not accept “self defense” as a legitimate reason for acquiring one.[22]

Ban civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, with no grandfather clause that would allow people who already own these kinds of weapons to keep them.

The United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand all promptly banned civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, with no grandfather clause, after mass shootings committed with these kinds of weapons in 1987 in Hungerford, England; [23] in 1996 in Port Arthur, Australia; [24] and in 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand. [25] While the New Zealand ban is too recent to fully assess its effect, there have been only three mass shootings in the UK since 1987 and one in Australia since 1996.[26] The United States should follow the examples of the UK, Australia, and New Zealand in banning civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, not just so-called “assault weapons,” with no “grandfather clause.”

Ban civilian ownership of all handguns, with no grandfather clause.

Handguns are the type of firearm used in the vast majority of all gun related deaths in the United States,[27] including in most mass shootings.[28] Following a mass shooting committed at an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, in which 16 five and six year old students and their teacher were murdered by a man who legally owned the handguns he used in the massacre, Great Britain completely banned civilian handgun ownership, with no grandfather clause. There hasn’t been another school shooting since the ban went into effect.[29] The mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville was the 89^th U.S. school shooting this year,[30] and the overall rate of gun related deaths in the United States is now 70 times higher than the rate in the Great Britain.[31]

Overturning the Fraudulent Misrepresentation of the Second Amendment

Prior to 2008, there was no constitutional obstacle, Second Amendment or otherwise, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws of the type described above.[32] In the rogue 2008 Heller decision,[33] though, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions,[34] in ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” The late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had described such an interpretation of the Second Amendment as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime.[35] The late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored a dissenting opinion in Heller, described the Heller majority opinion as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my [35 year] tenure on the bench.”[36] Now, though, in order to change the guiding principle for firearm ownership in the United States from a “permissive” one to a “restrictive” one, to ban handguns, and to avoid any possible constitutional challenge to banning all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, the Heller decision and its progeny, which now includes the 2022 Bruen decision,[37] must first be overturned.

In Conclusion

Despite our best efforts to get other organizations to join us, Americans Against Gun Violence remains the only gun violence prevention organization in the entire United States that openly advocates and is actively working toward overturning the Heller decision and its progeny and toward adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries. Until we adopt such laws, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs. Instead, no matter how quickly and courageously police respond to limit the carnage, we, as a nation, should be ashamed for not taking the definitive measures needed to prevent mass shootings from occurring in the first place.

Click on this link for a downloadable version of this press release in PDF format.

References

[1] Adeel Hassan, “What We Know About the Louisville, Ky., Bank Shooting,” The New York Times, April 11, 2023, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/article/louisville-bank-shooting.html.

[2] “PBS NewsHour,” March 28, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/video/march-28-2023-pbs-newshour-full-episode-1679976042/.

[3] Garen J. Wintemute et al., “Extreme Risk Protection Orders Intended to Prevent Mass Shootings,” Annals of Internal Medicine 171, no. 9 (August 20, 2019): 655–58.

[4] “Gun Sales in California,” Open Justice, accessed December 7, 2016, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/firearms/overview#/.

[5] These mass shootings include: January 16, 2023, Goshen, California: 6 people, including 17 year-old mother and her 6 month old baby, killed in their home; January 21, 2023, Monterey Park, California: 10 people killed, 10 others wounded in mass shooting at dance studio during Chinese New Year celebration; January 23, 2023, Half Moon Bay, California: 7 agricultural workers killed; and January 23, 2023, Oakland California: 1 person killed, 7 wounded at a gas station.

[6] Rob Bonta, “Crime in California 2021” (Sacramento. California: California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General), 13, accessed April 3, 2023, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://data-openjustice.doj.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-08/Crime%20In%20CA%202021_0.pdf Table 4.

[7] John Hendren, “Banned Gun Used in School Shooting,” AP NEWS, April 23, 1999, https://apnews.com/article/b5040489ff6eea011e94e3a560ae6412.

[8] Christopher S. Koper, Daniel J. Woods, and Jeffrey A. Roth, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003; Report to the National Institute of Justice, United States Department of Justice” (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, June 2014), 1–2, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf.

[9] Lois Beckett and Sam Levin, “Eight Days, 25 Dead: California Shaken by String of Mass Shootings,” The Guardian, January 25, 2023, sec. US news, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/25/california-mass-shootings-reaction-communities.

[10] Zusha Elinson and Cameron McWhirter, “Gun Makers Adjust Rifles to Skirt Bans,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2019, sec. US, https://www.wsj.com/articles/gun-makers-adjust-rifles-to-skirt-bans-11561109521.

[11] “Brady Law | Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,” accessed April 13, 2023, https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/brady-law.

[12] “Federal Law on Background Checks | Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence,” accessed September 18, 2016, http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-laws/federal-law/sales-transfers/background-checks/; “PBS NewsHour.”

[13] “Federal Law on Background Checks | Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence”; “PBS NewsHour.”

[14] See, for example, the cases of Seung-Hui Cho who committed the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting and Jared Loughner, who committed the 2011 Tucson mass shooting in which Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded. “Backgrounder on Pistols Used in Virginia Tech Shooting” (Washington DC: Violence Policy Center, April 2007), https://vpc.org/studies/vatechgunsbackgrounder.pdf; “Why Jared Loughner Was Allowed to Buy a Gun,” Christian Science Monitor, January 10, 2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0110/Why-Jared-Loughner-was-allowed-to-buy-a-gun.

[15] See, for example, the case of Dylann Roof, who openly spoke of starting a race war before committing the 2015 mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Michael S. Schmidt, “Background Check Flaw Let Dylann Roof Buy Gun, F.B.I. Says,” The New York Times, July 10, 2015, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/background-check-flaw-let-dylann-roof-buy-gun-fbi-says.html; N, P, and R, “Dylann Roof Said He Wanted To Start A Race War, Friends Say,” NPR, June 19, 2015, sec. National, https://www.npr.org/2015/06/19/415809511/dylann-roof-said-he-wanted-to-start-a-race-war-friends-say.

[16] Hassan, “What We Know About the Louisville, Ky., Bank Shooting”; Alison Durkee, “Nashville Shooting: What We Know About The 28-Year-Old Suspect,” Forbes, March 28, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/28/nashville-shooting-what-we-know-about-the-28-year-old-suspect/.

[17] Glenn Thrush, “What Do Most Mass Shooters Have in Common? They Bought Their Guns Legally.,” The New York Times, May 17, 2022, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/legal-gun-purchase-mass-shooting.html.

[18] “Fatal Injury Data | WISQARS | Injury Center | CDC,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed July 1, 2021, http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/fatal.html.

[19] Thomas Dodd, “Text of Speech by Senator Thomas Dodd on Floor of U.S. Senate: The Sickness of Violence and the Need for Gun Control Legislation” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 11, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#; Thomas Dodd, “Press Release: Pious Condolences Will No Longer Suffice” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 10, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#.

[20] George D. Newton and Franklin E. Zimring, “Firearm Licensing: Restrictive v Permissive,” Firearms & Violence in American Life: A Staff Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1, 1969).

[21] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country,” GunPolicy.org, accessed July 1, 2021, http://www.gunpolicy.org/.

[22] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country.”

[23] Michael J. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 185–93.

[24] Rebecca Peters, “Rational Firearm Regulation: Evidence-Based Gun Laws in Australia,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 195–204; Philip Alpers, “The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 205–11; Joel Negin et al., “Australian Firearm Regulation at 25-Successes, Ongoing Challenges, and Lessons for the World,” New England Journal of Medicine 384, no. 17 (2021): 1581–83.

[25] Josh Hafner, “Gun Control Bill in New Zealand Passes in Early Vote Following Attacks,” USA Today, April 2, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/04/02/gun-control-bill-new-zealand-vote-parliament-mosque-attacks/3341240002/; “2019 Firearm Law Changes (Arms Amendment Bill 2),” New Zealand Police, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.police.govt.nz/advice-services/firearms-and-safety/2019-firearm-law-changes-arms-amendment-bill-2.

[26] For the purpose of this comparison, a mass shooting is defined as a single incident with 5 or more fatalities. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings”; Negin et al., “Australian Firearm Regulation at 25-Successes, Ongoing Challenges, and Lessons for the World.”

[27] Sugarmann, Every Handgun Is Aimed at You.

[28] Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan, “US Mass Shootings, 1982-2018: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation,” Mother Jones, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/.

[29] North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings.”

[30] Durkee, “Nashville Shooting.”

[31] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country.”

[32] John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 481–87.

[33] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[34] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

[35] Warren Burger, PBS News Hour, December 16, 1991, c.

[36] Stevens, The Making of a Justice, 482.

[37] New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc. et al v. Bruen, et al, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (Supreme Court 2022) The six justices in the Bruen majority included five justices (Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett) who were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote, and a sixth justice (Thomas) who never sould have been confifmed had current standards for xwxual misconduct been applied during his confirmation hearing.

AAGunV in the News, News about Gun Violence, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee

Sacramento California, March 28, 2023: We at Americans Against Gun Violence extend heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, classmates, and colleagues of the three young children and the three staff members who were killed in the mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee on March 27, 2023. We also extend our sympathy to the entire Nashville community.

At the same time, though, we wish to point out that such tragedies are preventable, but that we, as a nation, choose not to prevent them. In fact, for the most part, we choose to not even talk about the definitive measures needed to prevent them.

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, occur on a regular basis. We know – or should know – what we need to do to prevent mass shootings, as well as most of the other more than 120 fatal shootings that now occur on an average day in our country.[1] As the late Senator Thomas Dodd stated more than half a century ago, in June of 1968:

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 legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.[2]

Instead of adopting stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in the other high income democratic countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, occur rarely, if ever, and in which the overall rate of gun-related deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in the United States[3] – in the words of Joshua Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, we “nibble around the edges of half-measures and good intentions, dramatically out of synch with the reality of gun violence in America.”[4]

Specifically, in order to prevent horrific mass shootings like the one that occurred in Nashville on March 27, 2023, as well as to stop the shameful epidemic of gun violence that now claims more than 120 lives on an average day in our country, the United States must adopt the following measures:

Change the guiding principle for gun ownership in our country from a “permissive” one to a “restrictive” one.[5]

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which the guiding principle for firearm acquisition is that a person who seeks to acquire a gun can legally do so if the person is of a certain age and can pass a rudimentary background check – done instantaneously by computer in most cases – to see if the person is on a perennially incomplete database of people who meet one or more limited criteria for being prohibited from owning a gun.[6] This guiding principle is termed, “permissive.” In all other advanced democracies, the burden of proof is on the person seeking to acquire a gun to prove that he or she has a good reason to own one and can handle one safely. This guiding principle is termed, “restrictive.” And recognizing that there is no net protective value in owning or carrying a gun, many other democratic countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, do not accept “self defense” as a legitimate reason for acquiring one.[7]

Ban civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, with no grandfather clause that would allow people who already own these kinds of weapons to keep them.

The so-called “assault weapons ban” that President Biden called for Congress to enact in his comments after the Nashville mass shooting is similar to the federal “assault weapon ban” (AWB) that was in effect in the United States from 1994 until it was allowed to sunset in 2004. It is doubtful that such “bans” have much effect in preventing mass shootings or other firearm related deaths. The 1994 AWB defined an “assault weapon” as a semi-automatic firearm that could accept a detachable magazine and that had at least two other features typically included on military weapons, such as a pistol grip, a thumb-hole in the stock, or a bayonet mount. The ban grandfathered in millions of “assault weapons” that were already in circulation, and it specifically exempted 86 different makes of semi-automatic firearms that did not meet the definition of an assault weapon, but that were potentially just as deadly. Moreover, U.S. gun manufacturers subsequently produced new models of firearms that were just as lethal but that evaded the definition of an “assault weapon.” A report to the U.S. Department of Justice summarized the shortcomings of the AWB as follows:

The [assault weapons] provision targets a relatively small number of weapons based on features that have little to do with the weapons’ operation, and removing those features is sufficient to make the weapons legal.[12]

Any automatic or semi-automatic firearm can be used to kill and maim large numbers of people in a short period of time, regardless of whether it has other features that give it the appearance of a military style weapon. The United States should follow the examples of the UK, Australia, and New Zealand in banning civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, not just so-called “assault weapons.”

Ban civilian ownership of all handguns, with no grandfather clause.

Handguns are the type of firearm used in the vast majority of all gun related deaths in the United States,[13] including in most mass shootings.[14] Following a mass shooting committed at an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, in which 16 five and six year old students and their teacher were murdered by a man who legally owned the handguns he used in the massacre, Great Britain completely banned civilian handgun ownership, with no grandfather clause. There hasn’t been another school shooting since the ban went into effect.[15] The mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville was the 89^th U.S. school shooting this year,[16] and the overall rate of gun related deaths in the United States is now 70 times higher than the rate in the Great Britain.[17]

Prior to 2008, there was no constitutional obstacle, Second Amendment or otherwise, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws of the type described above.[18] In the rogue 2008 Heller decision,[19] though, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions,[20] in ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” The late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had described such an interpretation of the Second Amendment as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime.[21] The late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored a dissenting opinion in Heller, described the Heller majority opinion as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my [35 year] tenure on the bench.”[22] Now, though, in order to change the guiding principle for firearm ownership in the United States from a “permissive” one to a “restrictive” one, to ban handguns, and to avoid any possible constitutional challenge to banning all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, the Heller decision and its progeny, which now includes the 2022 Bruen decision,[23] must first be overturned.

Despite our best efforts to get other organizations to join us, Americans Against Gun Violence remains the only gun violence prevention organization in the entire United States that openly advocates and is actively working toward overturning the Heller decision and its progeny and adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries. Until we adopt such laws, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs, and we shouldn’t be surprised when it’s announced every year that the annual number of gun-related deaths has reached new record high levels.

Notr: Click on this link for a downloadable version of this press release in PDF format.

References

[1] “Fatal Injury Data | WISQARS | Injury Center | CDC,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed July 1, 2021, http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/fatal.html.

[2] Thomas Dodd, “Text of Speech by Senator Thomas Dodd on Floor of U.S. Senate: The Sickness of Violence and the Need for Gun Control Legislation” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 11, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#; Thomas Dodd, “Press Release: Pious Condolences Will No Longer Suffice” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 10, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#.

[3] Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

[4] Josh Sugarmann, Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns (New Press, 2001), 181.

[5] George D. Newton and Franklin E. Zimring, “Firearm Licensing: Restrictive v Permissive,” Firearms & Violence in American Life: A Staff Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1, 1969).

[6] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country,” GunPolicy.org, accessed July 1, 2021, http://www.gunpolicy.org/.

[7] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country.”

[8] Michael J. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 185–93.

[9] Rebecca Peters, “Rational Firearm Regulation: Evidence-Based Gun Laws in Australia,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 195–204; Philip Alpers, “The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 205–11; Joel Negin et al., “Australian Firearm Regulation at 25-Successes, Ongoing Challenges, and Lessons for the World,” New England Journal of Medicine 384, no. 17 (2021): 1581–83.

[10] Josh Hafner, “Gun Control Bill in New Zealand Passes in Early Vote Following Attacks,” USA Today, April 2, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/04/02/gun-control-bill-new-zealand-vote-parliament-mosque-attacks/3341240002/; “2019 Firearm Law Changes (Arms Amendment Bill 2),” New Zealand Police, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.police.govt.nz/advice-services/firearms-and-safety/2019-firearm-law-changes-arms-amendment-bill-2.

[11] For the purpose of this comparison, a mass shooting is defined as a single incident with 5 or more fatalities. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings”; Negin et al., “Australian Firearm Regulation at 25-Successes, Ongoing Challenges, and Lessons for the World.”

[12] Christopher S. Koper, Daniel J. Woods, and Jeffrey A. Roth, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003; Report to the National Institute of Justice, United States Department of Justice” (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, June 2014), 1–2, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf.

[13] Sugarmann, Every Handgun Is Aimed at You.

[14] Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan, “US Mass Shootings, 1982-2018: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation,” Mother Jones, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/.

[15] North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings.”

[16] Alison Durkee, “Nashville Shooting: What We Know About The 28-Year-Old Suspect,” Forbes, March 28, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/28/nashville-shooting-what-we-know-about-the-28-year-old-suspect/.

[17] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country.”

[18] John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 481–87.

[19] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[20] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

[21] Warren Burger, PBS News Hour, December 16, 1991, c.

[22] Stevens, The Making of a Justice, 482.

[23] New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc. et al v. Bruen, et al, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (Supreme Court 2022) The six justices in the Bruen majority included five justices (Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett) who were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote, and a sixth justice (Thomas) who probably never would have been confirmed had current standards for sexual misconduct been applied during his confirmation hearing.

AAGunV in the News, News about Gun Violence, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to the Adoption of Illinois Assault Weapon and Large Capacity Magazine Ban

Sacramento California, September January 13, 2023: Americans Against Gun Violence commends the Illinois State Legislature for passing HB 5471 and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker for signing this bill into law on January 9, 2023. The bill, also known as the Protect Illinois Communities Act and enrolled as Public Act 102-1116, includes both an assault weapons ban and a ban on large capacity magazines. This law is a significant step forward – from a symbolic point of view, at least – toward curbing the epidemic of gun violence that afflicts both the State of Illinois and the rest of our country.

The assault weapons and large capacity magazine ban was passed in response to the mass shooting last year at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois. The reasons why the adoption of this law is probably more of symbolic than real life significance, though, include the following:

The “assault weapons ban” in HB 5471, like similar bans adopted in the past by several other states and the federal ban that was in place from 1994-2004, defines assault weapons in such a way that gun manufacturers can produce and sell semi-automatic firearms that have the same potential (or very nearly the same potential) for being used to kill and maim large numbers of people in a short period of time but that evade the definition of an “assault weapon.”
Like other US “assault weapons bans,” HB 5471 includes a “grandfather clause” that allows persons who already own firearms that fit the definition of “assault weapons” to keep them provided that they register them with the state police.
Although there is clearly no legitimate civilian use for “assault weapons,” and although they’ve been used in many recent horrific mass shootings, they account for a very small fraction of all gun-related deaths in the United States, most of which are committed with handguns.
The fact that firearms can be easily transported across state lines in a clandestine manner limits the effectiveness of any individual state assault weapons ban that is not accompanied by an equivalent federal ban.
Other high income democratic countries like Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand all reacted promptly to mass shootings by completely banning civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns – not just so-called “assault weapons” – with no grandfather clause. Great Britain, which has one of the lowest rates of gun related deaths in the world, went a step further in completely banning civilian ownership of all handguns.
The “large capacity magazine” ban in HB 5471 defines a large capacity magazine as one that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Ten bullets can be used to kill 10 people, and mass shooters typically carry multiple magazines that they can quickly exchange.
The gun lobby will undoubtedly challenge the Illinois assault weapons and large capacity magazine ban on a Second Amendment basis, and if the case gets to the Supreme Court, the current majority will almost certainly rule the Illinois law to be unconstitutional. On June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court effectively invalidated a similar assault weapons ban in Maryland and similar large capacity magazine (LCM) bans in California and New Jersey by issuing “GVR”[1] orders in the cases of Bianchi v. Frosh (challenging Maryland’s assault weapons ban), Duncan v. Bonta (challenging California’s LCM ban) and Association of New Jersey Rifle, et al. v. Bruck (challenging New Jersey’s LCM ban). One week earlier, the Supreme Court had overturned New York’s requirement for a special permit to carry a concealed handgun in its Bruen decision. The Court issued the June 30 GVR orders “in light of Bruen.”

Although for the reasons discussed above, the adoption of the Illinois assault weapons and large capacity magazine ban may be largely a symbolic victory, symbolic victories are important. The adoption of HB 5471 indicates a desire on the part of the people of Illinois for definitive measures to stop the shameful epidemic of gun violence that affects their state and the rest of the country.

It is the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that we have not only the ability, but also the moral responsibility to reduce rates of gun related deaths in the United States to levels comparable to the rates in other high income democratic countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings occur rarely, if ever, and in which the average rate of gun related deaths is one tenth the rate in our country. In order to adopt such laws, which include a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic long guns with no “grandfather clause,” we must first overturn the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision and its progeny.

In Heller, a narrow 5-4 majority of justices ruled that the District of Columbia’s partial handgun ban violated the Second Amendment. In doing so, the Heller majority reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions, by ruling for the first time in US history that the Second Amendment conferred any kind of individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” The same five justices in the Heller majority ruled in the 2010 McDonald decision that Chicago’s partial handgun ban also violated the Second Amendment. As discussed above, the progeny of Heller now also includes the Bruen decision, in which three remaining justices from the Heller majority (Alito, Roberts, and Thomas) and three new Trump nominees (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) ruled that New York’s concealed handgun law was unconstitutional; and the June 30 GVR orders, which effectively invalidated state assault weapons and LCM bans in other states similar to those in the new Illinois law.

The Heller decision and its progeny endorse an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud” on the American public by special interest groups that he had ever seen in his lifetime. But Heller and its progeny are worse than a fraud. In creating constitutional obstacles, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, Heller and its progeny are literally death sentences for tens of thousands of Americans annually.

We believe that an important step toward overturning Heller and its progeny is to point out the fraudulent misrepresentation of the Second Amendment by the current majority of Supreme Court justices and the disastrous public health consequences of this fraud while defending cases like the Illinois assault weapons and large capacity magazine ban. Americans Against Gun Violence is the only organization in the entire country that openly advocates and is actively working toward overturning Heller and its progeny, and we’re the only organization that has filed amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs in important Second Amendment cases, including in Bruen and in Duncan v. Bonta, making the case that Heller and its progeny were egregiously wrongly decided and should be overturned, and that lower courts should interpret these cases as narrowly as possible until they are overturned. We look forward to assisting the State of Illinois in any way we can in defending its assault weapons and large capacity magazine ban in the short term; and we will continue to work toward the eventual adoption of far more definitive gun control legislation at both the state and federal levels in the long term.

[1] “GVR” is an acronym for Grand writ of certiorari, Vacate the prior decision, and Remand for further consideration.

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Essay Topic

To enter the 2023 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, students must submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer in response to the following prompt:

“Describe your thoughts about lockdown drills conducted in response to the threat of shootings on American school campuses.”

The essay contest prompt is intentionally open-ended. Students may write about any aspect of lockdown drills and the threat of school shootings that they feel is most important. Below is a list of some specific issues, though, that students may wish to consider addressing in their essays:
- Are lockdown drills a rational response to the threat of school shootings?
- How do lockdown drills conducted in the United States compare with measures taken by other high income democratic countries to protect their children and youth from the threat of school shootings and other forms of gun violence?
- What is the psychological impact of lockdown drills on students? Do such drills make students feel more safe? Less safe?
- Should participation in lockdown drills be mandatory or voluntary for high school students?
- What definitive measures are necessary to protect American children and youth from not only becoming victims of school shootings, but to protect them from becoming victims of other forms of gun violence? What are the obstacles to the adoption of these kinds of definitive measures?
- What role can high school students play themselves in addition to – or instead of – participating in lockdown drills in order to help prevent school shootings and other forms of gun violence affecting American children and youth?

Contest Eligibility, Rules, and Online Entry Form

Contestants must be high school students in good standing attending school in the United States or its territories.
Students who entered high school on track to graduate in 2023 but who graduated early are also eligible.
Americans Against Gun Violence Board members, employees, and paid consultants and their first and second degree relatives are not eligible.
Contestants are encouraged to access information posted on the Americans Against Gun Violence website, among other resource materials, and to discuss the essay topic with teachers, parents, friends, and other mentors; but students must write their essays themselves, in their own words.
Students who are under the age of 18 must have the consent of a parent or legal guardian to enter the contest.
To enter the contest, students must submit their essays and demographic information via the following URL: The contest is now closed to new entries.
Essays may include a title and footnotes, but these elements are not required. If titles and footnotes are included, they don’t count toward the 500 word limit.
Only one essay will be considered per student. If a student submits more than one essay, the most recent submission will be the one that is considered.
The deadline to enter the contest is 11:59 PM in the student’s own time zone on Saturday, April 15, 2023. Late entries will not be accepted unless the lateness was caused by a malfunction of the Americans Against Gun Violence online entry system.

Selection of Contest Winners

A minimum of twelve contest winners will be selected from the essays submitted.
The Americans Against Gun Violence Board of Directors will establish a panel of members to judge essays based on accuracy, originality, clarity, cohesiveness, and overall impact.
Essay judges will be blinded to all student identifying information.
Contest winners will be notified by email by Monday, May 15, 2023.
At the time that students are notified that they’ve been chosen as contest winners, they’ll also be sent a signature form that includes the following elements:
- A statement that the essay submitted is the student’s own original work
- A statement signed by a parent or legal guardian, if the student is under age 18, confirming that the parent or guardian approves of the student’s participation in the essay contest
- A statement by a school official confirming that the contestant is a high school student in good standing or that the student entered high school on track to graduate in 2023 but graduated early
- Note: If the student’s school is not physically in session, documentation such as a student body card or transcript will be accepted in lieu of the signature of a school official as evidence that the entrant is a high school student.
In order to receive a monetary award, students must return the signed signature forms within 30 days of being notified that they are contest winners.

Contest Awards (Total of at least $15,000)

Upon submission of their completed signature forms, the first place winner will be sent a check for a $3,000 award; second place a $2,500 award; and third place a $2,000 award.
Upon submission of their completed signature forms, the fourth through tenth ranked winners will each be sent $1,000 awards, and the 11^th and 12^th ranked winners will each be sent $250 awards.
If any of the students chosen as one of the top 12 winners don’t submit their completed signature forms within 30 of being notified, their awards may be given to other lower ranked entrants.
Awards will be sent by check to the home address listed on the students’ entry forms.
Americans Against Gun Violence reserves the option of also offering additional monetary awards of $100 each to students not ranked in the top 12 if the essay contest judges feel that their essays are deserving of such awards. (In past years, up to 12 additional $100 awards have been offered.)

Publication of Essays and Release of Students’ Names and High School Affiliations

By entering the contest, students agree to allow Americans Against Gun Violence to publish their essays in part or in whole in any way that the Board of Directors deems to be appropriate, but without the students’ names or high school affiliations.
When the contest winners are notified that they have been chosen to receive awards, they will be provided with forms to indicate whether they would like to have their names and/or high school affiliations released in association with their essays. Americans Against Gun Violence will not publish the students’ names and/or high school affiliations without the written consent of the student, and, if the student is under 18 year of age, the consent of a parent or guardian.
The responses to the media release forms will not in any way influence the ranking of the contest winners.

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline

The deadline for entering the contest is 11:59 PM in the student’s own time zone on Saturday, April 15, 2023.
The students selected as winners will be notified by Monday, May 15, 2023.
Students chosen as contest winners must return completed signature forms within 30 days of being notified that they have been chosen as winners in order to receive their monetary awards.
Award checks will be mailed to the winners upon receipt of their completed signature forms.

For additional information or questions, please email essaycontest@aagunv.org or call (916) 668-4160.

Past Essay Contests|

From the President of Americans Against Gun Violence

Dear PBS NewsHour,

Is the interview that William Brangham conducted on December 14, 2022, with Nicole Hockley, the devastated mother of Dylan Hockley, one of the 20 children murdered in the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, the best that the PBS NewsHour can do on the 10^th anniversary of this preventable tragedy? And is “helping students identify and report the warning signs of someone who is planning violence,” which is the main focus of Sandy Hook Promise, the organization co-founded by Ms. Hockley, the best our country can do in response to the Sandy Hook massacre?

The PBS NewsHour should have pointed out that other high income democratic countries like Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand all reacted promptly and definitively in response to mass shootings committed with semi-automatic rifles like the one that Adam Lanza used to commit the Sandy Hook massacre by banning civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles, not just so-called “assault weapons.” And the NewsHour should have interviewed Dr. Michael North of Scotland, who lost his 5 year-old daughter Sophie in the 1996 Dunblane Primary School massacre, in which Thomas Hamilton used handguns that he legally owned to kill 16 students, including Sophie, and their teacher. Dr. North subsequently helped lead a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Great Britain. There hasn’t been another school shooting since the ban went into effect, and the rate of gun related deaths in the UK is currently 1/70^th the rate in the United States.

The NewsHour should have pointed out that since the horrific Sandy Hook massacre 10 years ago, the United States has taken no significant action to prevent such tragedies from recurring over and over again, and that not unexpectedly, another horrific mass shooting similar to the Sandy Hook massacre occurred at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24 of this year in which 19 students and two teachers were killed.

The NewsHour should have pointed out that prior to the Supreme Court’s rogue 5-4 Heller decision in 2008, there was no constitutional obstacle to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all the other high income democratic countries of the world. The NewsHour should have replayed its 1991 interview with the late Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger in which Justice Burger called the misrepresentation of the Second Amendment by the gun lobby “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’ – on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” And the NewsHour should have pointed out that in Heller, and again in its June 23, 2022 Bruen decision, the Supreme Court endorsed this fraud.

And finally, the NewsHour should have pointed out that there is currently only one gun violence prevention organization in the United States, Americans Against Gun Violence, that openly advocates and is actively working toward overturning the Heller decision and its progeny and adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia.

The late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1958:

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Rev. King was referring, of course, to silence on the subject of civil rights, but the above quotation is also germane to our country’s epidemic of gun violence – an epidemic that took Rev. King’s own life a decade after he wrote the essay from which the above quotation was taken.

The silence on the part of the PBS NewsHour – and most of the rest of our country – concerning the main cause of our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence, which is our lax gun laws and the related vast pool of privately owned guns; and the silence concerning the definitive steps needed to stop this epidemic, including overturning the Heller decision and its progeny and adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic counties, is truly appalling.

Yours truly,

Bill Durston, MD

President, Americans Against Gun Violence

Note: To view the PBS NewsHour segment concerning the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre and/or read the transcript, go to this URL: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/newtown-remembers-those-killed-at-sandy-hook-a-decade-after-the-tragedy

To send an email to the NewsHour yourself, send it to the following address: viewermail@newshour.org

AAGunV in the News, News about Gun Violence|

False Assertions in December 3, 2022 Interview on NPR About Gun Violence Prevention

NPR aired an interview this past weekend (December 3, 2022) with gun violence researcher Eric Fleegler in which several false assertions were made. In introducing Dr. Fleegler, the interviewer, Sarah McCammon, referred to a “new study” published by Dr. Fleegler and his co-authors in the Journal of the American Medical Association concerning firearm related deaths in the United States over the past 30 years. A transcript of the essay was posted on the NPR website under the title, “Research sheds light on the dramatic rise in gun-related deaths since 2004.”

Although the study by Fleegler et al was newly published, it contained little in new information or insights. As the authors acknowledged in the methods section of their paper, all of the data upon which the paper was based was already available on the CDC website. And most of the facts that were spun as new revelations in the paper and in the interview should be well known to anyone who’s been following the posts on the Americans Against Gun Violence website over the past six years. These “new revelations” include the facts that rate of U.S. gun related deaths has been rising steeply to record levels in recent years and that gunshot wounds are now the leading cause of death in American children and youth.

In the interview, Fleegler stated:

In 2021, it’s over 48,000 people who have died by firearms. And that’s a shockingly high number. We need to think as a society, how do we approach gun violence?

Fleegler stated toward the end of the interview that we need to approach preventing gun related deaths in the same way in which we’ve approached preventing deaths in motor vehicle crashes. He cited seatbelts, airbags, and drunk driving laws as effective measures, and he concluded:

What we didn’t do is say, you can’t have a car, and we take away the cars because people are dying. We need to think about guns in the same way.

The interviewer didn’t challenge Fleegler concerning this statement – a statement that ignores the fundamental difference between automobiles and guns.

Most modern automobiles are specifically designed to transport people safely and efficiently from point A to point B, and they’re used effectively for this purpose more than 99% of the time. Most modern firearms are specifically designed to efficiently kill people; and the shocking statistics that Fleegler cited in the interview document that guns were used effectively for this purpose in the United States more than 48,000 times in 2021. And while the gun industry and its associated lobby promote the myth that honest, law-abiding people should own guns for self-defense, there is overwhelming evidence that guns in the homes and in the communities of honest, law-abiding people are far more likely to be used to harm them than to protect them. For example, a study published more than 25 years ago in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine showed that for every one time a gun in the home was used to kill a home invader, there were 43 gun-related deaths of a household member, including gun-related suicides, homicides, and accidents.[i] More recent FBI data show that for every one time a gun is used to kill someone in self-defense, there are 35 criminal gun related homicides.[ii]

Fleegler’s assertion that we can significantly reduce rates of gun related deaths without reducing our vast pool of privately owned guns is also counterfactual. There is a direct relationship between rates of per capita gun ownership and rates of gun related deaths, and as the graph below demonstrates, the United States is an extreme outlier in both categories as compared with all other high income democratic countries.

We don’t need any more data – or another rehash of old data – to know that in order to stop our uniquely American epidemic of gun violence, we must drastically reduce the number of privately owned guns in our country through the adoption stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries. As the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut stated on the floor of the U.S. Senate in June of 1968, more than half a century ago:

Pious condolences will no longer suffice….Quarter measures and half measures will no longer suffice….The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.

Please contact NPR Weekend Edition to call for a retraction of the false assertions in the interview with Eric Fleegler, including: 1) the assertion that the study by Fleegler et al provides evidence to support a new direction any different from that advocated by Senator Dodd more than half a century ago concerning the definitive steps needed to stop our country’s epidemic of gun violence; 2) the assertion that preventing deaths from gunshot wounds is analogous to preventing deaths from motor vehicle crashes; and, 3) the assertion that we can significantly reduce rates of gun violence in our country without drastically reducing the vast pool of privately owned guns. Please also urge NPR to conduct an interview with Americans Against Gun Violence president Dr. Bill Durston as a counterpoint to the false assertions made in the interview with Dr. Fleegler.

[i] Arthur L. Kellermann and Donald T. Reay, “Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home,” New England Journal of Medicine 314, no. 24 (June 12, 1986): 1557–60, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198606123142406.

[ii] “Self-Defense Gun Use,” Violence Policy Center (blog), 2017, https://vpc.org/revealing-the-impacts-of-gun-violence/self-defense-gun-use/.

AAGunV in the News, News about Gun Violence|

Americans Against Gun Violence Condemns Supreme Court Ruling

Press Release

Americans Against Gun Violence Condemns Supreme Court Ruling that New York’s Requirement for Special Permit to Carry Concealed Handguns Violates the Second Amendment

Sacramento California, September June 23, 2022: Americans Against Gun Violence condemns the 6-3 ruling issued by the Supreme Court today in the case of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (NYSRPA v. Bruen) that New York’s requirement for a special permit to carry a concealed handgun violates the Second Amendment.

As egregiously flawed and dangerous as this decision is, it was not unexpected. Three of the justices in the Bruen majority (Roberts, Thomas, and Alito) were members of the narrow, five justice majority in the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision, in which the Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions, in ruling that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” The other three justices in the Bruen majority (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett) were all nominated by Donald Trump, who promised assembled NRA members at their annual convention in 2017 that he would “never, ever” let them down.

The Second Amendment 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.” The history and text of the Second Amendment clearly demonstrate that the Amendment was intended to confer a collective right for citizen militias to possess weapons of war for the common defense, not an individual right to own guns for personal use, much less an individual right to carry concealed handguns. (See the discussion, “Does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia?” on the Facts and FAQ’s page of this website for a detailed discussion of this topic.)

The majority opinion in NYSRPA v. Bruen, written by Justice Thomas, and the concurring opinions by Justices Alito and Kavanaugh, make 123 references to the Heller decision as binding precedent concerning the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment. The Heller decision has been described by respected authorities as “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship” and as “evidence of the ability of well-staffed courts to produce snow jobs.” In his autobiography, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens described the Heller decision as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my

[35 year] tenure on the bench.” Stevens also noted that the Heller majority endorsed an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Americans Against Gun Violence filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in the NYSRPA v. Bruen case in support of New York’s concealed carry laws. In our brief, we also discussed some of the more egregious flaws in the Heller decision, upon which the gun lobby based its case, and we noted that the Heller decision was worse than even the above harsh criticisms might indicate. In creating a constitutional obstacle, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in the other high income countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings occur rarely, if ever, and in which the rate of gun related deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in the United States – Heller is literally a death sentence for tens of thousands of American annually. In our amicus brief, Americans Against Gun Violence called on the Supreme Court to not only rule in the NYSRPA v. Bruen case that restrictions on carrying concealed handguns were constitutional, but to take the opportunity of this case to reverse the Heller decision. Instead, the Bruen majority compounded the egregious errors and expanded the deadly consequences of the Heller decision.

More than 30 amicus briefs were filed in support of New York State’s concealed handgun laws in the NYSRPA v. Bruen case, including briefs filed on behalf of some of the country’s best known gun violence prevention organizations. Americans Against Gun Violence was the only organization, though, to file a brief that openly stated that the Heller decision was wrongly decided and should be overturned.

Until the fraudulent notion that the Second Amendment was intended to confer an individual right to own guns and gun related paraphernalia is overturned in the court of public opinion, we should expect the Supreme Court to continue to expand the constitutional right that it created in Heller, including by ruling that laws governing civilian ownership of assault weapons and large capacity magazines violate the Second Amendment. We should also expect the number of annual gun related deaths in our country to continue to rise, and we shouldn’t be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs.

Americans Against Gun Violence urges other organizations and individuals to join us in educating the American public and policy makers concerning the fact that the Second Amendment was never intended to confer an individual right to own guns; in demanding that the Supreme Court reverse the Heller decision and its progeny, including the NYSRPA v. Bruen decision; and in demanding that Congress adopt stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in other high income democratic countries of the world.

References

District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).
United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).
Michele Gorman, “Full Transcript: President Trump’s Speech Fires up the NRA,” Newsweek, April 28, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-full-transcript-atlanta-592039.
Saul Cornell, “Originalism on Trial: The Use and Abuse of History in District of Columbia v. Heller,” Ohio State Law Journal 69 (2008): 629.
Richard Posner, “In Defense of Looseness,” The New Republic 239, no. 3 (August 27, 2008): 35.
John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 482.
Stevens, 483; Warren Burger, PBS News Hour, December 16, 1991, c..
Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

Press Releases|

Announcing the Winners of our 2022 National High School Essay Contest

Americans Against Gun Violence is pleased to announce the winners of our 2022 National High School Essay Contest, which was open to all U.S. high school students. To enter the contest, students were required to submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer by April 16, 2022, describing their thoughts about the following statement made by the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger during an interview on the PBS News Hour on December 16, 1991:

If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment…. This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

[i]

We received winning essay submissions from students attending high school in 12 of the 50 states (Arizona, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania). The winners were chosen via a rigorous process in which more than 20 Americans Against Gun Violence members participated, reading and rating essays blinded to any student identifying information. In the essay contest instructions, we announced that we would be awarding a total of at least $15,000 to twelve winners, with the option of providing additional awards, as we have done the past three years, if we received more than 12 outstanding essays. Again this year, our readers felt there were indeed more than 12 outstanding essays, and we are therefore awarding a total of $16,300 to 25 winners.

While we are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s essay contest, we are once again deeply troubled by the students’ poignant descriptions of the devastating effect on American youth of the ongoing epidemic of gun violence in our country, an epidemic that those of us in older generations should have stopped long ago. We are also troubled by the fact that again this year, many students have not felt secure in having their names or the names of their high schools published in association with their essays. It is part of our mission at Americans Against Gun Violence to change the toxic culture in our country that makes students fear for their safety if they speak openly and frankly about the need to take definitive action to protect our children and our youth from the threat of gun violence.

The winners of our 2022 National High School Essay Contest are:

First Place Winner

$3,000 Award

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

We’re All Militiamen Now:

How the Gun Lobby Rewrote the Constitution

…Until recently, the Supreme Court had rightly interpreted the Second Amendment as a limited provision inextricably linked to preserving a militia. In the 1970s, however, the NRA and its ilk launched a vigorous campaign to uncouple the right to “keep and bear Arms” from the necessity of a “well-regulated Militia”….It is well past time to restore the Second Amendment to its original meaning and adopt gun control laws in the United States comparable to those in other advanced democratic countries. We cannot delay, for tens of thousands of lives are at stake every year…. [Read the full essay]

Second Place Winner

$2,500 Award

Ruby Solomon

Fremont High School, Sunnyvale, California

No Defense for the Second Amendment

…The late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger asserted in 1991 that the Second Amendment, which had been interpreted for the first two centuries of our country’s existence as conferring a collective right for states to maintain armed militias for the common defense, was being fraudulently misrepresented by special interest groups….The National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and countless other “gun rights” organizations believe that their invented “right” to own guns is more important than the safety of not just school children, but the tens of thousands of other Americans who die from gun violence each year….[Read the full essay]

Third Place Winner

$2,000 Award

Sebastian Maldonado

Saint Francis High School, Mountain View, California

Seeking Refuge

“El sueño americano que me vendieron es una mentira.” “The American Dream they sold me is a lie,” I overheard my mother wearily mutter under her breath as she guided me through our vacant, dimly lit neighborhood streets. As we made our way to my elementary school for the first time, I could sense a lifetime’s worth of fear in the closeness with which she held me, not realizing she was protecting me from the gun violence that continues to ravage America today….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Winner

Maddy Black

University High School, San Francisco, California

Who and What Are You Protecting?

… The Second Amendment has been hijacked and manipulated by special interest groups to the extent that it is almost unrecognizable from the original amendment. The American people, including American children and youth, are the victims of this fraud, which places the economic interests of the U.S. gun lobby and the associated gun industry as a higher priority than even the lives of first grade children….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Winner

Mason Davis

Bloomington High School North, Bloomington, Indiana

Untitled

…I myself come from a hunting background and a family culture that recognizes the danger of possessing and operating firearms. I am happy to comply with all of my state regulations, from taking the Hunters Education Course when I was thirteen to renewing my hunting licence annually….Gun regulations are not an attack on the rights of gun owners, but protection of the rights of life and liberty for myself and my family, and I am grateful for them. [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Winner

Samantha Podnar

North Allegheny Senior High School, Wexford, Pennsylvania

A Decades Long Deception

One wall of the National Rifle Association’s headquarters bears a quote in brassy cursive letters: “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” But this fragment from the Second Amendment contains a deliberate omission, warping the original meaning. The modern gun rights movement is predicated on this lie….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Winner

Naomi Scissors

Richard Montgomery High School, Rockville, Maryland

Untitled

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads “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.” These words have been twisted by the gun lobby and, as a result, misinterpreted by the Supreme Court to keep money flowing into the hands of gun manufacturers at the expense of tens of thousands of American lives every year….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Winner

Mackena Weber

Mira Loma High School, Sacramento, California

The Race to Rewrite History

….As the work of special interest groups to deceive the American public continues, one has to wonder: If mass shootings and deaths are not enough to create change, then what will? As long as American society watches these tragedies play out on the news and in our own lives, special interest groups will continue to profit at humanity’s expense. The regulation of arms that was once a rarely-disputed reality of the Second Amendment must become a standard. To end this country’s collective suffering, we must cast special interests aside and instead consider our own. [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Winner

(Student’s name withheld at student’s request)

Aragon High School, San Mateo, California

The NRA’s Gun Control Fraud

… The meaning of the Second Amendment had not been a controversial view in most quarters, including the legal arena, since its enactment in 1791. But the National Rifle Association, the largest gun advocacy group in the U.S., saw an opening in the wording. The NRA sponsored research aimed at overturning binding legal precedents that restricted the right to bear arms….Its investment paid handsome dividends in the 2008 Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller. The decision was a stunning rebuke of historical perspectives….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

The Second Amendment: Twisted Into Terror

… If we want to remove the bloody thread of gun violence from the fabric of American life, we must realize the truth about the Second Amendment, and we must realize the actions necessary for change–the creation of strong gun control laws that deal with America’s reality and reverse the harm the gun lobby’s fraudulent misrepresentation of the Second Amendment has ultimately done. I believe that my generation, the one that enters a classroom and immediately checks for exit points, will undertake these actions in honor of our peers who have fallen beside us and in pursuit of a world we are proud, not dismayed, to live in. [Read the full essay]

$250 Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

A Constitutional Charade

… Once known as the “lost amendment” because it was seldom debated at the appellate level in nearly 200 years of American jurisprudence, the [Second Amendment] right to bear arms has become a touchstone in modern culture wars…The NRA funded academic studies to dispute the long-settled belief that the Second Amendment is a collective right reserved to the states. Instead, it gradually came to be seen – socially and in the courts – as an individual right to bear arms, independent of a militia….The result: despite horrific mass shootings and everyday gun violence, the country has been unable to pass any significant federal reforms….

$250 Winner

(Student’s name and high school pending student’s consent)

The NRA’s Deadly Pretense

… Warren Burger, late chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, did not mince words when he denounced the twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment by special interests, calling it a “fraud”…. Burger, who died in 1995, would undoubtedly be aghast at what has happened in the interim. Most notably: the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which established a right for D.C. residents to keep handguns…outside the context of a militia.

$100 Winner

Deul Choi

University High School, Irvine, California

Pulling the Trigger on America

… While gun supporters and individual right theorists claim that they have a right to bear arms for self-defense, they fail to interpret the historical origin and context of the Second Amendment, they justify gun violence with this flawed logic, and ironically, through their obsession over gun rights, they violate everyone else’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”…More often than not, guns are used to harm others, rather than in self-defense….Furthermore, a pro-gun-based misinterpretation of the Second Amendment is an attack on the youth of our nation, and thus an attack on our future…..

$100 Winner

Mallory Doyle

St. Joseph High School, Trumbull, Connecticut

Opposition of Viewpoints

…As the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger alluded with his 1991 quote, there were concerns at the time that the gun lobby was fraudulently misrepresenting the Second Amendment as conferring an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a well regulated militia….Justice Burger was insightful and succinct in his observations, but more importantly, just as there was a change in opinions and viewpoints on the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment based on the gun lobby’s disinformation campaign, the tides can just as easily change when accurate information is disseminated….We all have a part in determining public opinion, and by openly discussing the true history and intent of the Second Amendment, we can all contribute to reversing what Justice Burger appropriately called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’- on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime. [Read the full essay]

$100 Winner

Gabriel Hernandez-Ramirez

Bloomington High School North, Bloomington, Indiana

Second Amendment: Its Roots and Consequences

… The late Chief Justice Warren Burger spoke of the fraudulent misrepresentation of the Second Amendment by the U.S. gun lobby as conferring an individual right to own guns. But there’s an even darker side to the Second Amendment. There’s credible evidence that the origin of the Amendment dates back to the suppression of slave revolts like the rebellion in Stono, South Carolina in 1739. White militias in the South were used by plantation owners to keep the Black slave population in subjugation. It’s not only possible, but likely, that one of the reasons – if not the main reason – for the inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights was to reassure southern states that they could keep their armed slave patrols…. Gunshot wounds are now the leading cause of death in in our country for children ages 1-19. We can’t continue to allow the fraudulent misrepresentation of an antiquated amendment with racist origins to prevent us from adopting the kind of strict gun control laws needed to protect our children and our youth..

$100 Winner

Jiin Yun

Orange County School of the Arts, Santa Ana, California

Untitled

…The Second Amendment was created to prevent a standing army, which was deemed unnecessary in 1789. In the context of the Revolutionary War, a “militia” was a group of soldiers that joined with the common purpose of protecting their communities….However, militias are long gone, and military technology has advanced tremendously, making the Second Amendment irrelevant to today’s society….Keeping the right to bear arms is equivalent to losing our freedom of walking outside without the fear of getting shot….

$100 Winner

Nicolas Tavares

Casa Roble Fundamental High School, Orangevale, California

Untitled

… When Sandy Hook took place, my younger siblings were the same age as the victims. Every day since, my mom has feared for our safety as she sends us to school….I was 13 when the Parkland shooting happened; I was much more aware of the dangers of school shootings at that point. …It is always in the back of my mind that my life is in danger, even when I am just sitting in class….Unfortunately, the framers had no idea how poorly we’d understand the Second Amendment, and how deadly weapons would get. Justice Burger understood the framers created the 2nd Amendment as a State’s right, to keep a well-regulated militia, such as the National Guard. It was never meant to refer to an individual “right to bear arms.”

$100 Winner

Carson Wang

(Name of high school withheld at student’s request) Mason, Ohio

Times Change

…Militias no longer bear a significant role in our national security. Instead, the strongest standing army in the world defends our shores, our seas, and our states…We have no need for the minutemen of old, nor for citizens to walk with weapons in hand, but even so, the Second Amendment still exists….Special interest groups, and along with them, the gun companies that they represent… lobby for laws to protect gun ownership, all in the name of rights….But such relentless self-promotion is, first and foremost, fraud. Fraud, which is defined as deception intended for personal gain….

$100 Winner

Ashwin Telang

(Name of high school withheld at student’s request) West Windsor, New Jersey

How the Second Amendment Turned Terrible

Too often do we ignore that for 218 years, justices interpreted the Second Amendment not as a personal right to arms but as a militia’s right. The framers created the amendment so states could use a militia to protect themselves….But militias have little relevance today. Subsequently, the NRA trashed the “militia interpretation” and gave way to a new “individual right interpretation”…. Using lobbying strength, the NRA then broadcasted that the Second Amendment provided a universal right to arms….We live in a very different age than 1991 because of the NRA. One where more guns exist than people in America….

$100 Winner

Hailey Flickinger

(High school name and location withheld at student’s request)

Human Right or Luxury?

… Our churches, supermarkets, schools, libraries, hospitals, daycares, concert venues, workplaces are threatened every single day so long as our country does not introduce stringent gun laws. Our democracy is threatened every single day….When Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger discussed the fraudulent misrepresentation of the Second Amendment by special interest groups, he knew that our country was in danger….Are we willing to put our own children’s lives on the line for someone who feels the need to have a military-type weapon in their home?

$100 Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Untitled

…I go to school in the Bronx, one of the most violent places in America, where it’s both illegal and common for youth under the age of 21 to carry handguns, and where the vast majority of gunshot victims are African American. Because communities of color tend to distrust law enforcement, in the Bronx and similar urban neighborhoods, people take the law into their own hands — functioning sometimes as de facto militias, arming themselves in the belief that owning and carrying guns will help them defend their own rights, but too often violating the rights of others, and ultimately fueling the vicious cycle of violence. Even if the late Chief Justice Warren Burger was right to call the gun lobby’s misrepresentation of the Second Amendment a “fraud,” clarifying the amendment’s true meaning is only a starting point for stopping gun violence in communities like mine. To stop gun violence in the Bronx and other similar urban communities, we must also address the reasons why the residents of such communities feel more threatened than protected by the law enforcement agencies that are supposed to be serving them….

$100 Winner

(Student’s name and high school name withheld at student’s request) Oro Valley, Arizona

An Amoral Amendment

… The gun lobby’s misinterpretation of the Second Amendment enables the uniquely American epidemic of gun violence. Even if complete repeal is unlikely, we must argue in the courts for a more rational interpretation of that infamous sentence. We have to fulfill our moral obligation to the next generation and make long overdue, sensible reforms…We have to prevent another Sandy Hook or Parkland. We have to fight the deep-pocketed gun lobby, so our American future can be one where no one lives in fear of being gunned down at a supermarket.

$100 Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

The Real Big Lie: How the Gun Lobby Defrauded America

Every Monday morning at 9:30 am, my school’s PA system comes to life and orchestrates the Pledge of Allegiance. Some stand and recite the Pledge. Others sit in respectful silence. The prominence of the Pledge in our public education system epitomizes the zealous American desire to preserve and protect this country’s democratic heritage – which extends to the Constitution. Unfortunately, this aspiration does not always hold true, especially when we scrutinize the Second Amendment. While “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms’ has been ingrained into our colloquial constitutional lexicon, we often fail to consider its antecedent, ”A well regulated militia.” Our forgetfulness of the phrase “a well regulated militia” is not due to a mere lapse of memory. Rather, it is a direct result of the gun lobby’s decades long campaign of disinformation….

$100 Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

A New Way Forward: Targeting Special Interest Groups and Political Polarization

Every morning, American students wake up and face the terrifying question, “Am I next?” A defining aspect of American education has been mass shootings. We’ve grown up watching students and faculty rush out of schools with their hands over their heads; we’ve huddled silently in dark corners, practicing what to do in case a shooter tries to break into our classroom until the movements become muscle memory; we’ve held countless moments of silence for each victim killed….Fear of mass shootings will, unfortunately, continue to define many educational experiences….

$100 Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Untitled

The misreading and intentional ignorance [of the Second Amendment], or as Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger identifies it, “fraud,” has been pushed by special interest groups such as the National Rifle Association, which lobby for the retention of this specific interpretation of the Second Amendment to increase political power and money….Even if our founding fathers had meant to allow citizens the right to bear arms even after there was no longer a need for a militia, they could not have imagined what modern guns would become. For every musket shot, a semi-automatic rifle can shoot 150 times. Had our founding fathers foreseen what would become of the Second Amendment, interpreted to promote unnecessary death and violence for the benefit of special interest groups, the Bill of Rights would have passed with only nine amendments.

[i] The interview with Justice Burger can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/157433062. The interview begins at 7 minutes and 48 seconds into this PBS highlights recording.

Past Essay Contests|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas

Sacramento California, May 26, 2022: Americans Against Gun Violence extends our heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, classmates, and colleagues of all the victims of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas on May 24. We also send sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to the victims who suffered non-fatal injuries. As the late Senator Thomas Dodd stated more than half a century ago, though, in June of 1968:

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 legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.

[1]

In order to prevent horrific mass shootings like the one that occurred in Uvalde yesterday, as well as to stop the epidemic of gun violence that claims more than 110 lives on an average day in our country, the United States must adopt the following measures:

Change the guiding principle for gun ownership in our country from a “permissive” one to a “restrictive” one.[2]

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which the guiding principle for firearm acquisition is that a person who seeks to acquire a gun can legally do so if the person is of a certain age and can pass a rudimentary background check, done instantaneously by computer in most cases, to see if the person is on a perennially incomplete database of people who meet one or more limited criteria for being prohibited from owning a gun.[3] This guiding principle is termed, “permissive.” In all other advanced democracies, the burden of proof is on the person seeking to acquire a gun to prove that he or she has a good reason to own one and can handle one safely. This guiding principle is termed, “restrictive.” And recognizing that there is no net protective value in owning or carrying a gun, many other democratic countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, do not accept “self defense” as a legitimate reason for acquiring one.[4]

Ban civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, with no grandfather clause that would allow people who already own these kinds of weapons to keep them.

A federal “assault weapon ban” (AWB) was in effect in the United States from 1994 until it was allowed to sunset in 2004, but it is doubtful that it had much effect in preventing mass shootings or other firearm related deaths. The AWB defined an “assault weapon” as a semi-automatic firearm that could accept a detachable magazine and that had at least two other features typically included on military weapons, such as a pistol grip, a thumb-hole in the stock, or a bayonet mount. The ban grandfathered in millions of “assault weapons” that were already in circulation, and it specifically exempted 86 different makes of semi-automatic firearms that did not meet the definition of an assault weapon, but that were potentially just as deadly. Moreover, U.S. gun manufacturers subsequently produced new models of firearms that were just as lethal but that evaded the definition of an “assault weapon.” A report to the U.S. Department of Justice summarized the shortcomings of the AWB as follows: “The [assault weapons] provision targets a relatively small number of weapons based on features that have little to do with the weapons’ operation, and removing those features is sufficient to make the weapons legal.”[9]

Ban civilian ownership of all handguns, with no grandfather clause.

Handguns are the type of firearm used in the vast majority of all gun related deaths in the United States,[10] including in most mass shootings.[11] Following a mass shooting committed at an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, in which 16 five and six year old students and their teacher were murdered by a man who legally owned the handguns he used in the massacre, Great Britain completely banned civilian handgun ownership, with no grandfather clause. There hasn’t been another school shooting since the ban went into effect.[12] The mass shooting at Robb Elementary School was the 27^th U.S. school shooting this year,[13] and the overall rate of gun related deaths in the United States is 60 times higher than the rate in the Great Britain.[14]

Prior to 2008, there was no constitutional obstacle, Second Amendment or otherwise, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws of the type described above.[15] In the rogue 2008 Heller decision,[16] though, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions,[17] in ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to own guns unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” The late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had described such an interpretation of the Second Amendment as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime.[18] The late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored a dissenting opinion in Heller, described the Heller majority opinion as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my [35 year] tenure on the bench.”[19] Now, though, in order to change the guiding principle for firearm ownership in the United States from a “permissive” one to a “restrictive” one, to ban handguns, and to avoid any possible constitutional challenge to banning all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, the Heller decision must first be overturned.

Adopting the kinds of definitive gun control laws described above, though, need not be a lengthy process. The Supreme Court could overturn the Heller decision tomorrow. The Court heard oral arguments last November in the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen,[20] in which the gun lobby is claiming that New York’s requirement for a special permit to carry a concealed handgun violates the Second Amendment. The gun lobby’s case is based entirely on the Heller decision and its progeny. The Court will be issuing a decision in this case soon. While it’s likely, given the current composition of the Court, that it will rule that the New York law violates the Second Amendment, should the majority of justices unexpectedly put the history and text of the Second Amendment, prior legal precedent, reason, and the public good ahead of politics and the interests of the gun lobby, the Supreme Court could rule that not only is New York’s requirement for a special permit to carry a concealed handgun entirely within constitutional boundaries, but that the 2008 Heller case was wrongly decided and is therefore reversed. Once Heller is reversed, it shouldn’t take Congress any longer that it took Australia and New Zealand (two weeks) to completely ban civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns; and given that Great Britain has already provided the precedent, it should take Congress less than the two years it took Britain to completely ban civilian ownership of all handguns.

If the United States doesn’t promptly take the steps described above to stop our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs or when the CDC reports that the annual number of gun related deaths has again hit a new high.

Click on this link for a downloadable version of this press release in PDF format.

References

[1] Thomas Dodd, “Text of Speech by Senator Thomas Dodd on Floor of U.S. Senate: The Sickness of Violence and the Need for Gun Control Legislation” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 11, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#; Thomas Dodd, “Press Release: Pious Condolences Will No Longer Suffice” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 10, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#.

[2] George D. Newton and Franklin E. Zimring, “Firearm Licensing: Restrictive v Permissive,” Firearms & Violence in American Life: A Staff Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1, 1969).

[3] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country,” GunPolicy.org, accessed July 1, 2021, http://www.gunpolicy.org/.

[4] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country.”

[5] Michael J. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 185–93.

[6] Rebecca Peters, “Rational Firearm Regulation: Evidence-Based Gun Laws in Australia,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 195–204; Philip Alpers, “The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 205–11; Joel Negin et al., “Australian Firearm Regulation at 25-Successes, Ongoing Challenges, and Lessons for the World,” New England Journal of Medicine 384, no. 17 (2021): 1581–83.

[7] Josh Hafner, “Gun Control Bill in New Zealand Passes in Early Vote Following Attacks,” USA Today, April 2, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/04/02/gun-control-bill-new-zealand-vote-parliament-mosque-attacks/3341240002/; “2019 Firearm Law Changes (Arms Amendment Bill 2),” New Zealand Police, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.police.govt.nz/advice-services/firearms-and-safety/2019-firearm-law-changes-arms-amendment-bill-2.

[8] For the purpose of this comparison, a mass shooting is defined as a single incident with 5 or more fatalities. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings”; Negin et al., “Australian Firearm Regulation at 25-Successes, Ongoing Challenges, and Lessons for the World.”

[9] Christopher S. Koper, Daniel J. Woods, and Jeffrey A. Roth, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003; Report to the National Institute of Justice, United States Department of Justice” (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, June 2014), 1–2, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf.

[10] Josh Sugarmann, Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns (New Press, 2001).

[11] Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan, “US Mass Shootings, 1982-2018: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation,” Mother Jones, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/.

[12] North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings.”

[13] “School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where,” Education Week, May 25, 2022, sec. School Climate & Safety, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2022/01.

[14] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country.”

[15] John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 481–87.

[16] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[17] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

[18] Warren Burger, PBS News Hour, December 16, 1991, c.

[19] Stevens, The Making of a Justice, 482.

[20] New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc, et al v. Bruen, et al, No. 20-843 (n.d.).

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Sanctimonious Nonsense: Two Trump-appointed 9th Circuit Judges Rule that California’s Age Limit for Purchasing Semi-Automatic Rifles Violates the Second Amendment

Sacramento, California, May 12, 2022: In October of 2019, California Senate Bill 61 was signed into law, making it illegal to sell semi-automatic rifles to anyone under the age of 21 other than law enforcement officers or members of the armed forces.

[1] The term, “semi-automatic,” is used to describe a firearm in which a feeding device (usually a “magazine”) delivers a new round into the firing chamber as quickly as the shooter can pull the trigger. Semi-automatic rifles that resemble the military M-16 in appearance, including the popular AR-15, have been referred to as “assault weapons,” but any semi-automatic firearm can be used to kill and maim large numbers of people in a short period of time.

The gun lobby filed a lawsuit (Jones v. Becerra, which later became Jones v. Bonta after Rob Bonta replaced Xavier Becerra as California’s Attorney General) claiming that SB 61 violated the Second Amendment, but a federal district court judge rejected the gun lobby’s claim.[2] The gun lobby then appealed to the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals. On May 11, in a split 2-1 decision, a three judge panel of the 9^th Circuit ruled that California’s age limit for purchasing a semi-automatic rifle does in fact violate the Second Amendment.[3]

The two judges in the majority, Ryan Nelson and Kenneth Lee, are both Trump nominees. (The dissenting judge, Sidney Stein, is a Clinton nominee.) Judge Lee had previously authored a majority opinion a 2-1 decision of a panel of the 9^th Circuit in the case of Duncan v. Becerra, (which also later became Duncan v. Bonta) in which he and Judge Consuelo Callahan (a George W. Bush nominee) ruled that California’s large capacity magazine ban violated the Second Amendment.[4] That ruling was subsequently vacated in a 7-4 decision by an 11-judge en banc panel of the 9^th Circuit.[5] Judge Nelson was one of the four dissenters on the en banc panel.

Judge Nelson wrote the majority opinion in Jones v. Becerra. His first two sentences, which can best be described as sanctimonious nonsense, set the tone for the rest of his 70 page majority opinion. Judge Nelson writes:

America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army. Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.[6]

The Revolutionary War was won by a professional army equipped mainly with single shot flintlock muskets imported from Europe,[7] not by teenagers running around on their own with semi-automatic rifles. The ruling by Judges Nelson and Lee that California’s age restriction on the sale of semi-automatic rifles violates the Second Amendment is absurd.

The Second Amendment 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.

The clearly stated purpose of the Second Amendment is to provide for the common defense. Today’s equivalent of a “well regulated Militia” is the armed forces, including the National Guard, not teenage gangs and self-appointed insurrectionist militias. The term, “the people,” was used in a collective sense throughout the Constitution, as in the first phrase of the first sentence, “We the people of the United States,” and in the part of the First Amendment that refers to “the right of the people to peaceably assemble.” And the term, “keep and bear arms” was used almost exclusively during the Founding Era to refer to possessing and carrying weapons of war in the setting of military service.[8]

Judge Nelson makes 26 references to the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision in his majority opinion. In Heller, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Court ruled that the District of Columbia’s partial handgun ban and safe firearm storage laws violated the Second Amendment.[9] Prior to the Heller decision, no U.S. firearm law had ever been overturned on a Second Amendment basis. In ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred any kind of an individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia,” the Heller majority reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions,[10] and effectively declared “open season” for the gun lobby to challenge all kinds of firearm laws.

Respected authorities have described the Heller decision as “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship”[11] and as “evidence of the ability of well-staffed courts to produce snow jobs.”[12] In his autobiography, The Making of a Justice, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote a dissenting opinion in Heller, described the Heller majority opinion as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my [35 year] tenure on the bench.”[13] Stevens also noted that the Heller majority endorsed an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called “[O]ne of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud,’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”[14] But the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision is worse than even these harsh criticisms might indicate. In creating a constitutional obstacle, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in the other high income democratic countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings occur rarely, if ever, and in which the average rate of gun related homicides is 1/25^th the U.S. rate for all age groups combined[15] and 1/82^nd the U.S. rate for high school age youth,[16] Heller is literally a death sentence for tens of thousands of Americans annually.

As terrible as the Heller decision is, it provides no basis for ruling that it is unconstitutional to ban the sale of semi-automatic rifles to persons under 21 years of age. We urge California Attorney General Bonta to appeal the ruling of Judges Nelson and Lee to the full 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, and we urge the other judges of the 9^th Circuit to apply the Heller decision as narrowly as possible until such time as the decision is overturned.

Click on this link for the fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

References

[1] “Bill Text – SB-61 Firearms: Transfers.,” 61, accessed May 12, 2022, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB61.

[2] Jones v. Becerra, 498 F. Supp. 3d 1317 (Dist. Court 2020).

[3] Jones v. Bonta, No. 20-56174 (Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals May 11, 2022).

[4] Duncan v. Becerra, 970 F. 3d 1133 (Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2020).

[5] Duncan v. Bonta, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit (November 30, 2021).

[6] Jones v. Bonta at 8.

[7] Mark Malloy, “Small Arms of the Revolution,” American Battlefield Trust, December 8, 2020, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/small-arms-revolution.

[8] “BRIEF FOR PROFESSORS OF LINGUISTICS AND ENGLISH DENNIS E. BARON, Ph.D., RICHARD W. BAILEY, Ph.D. AND JEFFREY P. KAPLAN, Ph.D. IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS in the Case of District of Columbia v. Heller,” 2008.

[9] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[10] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

[11] Saul Cornell, “Originalism on Trial: The Use and Abuse of History in District of Columbia v. Heller,” Ohio State Law Journal 69 (2008): 629.

[12] Richard Posner, “In Defense of Looseness,” The New Republic 239, no. 3 (August 27, 2008): 35.

[13] John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 482.

[14] Stevens, 483; Warren Burger, PBS News Hour, December 16, 1991, c.

[15] Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

[16] Ashish P. Thakrar et al., “Child Mortality In The US And 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis,” Health Affairs 37, no. 1 (January 2018): 140–49, https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0767.

Press Releases|

The 2022 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest

Is Now Closed for New Submissions from U.S. High School Students

Note: Deadline to enter the contest was 11:59 PM on Saturday, April 16, 2022. Return to this page after May 16 to read the winning essays in this year’s contest.

Essay Topic

To enter the 2022 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, students must submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer describing their thoughts about the following statement made by the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger during an interview on the PBS News Hour on December 16, 1991:

“If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment….This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

[1]

Contest Eligibility and Rules

Contestants must be high school students in good standing attending school in the United States or its territories.
Students who entered high school on track to graduate in 2022 but who graduated early are also eligible.
First and second degree relatives of Americans Against Gun Violence Board members, employees, and paid consultants are not eligible.
Contestants are encouraged to access information posted on the Americans Against Gun Violence website among other resource materials, and to discuss the essay topic with teachers, parents, friends, and other mentors; but contestants must write their essays themselves, in their own words.
Contestants who are under the age of 18 must have the consent of a parent or legal guardian to enter the contest.
To enter the contest, students must submit their essays and demographic information via the following link: (The essay contest is now closed to new submissions.)
Essays may include a title and footnotes, but these elements are not required. Titles and footnotes do not count toward the 500 word limit.
Only one essay will be considered per student. If a student submits more than one essay, the most recent submission will be the one that is considered.
The deadline to enter the contest is 11:59 PM in the student’s own time zone on Saturday, April 16, 2022. Late entries will not be accepted unless the delay was caused by a malfunction of the Americans Against Gun Violence online entry system.

Selection of Contest Winners

Twelve contest winners will be selected from the essays submitted.
The Americans Against Gun Violence Board of Directors will establish a panel of members to judge essays based on accuracy, originality, clarity, cohesiveness, and overall impact.
Essay judges will be blinded to all student identifying information.
Contest winners will be notified by email by Monday, May 16, 2022.
At the time that students are notified that they’ve been chosen as contest winners, they’ll also be sent a signature form that includes the following elements:
A statement that the essay submitted is the student’s own original work
A statement signed by a parent or legal guardian, if the student is under age 18, confirming that the parent or guardian approves of the student’s participation in the essay contest
A statement by a school official confirming that the contestant is a high school student in good standing or that the student entered high school on track to graduate in 2022 but graduated early
Note: If the student’s school is not physically in session, documentation such as a student body card or transcript will be accepted in lieu of the signature of a school official as evidence that the entrant is a high school student.
In order to receive a monetary award, students must return the signed signature forms within 30 days of being notified that they are contest winners.

Contest Awards (Total $15,000)

Upon submission of their completed signature forms, the first place winner will be sent a check for a $3,000 award; second place a $2,500 award; and third place a $2,000 award.
Upon submission of their completed signature forms, the fourth through tenth ranked winners will each be sent $1,000 awards, and the 11^th and 12^th ranked winners will each be sent $250 awards.
If any of the students chosen as one of the top 12 winners don’t submit their completed signature forms within 30 of being notified, their awards may be given to other lower ranked entrants.
Awards will be sent by check to the home address listed on the students’ entry forms.
Americans Against Gun Violence reserves the option of also offering additional monetary awards to students not ranked in the top 12 if the essay contest judges feel that their essays are of exceptional quality.

Publication of Essays and Release of Contact and Identifying Information

By entering the contest, students agree to allow Americans Against Gun Violence to publish their essays in part or in whole in any way that the Board of Directors deems to be appropriate, but without any student contact or identifying information linked to the essays.
Americans Against Gun Violence will not publish or release any student contact or identifying information without the written consent of the student and, if the student is under age 18, the written consent of a parent or guardian.
When the 12 contest winners are notified that they have been chosen as winners, they will be provided with media release forms to indicate to what degree, if any, they wish to have their contact and identifying information released in association with their essays.
The responses to the media release forms will not in any way influence the ranking of the contest winners.

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline

The deadline for entering the contest is 11:59 PM in the student’s own time zone on Saturday, April 16, 2022.
The students selected as the 12 winners will be notified by Monday, May 16, 2022.
Students chosen as contest winners must return completed signature forms within 30 days of being notified that they have been chosen as winners in order to receive monetary awards.
Award checks will be mailed to the winners upon receipt of their completed signature forms.

[1] The interview can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/157433062. The interview with Chief Justice Burger begins at 7 minutes and 48 seconds into this PBS highlights recording.

Click on these links to download contest details and a contest flyer in PDF format. For additional information or questions, please email essaycontest@aagunv.org or call (916) 668-4160.

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Americans Against Gun Violence Commends En Banc Panel of 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for Upholding California’s Large Capacity Magazine Ban

Sacramento, California, December 8, 2021: In 2016, California voters approved Proposition 63, which included a ban on large capacity ammunition magazines, (abbreviated “LCM’s” and defined as magazines that hold more than 10 rounds) by almost a two to one margin (63% in favor to 37% opposed).

[1] On June 29, 2017, two days before the ban was to go into effect, in response to a lawsuit filed by the gun lobby (the case of Duncan v. Becerra, later retitled Duncan v. Bonta, after Rob Bonta succeeded Javier Becerra as California’s attorney general),[2] a San Diego District Court Judge, Roger Benitez, issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the ban.[3] In an 86 page ruling that reads more like a gun lobby manifesto than the opinion of an objective jurist, Benitez subsequently made the injunction permanent.[4] Benitez’s opinion included 78 references to the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision as binding precedent.[5] In Heller, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions,[6] in ruling that the Second Amendment conferred individual right to keep a handgun in the home unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” The Heller decision makes no mention, though, of LCM’s.

California’s Attorney General appealed Benitez’s decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in a split decision, the panel upheld Benitez’s ruling.[7] In the panel’s majority opinion, written by Trump appointee, Kenneth Lee, and joined by George W. Bush appointee Consuelo Callahan, Judges Lee and Callahan repeated much of the misinformation in the Benitez ruling and went further to imply that because AR-15’s are now “the most popular rifle in American history,”[8] civilian ownership of such rifles, commonly referred to as “assault rifles,” should also be constitutionally protected. Judges Lee and Callahan also referred to the Glock handgun, which is manufactured by an Austrian company, and which comes with a standard 17 round magazine, as “America’s gun,”[9] and opined that in light of the current civil unrest in our country, “…communities of color have a particularly compelling interest in exercising their Second Amendment rights” to arm themselves with such weapons.[10]

The California Attorney General appealed the ruling of the three judge panel to the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and on November 30, 2021 (a day in which the news was dominated by the mass shooting committed by a 15 year-old student using a handgun equipped with a 15 round magazine at the Oxford High School in Oakland County, Michigan[11]), in a 7-4 decision, an eleven judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the previous rulings of judges Benitez, Lee, and Callahan and ruled instead that California’s LCM ban did not violate the Second Amendment or any other part of the United States Constitution.[12] The four dissenting judges, Trump appointees Bumatay, and VanDyke, George W. Bush appointee Ikuta, and Carter appointee Nelson, filed vitriolic dissents in the case, with Judge VanDyke filing a particularly personal attack against the judges in the majority.

Several gun violence prevention organizations, including Americans Against Gun Violence, filed amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs in the Duncan case in support of California’s LCM ban, but Americans Against Gun Violence was the only organization to make the point in its brief that the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision, upon which the gun lobby’s challenge to California’s LCM ban was based, was wrongly decided, is egregiously flawed, and therefore, should be interpreted by lower courts as narrowly as possible until Heller is overturned by the Supreme Court itself. Americans Against Gun Violence has also filed an amicus brief in the current Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court – the case of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen et al (NYSRPA v. Bruen) – in which the gun lobby is claiming that New York State’s laws concerning carrying loaded handguns in public violate the Second Amendment.[13] Like the Duncan case, the NYSRPA v. Bruen case is based entirely on the Heller decision. Thirty-five other organizations have joined Americans Against Gun Violence in filing amicus briefs in support of New York’s handgun laws in NYSRPA v. Bruen, but as in the Duncan case, our brief is the only one that makes the point that Heller was wrongly decided and should be overturned. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in NYSRPA v. Bruen on November 3, and a decision is expected within the next few months.

Americans Against Gun Violence commends the majority of judges in the Ninth Circuit en banc panel for upholding the constitutionality of California’s LCM ban. It must be recognized, however, that this decision is a minor victory, and probably only a temporary one, in the effort to stop our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence. It’s likely that the gun lobby will appeal the Duncan decision to the Supreme Court, and even if the high court upholds the ruling of the Ninth Circuit en banc panel, banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds will have minimal effect in reducing the rate of gun related deaths and injuries in our country.

In order to stop our shameful epidemic of gun violence, we must do much more than ban LCM’s. We must adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws in the other high income democratic countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, occur rarely if ever, and in which the rate of gun related deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in the United States.[14] Such laws include a complete ban on civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles (including so-called “assault rifles”) comparable to the bans that Great Britain,[15] Australia,[16] and New Zealand[17] all promptly adopted after mass shootings committed with semi-automatic long guns in Hungerford, England in 1987; in Port Arthur, Australia in 1996; and in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019; and a complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns, comparable to the ban that Britain adopted after the 1996 Dunblane Primary School massacre, which was committed with handguns.[18] And in order to adopt such bans, we must first overturn the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision.

Respected authorities have described the Heller decision as “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship”[19] and as “evidence of the ability of well-staffed courts to produce snow jobs.”[20] In his autobiography, The Making of a Justice, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote a dissenting opinion in Heller, described the Heller majority opinion as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my [35 year] tenure on the bench.”[21] Stevens also noted that the Heller majority endorsed an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called “[O]ne of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud,’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”[22] But the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision is worse than even these harsh criticisms might indicate. In creating a constitutional obstacle, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in the other high income democratic countries of the world, Heller is literally a death sentence for tens of thousands of Americans annually.

Note: Click on this link for a downloadable copy of this press release in PDF format.

References

[1] “California Proposition 63 — Background Checks for Ammunition Purchases and Large-Capacity Ammunition Magazine Ban Initiative — Results: Approved,” The New York Times, August 1, 2017, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/california-ballot-measure-63-firearm-and-ammo-control.

[2] “Duncan v. Becerra, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2020,” August 14, 2020, https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6809998583405327539&q=Duncan+v.+becerra&hl=en&as_sdt=2006.

[3] Eric Johnson, “Federal Judge Blocks California Ban on ‘Large-Capacity’ Gun Magazines,” Reuters, June 30, 2017, sec. Healthcare Sector, https://www.reuters.com/article/california-court-guns-idINL1N1JR02A.

[4] Duncan v. Becerra, 366 F. Supp. 3d 1131 (Dist. Court 2019).

[5] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[6] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

[7] “Duncan v. Becerra, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2020.”

[8] “Duncan v. Becerra, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2020,” 25.

[9] “Duncan v. Becerra, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2020,” 12.

[10] “Duncan v. Becerra, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2020,” 38.

[11] Livia Albeck-Ripka, “What We Know About the Michigan High School Shooting,” The New York Times, December 1, 2021, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/us/oxford-school-shooting-michigan.html.

[12] Miller v. Bonta, No. Case No. 19-cv-1537-BEN (JLB) (Dist. Court June 4, 2021).

[13] New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc, et al v. Bruen, et al, No. 20-843 (n.d.).

[14] Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

[15] Michael J. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 185–93.

[16] Rebecca Peters, “Rational Firearm Regulation: Evidence-Based Gun Laws in Australia,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 195–204; Joel Negin et al., “Australian Firearm Regulation at 25-Successes, Ongoing Challenges, and Lessons for the World,” New England Journal of Medicine 384, no. 17 (2021): 1581–83.

[17] “2019 Firearm Law Changes (Arms Amendment Bill 2),” New Zealand Police, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.police.govt.nz/advice-services/firearms-and-safety/2019-firearm-law-changes-arms-amendment-bill-2.

[18] North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings.”

[19] Saul Cornell, “Originalism on Trial: The Use and Abuse of History in District of Columbia v. Heller,” Ohio State Law Journal 69 (2008): 629.

[20] Richard Posner, “In Defense of Looseness,” The New Republic 239, no. 3 (August 27, 2008): 35.

[21] John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 482.

[22] Stevens, 483; Warren Burger, PBS News Hour, December 16, 1991, c.

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Americans Against Gun Violence Applauds Folsom Commissioner Leary for Opposing Home Gun Dealers

Sacramento, California, November 19, 2021: The Folsom City Planning Commission voted 6 to 1 on Wednesday evening to continue to allow gun dealers to sell guns and ammunition from their residential homes. Commissioner Barbara Leary was the sole member of the commission to oppose the measure.

The city of Folsom is a bedroom community located about 15 miles east of Sacramento. There are currently 15 schools in Folsom, including three high schools, as well as a community college. The Folsom school district made the news in 2016 when it was revealed that school officials had been allowing an unspecified number of school employees to bring loaded guns to school during the previous six years without the knowledge of students or parents. This practice was halted the following year when a new California state law was enacted banning anyone from bringing a gun onto a school campus.

The city of Folsom is best known, though, for Folsom State Prison, and for the fact that it was within the prison walls that Johnny Cash resurrected his failing career in January of 1968 by recording a live album during his performance for prison inmates. Cash elicited the loudest roar of admiration from his captive audience when he sang the line from his song, “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” The city of Folsom has a bike trail named for Johnny Cash and invites visitors to make a donation to “Be a part of Johnny Cash History.”

During the planning commission meeting on Wednesday, Commissioner Leary asked commission staff how many Folsom residents were currently selling guns out of their homes, how many and what kinds of guns they were selling, and how many of these guns had been used in crimes or in the commission of suicides. Commission staff responded that five gun dealers were currently operating from their residential homes, but they couldn’t answer Commissioner Leary’s other questions. Staff also acknowledged that no other surrounding city allows gun sales from private homes. Staff indicated that they had personally contacted the five home-based gun dealers to invite them to the meeting on Wednesday. Staff did not report making any special effort to personally contact other city residents, including parents of school children.

Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, sent a letter to the Folsom Planning Commission in advance of the meeting in opposition to allowing residents to sell guns and ammunition from their homes, and the commission allotted him just three minutes to speak in person at the meeting. In his letter, Dr. Durston noted that there was no shortage of guns and gun dealers in our country or in the Folsom area. It’s estimated that there are currently approximately 400 million privately owned guns in circulation in the United States, which amounts to more than one gun for every man, woman, and child in the country. There are currently more than 50,000 federally licensed firearm dealers in the United States. Dr. Durston noted that a Google search of “gun stores near Folsom” came up with 16 stores where one can buy guns in and around the city. A Google search of “grocery stores near Folsom” came up with 19 stores where one can buy groceries. Dr. Durston noted during his brief talk that including the five home-based gun dealers, there are currently more businesses in and around Folsom where people can buy guns than groceries.

Dr. Durston noted in his letter to the Planning Commission that every year, approximately 40,000 Americans are killed by guns, and that two to three times this number of U.S. residents suffer non-fatal but often devastating gunshot wounds. He also noted in his letter, and re-emphasized at the meeting, that gun-related deaths and injuries are far more common in the United States than in any other high income democratic country in the world. For all ages combined, the rate of gun homicides in the United States is 25 times higher than the average rate in the other high income democratic countries of the world, and for high school age youth, the U.S. rate of gun homicides is 82 times higher.

In his letter, Durston noted that our country’s extraordinarily high rate of gun violence is not a result of Americans being more violent in general than people in other democratic countries. On the contrary, the U.S. rate of violent assault by any means is below the average for the other high income democratic countries of the world. The extraordinarily high rate of gun homicide in the United States is due to fact that because of the easy availability of firearms, guns are used in assaults far more frequently in our country, and guns are far more lethal than fists, knives, and other weapons commonly used in assaults in other high income democratic countries.

In his letter, Dr. Durston included a graph demonstrating that there is a direct relationship between rates of gun related deaths and rates of private gun ownership; and that the United States is an extreme outlier among high income democratic countries in both categories. (See appended Figure). Dr. Durston also noted that the extraordinarily high number of guns in circulation in our country is a direct result of our extraordinarily lax gun control laws as compared with the laws in other advanced democracies.

In his letter and during his live presentation, Dr. Durston emphasized that guns in the homes and in the communities of honest, law-abiding people are far more likely to be used to kill, injure, or intimidate innocent people than to protect them. In one of the best known studies on this subject, it was shown that for every one time a gun in the home was used to kill an intruder, there were 43 gun-related deaths of a household member. Another study showed that someone who was carrying a gun at the time of an assault was four times more likely to be killed than someone who was not carrying a gun. In 2018, the most recent year for which expanded homicide data are available from the FBI, guns were used by private citizens to commit murders 34 times more often than they were used to kill an attacker in self defense .

At the planning commission meeting, some of the gun dealers present spoke of their “Second Amendment rights,” implying that selling guns from their homes is an extension of such “rights.” Dr. Durston noted that the Second Amendment 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.

Dr. Durston noted at the meeting that none of the gun dealers present claimed that their sales were related in an way to the maintenance of a “well regulated militia,” and that prior to 2008, there was no constitutional right, Second Amendment or otherwise, for any individual person in the United States to own or carry a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia,” much less sell guns from a private residence. Durston noted that the Supreme Court had ruled in all four Second Amendment cases that it had considered prior to 2008 that the Second Amendment did not confer an individual right to own or carry guns. He quoted from the Supreme Court’s 1980 Lewis decision:

[T]he Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”

Dr. Durston also noted that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called the gun lobby’s misrepresentation of the Second Amendment as conferring an individual right to own guns “One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word, ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” Sadly, though, in the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, a narrow 5-4 majority of Supreme Court justices became a party to that fraud in ruling that Washington DC’s partial handgun ban violated the Second Amendment. Dr. Durston noted, however, that as flawed as the Heller decision was, it said nothing about a right to sell guns and ammunition from one’s own home.

The gun dealers who spoke at the meeting complained that their personal incomes would be adversely affected if the Planning Commission banned sales of guns and ammunition from private residences. Dr. Durston responded to this complaint by inviting Planning Commission members to view the November 7, 2021 interview with Dr. Michael North of Scotland, which is posted on the Americans Against Gun Violence website. Dr. North lost his five year old daughter, Sophie, in the 1996 mass shooting at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, in which 15 other students and their teacher were also murdered and three other teachers and 12 other students were wounded by a man who legally owned the handguns he used to commit the massacre. Dr. North and other grieving parents subsequently led a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Great Britain. (Britain already had a ban on automatic and semi-automatic long guns, including so-called “assault rifles.”) There have been no further school shootings since the handgun ban went into effect in 1998, and that the rate of gun deaths in Britain is currently 1/60th the rate in the United States.

Dr. Durston noted that gun dealers who opposed the British handgun ban, like the gun dealers present at the Folsom Planning Commission meeting, had complained that a handgun ban would adversely affect their incomes. Dr. North and his fellow grieving parents responded that these gun dealers could find other sources of income, but Sophie and her classmates could not find other lives.

Dr. Durston pointed out to the Planning Commission that even after repeated mass school shootings, including the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in which 20 first graders, their school principal, and five other female staff members were murdered, the United States has taken no definitive action to prevent such tragedies from recurring; and that there is no reason to believe that another mass shooting on the scale of the Sandy Hook massacre could not occur on a Folsom campus.

Dr. Durston stated further that Folsom children and youth were already being seriously harmed by the threat of gun violence. He read to the Planning Commission an excerpt from one of this year’s winning essays in the annual Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, submitted by a student who attends Folsom High School. The student noted that for the first time in many years, there were no school shootings in 2020, not because elected officials had adopted stringent gun control laws, but because schools had been physically closed in response to the Covid pandemic. The student went on to write:

It is shameful that it took a pandemic-induced shutdown to quell mass shootings in America. It especially pains me when I hear stories of students breathing sighs of relief when they learned they no longer had to go to school in-person. Now more than ever, it has become excruciatingly clear that guns cause widespread fear and unease in the population. A school should be a safe haven for students and a hub for collaborative education, not a site of trauma and worry. Because of the presence of guns in their communities, young people in America have experienced great harm.

At this point, the Planning Commission chairperson told Dr. Durston that his time was up and asked him to conclude his remarks. Dr. Durston concluded by stating that in a country with approximately 400 million privately owned guns in circulation, with more than 50,000 gun dealers already in business, and with approximately 40,000 annual gun deaths, the Folsom Planning Commission’s decision concerning whether to ban sales of guns from private residences would have little overall effect on these appalling statistics, but that the commissioners’ votes would reveal a great deal about what they valued most – their guns and the profits of the five home-based gun dealers, or the safety and wellbeing of the city’s children and youth.

Commissioner Barbara Leary voted to prohibit sales of guns and ammunition from private homes in Folsom. The other six commissioners, Kevin Duewel, Bill Miklos, Eileen Reynolds, Ralph Pena, and Daniel West, voted to continue to allow Folsom residents, including the five current home-based gun dealers and an unlimited number of future gun dealers, to sell guns and ammunition from their residential homes.

Note: Dr. Durston is a board certified emergency physician and a former expert marksman in the United States Marine Corp, decorated for “courage under fire” during the Vietnam War.

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

Figure

Legend: Annual rates of gun deaths are plotted against estimated per capita gun ownership for the United States and 16 other high income democratic countries, all represented as circles. (Because of overlap, there appear to be fewer than 16 circles representing other high income democratic countries.) The line is a computer generated best fit line. Data used to construct the graph were taken from the most recently available data posted on the website, GunPolicy.org, hosted by the University of Sydney School of Public Health. In cases in which GunPolicy.org listed a range of per capita gun ownership estimates for a given country, the mean of the highest and lowest estimates was used. The 16 other high income democratic countries represented on the graph are, in alphabetical order, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

AAGunV in the News|

November 7 interview with Dr. Michael North is now available for online viewing

Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, interviewed Dr. Michael North on November 7, 2021, during a meeting conducted via Zoom that was open to the general public. The one hour interview can be viewed by clicking on this link.

Dr. North, who prefers to be addressed by his nickname, “Mick,” lost his five year old daughter, Sophie, in the mass shooting at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, in which fifteen other children and their teacher were also killed by a man who legally owned the handguns he used to commit the mass murder. The shooter also wounded three other teachers and 12 other students before shooting and killing himself. In the aftermath of the horrific shooting, Mick helped lead a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Great Britain. (Britain already had a ban on civilian ownership of automatic and semi-automatic long guns.) There have been no further school shootings since the handgun ban went into effect, and the rate of gun related deaths in Britain is currently 1/60^th the rate in the United States.

Mick wrote a book, Dunblane: Never Forget, that was published in 2000. In the book, Mick discusses the circumstances surrounding the Dunblane massacre and the response to the shooting in detail, including how he and . In the book also reveals that his wife, Barbara, died of breast cancer less than three years before their daughter and only child, Sophie, was murdered.

The November 7 interview begins with Mick reading the title of Chapter Four in Dunblane: Never Forget, “The Thirteenth of March,” and the subtitle “Bye, Soph, see you this evening,” the last words that he spoke to his five year-old daughter on the morning of March 13, 1996, as he dropped her off at school. The interview continues with Mick discussing other chapters in the book, including how he and the other grieving Dunblane parents eventually overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles in getting a complete ban on civilian handgun ownership adopted within less than two years after the Dunblane massacre. In the interview, Mick also reflects on the failure of the United States to take similar measures after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Dunblane: Never Forget is out of print, and hard copies are being re-sold at high prices, but an electronic version can be acquired for about $10. Americans Against Gun Violence urges everyone who seriously interested in ending our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence to read the book and to view the interview with Mick North.

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November 7 online discussion of “Dunblane: Never Forget,” with the author, Dr. Michael North

Anyone who is seriously interested in helping achieve the adoption of the kinds of definitive gun control laws necessary to stop the U.S. epidemic of gun violence is invited to participate in an online discussion hosted by Americans Against Gun Violence of the book, Dunblane: Never Forget, with the book’s author, Dr. Michael North, on Sunday, November 7, at 11 AM PST. Here is the URL for logging in to the discussion:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87981540216?pwd=UUhQM0ZGbjZwMDVzTTcxcERsZVNQZz09

Dr. North lost his five year old daughter, Sophie, in the mass shooting at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, in which fifteen other children and their teacher were also killed. The shooter, Thomas Hamilton, who legally owned the handguns he used to commit the massacre, also wounded 15 other students and teachers before shooting and killing himself.

Following the Dunblane Primary School mass shooting, Dr. North helped lead a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Great Britain. (Britain had already adopted a ban on civilian ownership of automatic and semi-automatic rifles after a mass shooting in Hungerford, England, in 1987.) There have been no further school shootings since the handgun ban went into effect in 1998, and the rate of gun related deaths in Britain is currently 1/60^th the rate in the United States.

In the book, Dunblane: Never Forget, Dr. North, who prefers to be addressed by his nickname, “Mick,” describes the circumstances surrounding the Dunblane Primary School massacre and how he and other grieving parents were subsequently able to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in getting the British handgun ban adopted within less than two years. Dunblane: Never Forget was published in 2000 and is now out of print. Hard copies of the book are selling for over $800, but electronic copies of the book can be downloaded for less than $10.

If you’re seriously interested in helping achieve the adoption of definitive gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that Mick North and his colleagues were able to get adopted in Great Britain, please read Dunblane: Never Forget and join us on Sunday, November 7, at 11 AM PST, for an online discussion of the book with the author himself. There will be an opportunity to ask questions of Mick during the event, but you can also submit questions in advance by emailing them to info@aagunv.org.

Following the discussion of Dunblane: Never Forget, during the online event on November 7, Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, will discuss the landmark amicus brief filed by our organization in the Second Amendment case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. New York. Oral arguments in this Supreme Court case are scheduled to be heard on November 3.

The November 7 event is free, but if you plan to participate, we’d appreciate it if you’d become an official paid member of Americans Against Gun Violence, if you haven’t already done so, and if you’d make an additional donation, if you’re able, to support our ongoing work. We’d also appreciate it if you’d invite any friends, family members, and colleagues who are seriously concerned about our country’s epidemic of gun violence to read Dunblane: Never Forget, and to join us for the online discussion of the book on November 7.

Here’s the full information for all options for logging in to the November 7 event:

Americans Against Gun Violence is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: “Dunblane: Never Forget” book club with Dr. Mick North

Time: Nov 7, 2021 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Americans Against Gun Violence Calls on High Court to Overturn Rogue 2nd Amendment Decision

Sacramento California, September 22, 2021: Americans Against Gun Violence filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in the case of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen on Tuesday, September 21, in which the organization called on the Supreme Court to overturn its rogue 2008 Heller decision.

In the NYSRPA v. Bruen case, the gun lobby claims that New York State’s laws restricting the carrying of concealed handguns violates the Second Amendment. The gun lobby’s argument is based almost entirely upon the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision in which a narrow five to four majority of the Court ruled for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred any kind of individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a well regulated militia. The Supreme Court had ruled in four previous cases that the Second Amendment, which begins with the phrase, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” did not confer an individual right to own guns for personal use.

The Heller decision has been described by respected authorities as “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship” and as “evidence of the ability of well-staffed courts to produce snow jobs.” In his autobiography, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens described the Heller decision as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my

[35 year] tenure on the bench.” Stevens also noted that the Heller majority endorsed an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” As Americans Against Gun Violence points out in its amicus brief, though, the Heller decision is worse than even these harsh criticisms might indicate. In creating a constitutional obstacle, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in the other high income countries of the world – countries in which the rate of gun related deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in our country – Heller is literally a death sentence for tens of thousands of American annually. Americans Against Gun Violence calls on the Supreme Court to overturn the rogue 2008 Heller decision and to rule in the current case that New York State’s handgun laws do not violate the Second Amendment.

A total of 32 amicus briefs in support of New York State’s handgun laws have been filed on behalf of 84 organizations, 606 individuals (including 152 members of Congress), 13 cities, and 18 states in the NYSRPA v. Bruen case as of the September 21 filing deadline, but Americans Against Gun Violence is the only organization to file a brief that openly states that the Heller decision was wrongly decided and should be overturned. We invite other organizations and individuals to join us in calling on the Supreme Court to overturn Heller and in calling for Congress to adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, including a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic long guns.

Click on this link for a full referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

News about Gun Violence, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Denounces Split Ruling by 3-Judge Appeals Court Panel Concerning the Legal Age to Purchase a Handgun

Sacramento California, July 20, 2021: Americans Against Gun Violence denounces the ruling by a 2-1 majority of a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that the federal law prohibiting the sale of handguns to persons under the age of 21 by federally licensed firearm dealers (FFL’s) violates the Second Amendment.

In 1968, in response to a growing epidemic of gun violence in the United States, with the majority of shootings being committed with handguns,

[1] Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which included a provision banning the sale of handguns by FFL’s to persons under the age of 21. Since 1968, the annual number of gun related deaths in the United States has risen from approximately 24,000 per year[2] to over 40,000 per year.[3] Handguns continue to be used in the vast majority of gun related deaths.[4] Firearm related homicides and suicides are the second and third leading causes of death, respectively, for American youth under the age of 20,[5] and the rate of gun homicide for high school age American youth is 82 times higher than the average rate in the other high income democratic countries of the world.[6]

It is against this backdrop that two Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judges, Trump appointee Julius N. Richardson and George W. Bush appointee G. Steven Agee,[7] ruled on July 13, 2021 in the case of Marshall v. ATF, that the federal law banning sales of handguns by FFL’s to persons under the age of 21 violates the Second Amendment.[8]

The plaintiff in this case, Natalia Marshall, who first sought to acquire a handgun at age 18, claimed that she needed the gun to protect herself against an ex-boyfriend who was subject to a restraining order and who had been arrested for illegally possessing a firearm.* In their majority opinion, Judges Richardson and Agee ignored the overwhelming evidence that guns are far more likely to be used to kill or injure law-abiding people than to protect them. For example, studies have shown that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill a household member than to kill an intruder;[9] that someone who is carrying a gun at the time of an assault is four times more likely to be fatally shot than someone who is not carrying a gun;[10] and that for every one time a woman uses a handgun to kill an intimate acquaintance in self defense, 83 women are murdered with a handgun by an intimate acquaintance.[11]

In their ruling, Judges Richardson and Agee make 65 references to the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision[12] in which a narrow 5-4 majority of the Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions,[13] in ruling that the District of Columbia’s partial handgun ban violated the Second Amendment. Prior to Heller, there was no constitutional right, Second Amendment or otherwise, for anyone in the United States to own any kind of a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.”[14] In Heller, by ruling that the “well regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment was irrelevant to the proper interpretation of second half of the Amendment concerning “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” the narrow five member majority of Supreme Court justices allowed the gun lobby to effectively rewrite the Second Amendment.[15]

The Heller majority opinion has been appropriately described by respected authorities as “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship”[16] and as “evidence of the ability of well-staffed courts to produce snow jobs.”[17] The late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored a dissenting opinion in Heller, described the majority opinion as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my [35 year] tenure on the bench.”[18] Justice Stevens noted that in the Heller decision, the majority endorsed an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called ”one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”[19] In their ruling in Marshall v. ATF, Judges Richardson and Agee join the Heller majority and a growing number of other federal judges[20] in taking this fraud to new lows.

The Heller decision and its progeny, including Marshall v. ATF, are worse, however, than “gun rights propaganda;” worse than “snow jobs;” worse even than a “fraud on the American public.” In creating a constitutional obstacle, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries – countries in which the rate of firearm related deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in the United States[21] – the Heller decision and its progeny are literally a death sentence for tens of thousands of Americans annually, including thousands of American children and youth.

Americans Against Gun Violence is the only national U.S. organization that openly advocates overturning the Heller decision and adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, including a complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns. We are the only organization to file an amicus (friend of the court) brief in a Supreme Court case calling on the Court to reverse Heller,[22]and the only organization to file an amicus brief in an appeals court case[23] calling on lower courts to interpret Heller as narrowly as possible until it is overturned. We urge Attorney General Merrick Garland to appeal the split ruling by the three judge panel in Marshall v. ATF to the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and we urge other public health and gun violence prevention organizations to join us in calling for overturning Heller and adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in the other high income democratic countries of the world.

*Another plaintiff, Tanner Hirschfeld, was ruled by the Appeals Court to have no standing in the case as he had already turned 21 years of age.

Click on this link for a fully referenced PDF version of this press release.

References

[1] Franklin E. Zimring, “Firearms and Federal Law: The Gun Control Act of 1968,” The Journal of Legal Studies 4, no. 1 (1975): 148.

[2] Sara Farchi et al., “Deaths Resulting from Firearm-and Motor-Vehicle-Related Injuries–United States, 1968-1991,” MMWR: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 43, no. 3 (1994): 37–42 Figure 1.

[3] “Past Summary Ledgers,” Gun Violence Archive, accessed April 17, 2021, https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls.

[4] Josh Sugarmann, Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns (New Press, 2001).

[5] Rebecca M. Cunningham, Maureen A. Walton, and Patrick M. Carter, “The Major Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States,” New England Journal of Medicine 379, no. 25 (December 20, 2018): 2468–75, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754.

[6] Ashish P. Thakrar et al., “Child Mortality In The US And 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis,” Health Affairs 37, no. 1 (January 2018): 140–49, https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0767.

[7] “Judges of the Court,” accessed July 19, 2021, https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/judges/judges-of-the-court.

[8] Hirschfeld v. BUREAU OF ALCOHOL (Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit 2021).

[9] Arthur L. Kellermann and Donald T. Reay, “Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home,” New England Journal of Medicine 314, no. 24 (June 12, 1986): 1557–60, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198606123142406.

[10] Charles C. Branas et al., “Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault,” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 11 (November 1, 2009): 2034–40, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2008.143099.

[11] “VPC – A Deadly Myth: Women, Handguns, and Self-Defense,” accessed July 19, 2021, https://www.vpc.org/studies/myth.htm.

[12] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[13] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

[14] See, for example, the Supreme Court’s statement in Lewis that “The Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have ‘some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.’” Lewis, 445.

[15] Michael Waldman, “How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment,” POLITICO Magazine, May 19, 2014, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856.html.

[16] Saul Cornell, “Originalism on Trial: The Use and Abuse of History in District of Columbia v. Heller,” Ohio State Law Journal 69 (2008): 629.

[17] Richard Posner, “In Defense of Looseness,” The New Republic 239, no. 3 (August 27, 2008): 35.

[18] John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 482.

[19] Stevens, 483; Warren Burger, PBS News Hour, December 16, 1991, c.

[20] George K. Young, Jr., v. State of Hawaii, No. 12-17808 (9th Cir July 24, 2014); Duncan v. Becerra, 366 F. Supp. 3d 1131 (Dist. Court 2019); Miller v. Bonta, No. Case No. 19-cv-1537-BEN (JLB) (Dist. Court June 4, 2021).

[21] Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

[22] “New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., et al., Petitioners v. City of New York, New York, et Al.,” Supreme Court of the United States, accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.supremecourt.gov/rss/cases/18-280.xml.

[23] Duncan v. Becerra, No. 19-55376 (Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2020).

AAGunV in the News|

Americans Against Gun Violence President Speaks About Gun Violence Prevention at “Pathways for Justice” Event

Americans Against Gun Violence president Dr. Bill Durston was invited to speak on the topic, “Gun Violence in America: A Preventable Epidemic,” during an hour long interactive online forum hosted by the Pathways for Justice Ministry of Sacramento’s St. Francis of Assisi Parish on Monday, June 28. The event was recorded and can be viewed online by clicking on this link:

https://youtu.be/vsTZ0HRicJg

During his presentation, which is supplemented with illustrative slides, Dr. Durston speaks and answers questions about the nature of our country’s gun violence epidemic; the causes of the epidemic; the definitive steps needed to stop the epidemic; current obstacles to taking these steps; and actions that we can take both individually and in concert to overcome those obstacles.

Note that the video recording, which was posted by the Pathways for Justice Ministry, begins and ends with a prayer; but consistent with Americans Against Gun Violence status as a 501(c)(3) secular nonprofit organization, Dr. Durston’s presentation contains no religious content.

AAGunV in the News, Events|

Americans Against Gun Violence Denounces District Court Judge Roger Benitez’s Ruling in Miller v. Bonta that California’s Assault Weapons Ban Violates Second Amendment

Sacramento California, June 9, 2021: Americans Against Gun Violence denounces the ruling by San Diego District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez on June 4, 2021, in the case of James Miller et al v. Rob Bonta, in his official capacity as Attorney General of the State of California, et al, that California’s assault weapons ban violates the Second Amendment.

Judge Benitez’s extreme bias is clear from the very first sentence of his decision, in which he writes, “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.” Judge Benitez’s entire 94 page opinion reads more like a gun lobby manifesto than the reasoned opinion of an objective jurist.

In his ruling, Judge Benitez makes 96 references to the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision in which a narrow five member majority of the Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions, in ruling that the District of Columbia’s partial handgun ban violated the Second Amendment. Prior to Heller, there was no constitutional right, Second Amendment or otherwise, for anyone in the United States to own any kind of a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia.” In Heller, by ruling that the first half of the Amendment, which refers to the need for a “well regulated militia,” was irrelevant to the proper interpretation of second half of the Amendment, which describes “the right to keep and bear arms,” the narrow five member majority of Supreme Court justices allowed the gun lobby to effectively rewrite the Second Amendment. The late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called the gun lobby’s misrepresentation of the Second Amendment “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – ‘I repeat the word fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime.

As egregiously flawed as the 2008 Heller decision is, however, it does not go so far as to state that individual citizens have a constitutional right to own assault rifles. Judge Benitez takes the fraudulent misrepresentation of the Second Amendment to a new low in his ruling in Miller v. Bonta.

This is the third such decision that Judge Benitez has issued in recent years. In June of 2017, two days before California’s large capacity magazine ban, which had been approved by almost a 2:1 margin by California voters as part of Proposition 63, was due to go into effect, Benitez ruled in the case of Duncan v. Becerra that the ban violated the Second Amendment. In April of 2020, Benitez ruled in the case of Rhode v. Becerra that the requirement for background checks for ammunition purchases that was included in Proposition 63 also violated the Second Amendment. Both of those rulings have been stayed pending review by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Benitez’s ruling in Miller v. Bonta has also been stayed for 30 days pending an appeal by California Attorney General Rob Bonta to the Ninth Circuit.

We applaud California Attorney General Rob Bonta for appealing Judge Benitez’s ruling in Miller v. Bonta. The rulings by Judge Benitez demonstrate the need to go much farther, though, and overturn the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision. As long as Heller stands, the gun lobby will continue to go “judge shopping” and find judges like Roger Benitez who will expand the fraudulent misrepresentation of the Second Amendment that was endorsed by the narrow five member majority of the Supreme Court in Heller.

Americans Against Gun Violence is the only national gun violence prevention organization in the United States that openly advocates overturning the 2008 Heller decision and the only gun violence prevention organization that has filed amicus briefs in Second Amendment cases before the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the Heller decision and on the Ninth Circuit to interpret the Heller decision as narrowly as possible until it is overturned.

AAGunV in the News|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at San Jose Valley Transit Authority

Sacramento California, May 27, 2021: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and coworkers of the of the nine people who were killed in the mass shooting at the San Jose Valley Transit Authority (VTA) maintenance facility on Wednesday, May 26. We also extend our sympathy to the members of the VTA staff who were not physically injured but who suffered severe psychological trauma as a result of being present during the shooting.

Following the mass shooting, California Governor Gavin Newsom visited the VTA facility where the shooting occurred and asked, “What the hell is wrong with us?” The Governor should know the answer to this question. Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, spoke with him in person a few years ago, when Newsom was California’s Lieutenant Governor, about the reasons why the United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis and why our rate of gun deaths, day in and day out, is ten times higher than the average rate in other advanced democracies; and Dr. Durston discussed with Lt. Governor Newsom the steps necessary to stop our shameful epidemic of gun violence.

The United States is the only high income democratic country in which the default for gun acquisition is that the person who seeks to acquire a gun can legally do so if the person is of a certain age and can pass a rudimentary background check, done instantaneously by computer in most cases. This guiding principle is termed, “permissive.” In all other advanced democracies, the default is that individuals cannot legally acquire a gun unless they can prove that they have a good reason to own one and can handle one safely. This guiding principle is termed, “restrictive.” And many other democratic countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, recognizing that there is no net protective value in owning or carrying a gun, do not accept “self defense” as a legitimate reason for owning one. California and the rest of the United States should adopt a “restrictive” guiding principle for gun acquisition and disallow the mistaken notion that owning a gun is necessary for “self defense” as a legitimate reason for owning one.

Background checks in other high income democratic countries like Australia, New Zealand, and the UK are done in person, not instantaneously by computer, and involve interviews with the prospective gun purchaser, with past and present domestic partners, and with coworkers, friends, and other people who have knowledge about the prospective gun purchaser’s character. Samuel J. Cassidy, who was reported by his ex-wife, coworkers, and neighbor to be mentally unstable and prone to angry outbursts, would never have been allowed to legally acquire a gun in other advanced democratic countries. California and the rest of the United States should conduct background checks in person as they are done in other democratic countries.

Other high income democratic countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, reacted swiftly and definitively to mass shootings by completely banning civilian ownership of the classes of weapons used in the shootings. Australia and New Zealand decided within less than two weeks to ban civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns – not just so-called “assault weapons” – after the 1996 Port Arthur and 2019 Christchurch mass shootings, respectively; and the UK, which already had a ban on automatic and semi-automatic long guns, also banned civilian ownership of all handguns after the 1996 Dunblane Primary School mass shooting. The rates of gun deaths in Australia and New Zealand are 1/10^th to 1/12^th the rate in the United States, and the rate of gun deaths in the UK is 1/60^th the U.S. rate. California and the rest of the United States should enact a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic long guns, with no “grandfather clause” for individuals who already own them.

Prior to 2008, there was no constitutional obstacle, Second Amendment or otherwise, in California or the rest of the United States to the adoption of stringent gun control laws of the type described above. In 2008, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court created a constitutional right to keep a handgun in the home for “self defense” in the rogue Heller decision. In Heller, the five member majority joined the gun lobby in claiming that the first half of the Second Amendment, which refers to a “well regulated militia,” is irrelevant to the second half of the Amendment, which describes a “right to keep and bear arms.” The late Supreme Court Chief Justice, Warren Burger, had described such an interpretation of the Second Amendment as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups” that he had ever seen in his lifetime. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear another Second Amendment case, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett (NYSRPA v. Corlett), later this year. Given the current composition of the Court, it’s expected that instead of overturning the Heller decision, the Court will probably expand the right it created in Heller. The State of California and the U.S. Department of Justice should join Americans Against Gun Violence in filing an amicus brief in NYSRPA v. Corlett calling on the Court to take the opportunity of this case to overturn Heller, and President Biden should put the Court on notice that if it does not overturn Heller, he will “pack the Court” with enough additional judges to overturn Heller in the near future.

If California and the rest of the United States don’t promptly take the steps described above to stop our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

AAGunV in the News|

Announcing the Winners of our 2021 National High School Essay Contest

Americans Against Gun Violence is pleased to announce the winners of our 2021 National High School Essay Contest. To enter the contest, which was open to all high school students in the United States and its territories, students were required to submit an essay of 500 words or fewer in response to the following prompt:

“Describe the effect on American youth of the confluence of our country’s longstanding gun violence epidemic with the current Covid-19 pandemic and the threat of violent insurrection; and describe what role you believe the adoption of stringent gun control laws should play at this critical time in our nation’s history.”

We received essay submissions from students across the country. The winners were chosen via a rigorous process in which more than 20 Americans Against Gun Violence members participated, reading and rating essays blinded to any student identifying information. In the essay contest instructions, we announced that we would be awarding a total of at least $15,000 to twelve winners, with the option of providing additional awards, as we have done the past two years, if we received more than 12 outstanding essays. Again this year, our readers felt there were indeed more than 12 outstanding essays, and we are therefore awarding a total of $15,900 to 21 winners. The winning essays in this year’s contest come from students attending high school in the states of California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas.

While we are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s essay contest, we are deeply troubled by the students’ descriptions of the devastating effect on American youth of the confluence of the ongoing epidemic of gun violence, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the threat of violent insurrection; and by the sense of betrayal that many students expressed concerning the fact that older generations have not taken the same kind of dramatic action to end the gun violence epidemic – an epidemic that is uniquely American and that disproportionately affects our children and our youth – as they have taken to address Covid-19 – a pandemic that is worldwide and that disproportionately affects older adults. We are also troubled by the fact that again this year, many students have not felt safe in having their names or the names of their high schools published in association with their essays. It is part of our mission at Americans Against Gun Violence to not only ensure that we address our country’s longstanding gun violence epidemic with at least as much urgency and resolve as we have addressed the Covid-19 pandemic, but that we also change the toxic culture in our country that makes students fear for their safety if they speak openly and frankly about the need to take definitive action to protect our children and our youth from the threat of gun violence.

The winners of our 2021 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest are:

First Place Winner

$3,000 Award

Sabrina Brandeis

Monte Vista High School, Danville, California

Weapons of Self-Destruction

…When COVID-19 lockdowns forced schools to close, kids were separated from their friends, creating feelings of isolation, anxiety, and frustration. As a result, during the same period that Americans bought guns in record numbers, 1 in 4 young adults reported suicidal ideation, overwhelming mental health crisis centers. Lonely and depressed children with access to firearms are a deadly combination, especially since guns are the most lethal way to commit suicide….As lockdowns abate, sensational firearm massacres have once again become front-page news, but the silent suffering of millions of youths has gone unrecognized. Unless we enact strict gun-control laws to limit access to firearms, it is inevitable that more incidents like

[the fatal shootings described in this essay] will occur. Now is the time to act, before we condemn America’s youth to another decade of gun tragedies. (Read the full essay)

Second Place Winner

$2,500 Award

Jack Guan

George Washington High School, San Francisco, California

Untitled

Sandy Hook was supposed to be the crisis that set this country on the track to take tangible, concrete action to address the epidemic of gun violence that takes so many lives each year….Even after 20 first graders were massacred at Sandy Hook elementary school, though, Congress failed to take any action to prevent similar tragedies from recurring in the future….More than a decade [later], it’s long past time for our government to replace thoughts and prayers with meaningful action to prove that the United States is a country that loves its children more than its guns. (Read the full essay)

Third Place Winner

$2,000 Award

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

Bayside, New York

Untitled

…On January 6th, 2021, a mob stormed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol as the Electoral College vote count was underway in Congress….As rioters clashed violently with police and broke into the building, members of Congress were evacuated from their chambers. Many congressional staff members, though, legitimately fearing for their lives, had to seek shelter on their own. In a cruel twist of irony, the young staffers knew exactly what had to be done, as they had been preparing for school shootings during their time as students. Their preparedness was a testament to how broken America’s relationship with gun violence really is. Rather than enacting stringent gun control laws to address the longstanding gun violence epidemic wrecking the country, the staffers’ bosses – our elected members of Congress – had opted instead to subject students to routine “lockdown drills,” instilling fear in students of getting shot in a place where they should feel most safe and secure; leaving children and youth to hope that a mass shooting would never actually happen in their school, but to realize that if it did, it was up to them to protect themselves from becoming one of the victims when it should have been the responsibility of older generations to prevent such horrific events from ever occurring in the first place….(Read the full essay)

$1,000 Award Winner

Finn Jacobson

Rex Putnam High School

Milwaukie, Oregon

Running Laps

Every morning, I get up at 6:00am and run laps around my high school track. Its a chance to clear my mind, and to reflect, prepare to focus, and watch the sun rise over that place I’ve always yearned to call home, to feel safe in. But I just can’t….When the sun rises over the United States of America, she sees us all running laps – living in an endless cycle of despair and strife, unable to escape the threat of gun violence. When the sun rises over all the other economically advanced democratic countries of the world, she sees governments that have taken definitive action to protect their citizens from the threat of gun violence. U.S. legislators have the power to adopt stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other democratic countries – laws that will finally bring us to the finish line. It is long past time that our elected leaders use this power to end our country’s vicious cycle of gun violence. (Read the full essay)

$1,000 Award Winner

Jenna Pimenta

Saint Francis High School

Sacramento, California

Untitled

On the first day of Honors Biology, my teacher went over the active shooter lockdown procedure; calm was key. We would lock the doors, close the blinds, and slide underneath the tables on the side of the room nearest to the windows. We would turn off our phones. We would be quiet. And we would wait. As twenty other freshmen and I eyed the dirty tile floor by the window, I thought about how this whole thing was absolutely absurd to someone from any other country but the United States. All because here, people want easy access to firearms more than they want kids to stop getting gunned down in school. (Read the full essay)

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s Name Withheld at Student’s Request)

Cosumnes Oaks High School, Elk Grove, California

Sikhs in America: A Unique Perspective on the Gun Violence Epidemic

In the same week that I celebrated turning eighteen and being fully vaccinated, I was forced to grapple with news that Sikhs working in an Indianapolis FedEx store, some of whom had just immigrated from India and were collecting their first paycheck in America, were gunned down and murdered….While watching the news from Indianapolis, it was impossible to avoid reliving August 5, 2012, when a gunman opened fire on the Wisconsin Sikh Temple that my grandparents attended. They were minutes from entering the Temple when eleven members of the congregation were shot, with seven losing their lives….I am going to college in the Fall and I find myself considering the risk of being shot on campus and how to keep myself safe. High school graduates should not be watching college campus videos thinking, “Where am I least likely to be shot….” Stringent gun control laws are long overdue, and it is abhorrent that many lawmakers in Congress put the safety of the people behind demands of special interest groups like the NRA. (Read the full essay)

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s Name Withheld at Student’s Request)

Aragon High School, San Mateo, California

America Reaps the Whirlwind

A confluence of events this past year shook the foundations of American democracy, leaving young people to wonder what kind of a world they will inherit. A global pandemic took center stage when 2020 debuted, stealing headlines from an entrenched foe: gun violence. As 2021 dawned, insurrectionists tried to topple the government of the United States in an attempted coup. It was the perfect storm….Sometimes, crises arouse the best in Americans. This past year, as freedom trumped common sense, they exposed the worst.

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

When I Say Now, I Mean Now

I am the daughter of immigrants. I soak up this country like a sponge and I wear it like the whole world is watching. I tell my parents what I learn in school – “government” when I was six and “rhetoric” when I was twelve and “insurrection” at sixteen. Nobody taught me “gun.” Nobody taught me “trigger,” “open-fire,” or “Glock,” because we already knew. We have read the news and screamed far too many times….

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School at Student’s Request)

Gun Control: The Most Important Kind of Child-Proofing

In the past year, people across the globe have gotten to know the inside of their houses very well….The sense of familiarity which stems from this consistency leads to an air of security: our home is the place where we feel the safest, and the most at ease….That is why I was so shocked to learn that 4.6 million American children live in homes with an unsupervised gun, and further, that most of those children know where that gun is stored, and some of them have even accessed it without their parents knowing. Obviously enough, the presence of a potentially-lethal firearm in the reach of young children is a recipe for disaster. Studies have demonstrated that it manifestly increases the risk of accidental self-harm. This is made clear by the fact that 8 children are accidentally injured or killed by firearms while in the home every single day. When you throw the pandemic into the mix, these statistics are a recipe for disaster….Homes are meant to be safe, and with proper gun control, politicians can ensure that they are so. Now is when we need it the most.

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School at Student’s Request)

All It Takes Is One: How Guns Sparked 2020’s Explosion

….What do you get when you put millions of guns, massive unemployment, increased anxiety and depression, and a political boiling pot all in the same country at the same time? That was the question we faced in May of last year, and the answer was precisely what one would expect….May 2020 had the highest number of mass shootings since 2013….Many countries, however, have figured out how to prevent sparks from setting off an explosion. For inspiration, we can look to the example of New Zealand. Less than one month after a mass shooting erupted in Christchurch,
the country issued a ban on most semi-automatic weapons. The enactment process was neither lengthy nor difficult, for everyone realized that a prohibition was necessary. Here in America, we have yet to come to that same conclusion….

$250 Award Winner

(Student’s Name Withheld at Student’s Request)

High Tech High, San Diego, California

Our Right to Life

Before the pandemic, my school had an active shooter threat. Right before lunch, our school went on lockdown. As we huddled in the back of our classroom, our teacher began flipping tables over and stuffing cracks with backpacks, creating D-Day like fortifications. In another classroom, a teacher grabbed a pole, ready to spear any potential gunman coming into the class. Our math teacher, just 25 years old, hid behind his doorway with a pair of scissors….Across the country, fear and paranoia have become a cornerstone in our schools. Whenever there’s so much as a loud noise our entire class is in fight or flight mode, looking to the exits….The Declaration of Independence reads “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” How can we even claim to follow those ideals when we deny Americans the right to their own life?…America’s past generations have failed us. We’re too young to vote but old enough to die….

$250 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

Their Future

As a high school senior, I am heartbroken with each headline of the latest tragedy in our schools, our stores, our businesses, knowing that families are grieving their insurmountable losses. At the same time, I am infuriated with the politicians who pocket money from pro-gun lobbyists and break the unfortunate news to the public: that as legislators, they can’t do anything in their legislative power to legislate. Trends are fortunately changing though, slowly but surely….What teens in the United States have realized is that curbside vigils and ‘thought and prayers’ are poor substitutes for real gun control laws….

$100 Award Winner

Ann Alexander

Spring Valley High School, Columbia, South Carolina

The Effects of Gun Violence on the Younger Generation

In March of 2020, schools shut down and transitioned to e-learning because of the Covid-19 pandemic. With students learning from home, the threat of gun violence in schools decreased. When schools opened back up in the fall for face-to-face instruction, the fear that students feel at school returned full force….The older generation has never experienced the threat of school shootings to the extent that students do today. They’ll never understand what it’s like to walk the halls and wonder where the best hiding place would be. They’ll never sit in silence during a drill and think that one day, this could be the real thing. They’ve never planned out what they would say in a text message to their loved ones, should the threat become a reality. They have never walked out of their home to go to school and thought to themselves, this could be the last time I see my family….The adoption of stringent gun control laws would be the first step in diminishing this fear.

$100 Award Winner

Mallory Doyle

St. Joseph High School, Trumbull, Connecticut

A Journey of Hope

As I travel a familiar path from my home to my grandparent’s, I pass through Newtown, CT. I see signs painted with stars and words of inspiration – peace, love, hope. Those signs appeared in 2012, days after the Sandy Hook massacre but are now faded and neglected. I went to school that fateful morning, a couple of towns over, unaware of the violence that would later haunt me….

$100 Award Winner

Benjamin Teplitz

Susquehanna Township High School, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Untitled

Growing up in a country where high schoolers need to practice where to hide if a murderous gunman infiltrates their school, a country where I was instructed at a young age to push desks against the classroom door to create a barricade from a shooter, a country that taught me to use a stapler as a weapon if someone was trying to kill me and my classmates in school, is terrifying…. Teen suicide rates in the United States have been increasing dramatically….Many believe this number has increased due to the COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines….Having tighter gun laws would save many of those lives…. Similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of violent insurrection conflated with our country’s gun violence epidemic, has affected American youth….[T]he potential for violent insurrection is frightening to many children, including myself. Especially, when the individuals who are threatening insurrection are those who oppose common-sense gun control legislation….

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

Untitled

Growing up in America, there was never a day where gun violence was not on the news. Every week, I’d wake up to another school shooting; another hate crime; another suicide….Mass shootings are a part of normal American life; how could you turn away from it? Our generation becoming more numb to gun violence….We need to follow in suit of Australia, the UK, and Japan. Stringent gun control will prevent another generation of youth numb to the news of gun violence and another generation practicing lockdown drills in school.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

Gun Control: A Vaccine for the Epidemic of Gun Violence

Between 1968 and 2011, 1.4 million American lives were claimed by gun violence, a figure almost two and a half times greater than those claimed by the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.A. Now more than ever, in a time of civil unrest and economic turmoil, it ought to become a top priority to restrict access to lethal firearms….

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

Untitled

The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 left 26 people dead, including 20 children. The slaughter, and many others since, should have spurred tougher gun laws. Instead, firearm sales spiked, resulting in more deaths. Gun sales surged again in the wake of COVID-19, the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. During a four-month period last year, nearly three million more firearms entered private hands. The attack on the U.S. Capitol earlier this year gave further warrant for tougher laws. Bogus claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen so inflamed some conspiracy theorists that they were primed for insurrection. The mob stormed Congress, a riot that left five people dead and desecrated the tabernacle of democracy. Meanwhile, the coronavirus forced students to attend classes virtually, interrupting the trend line of school shootings….The country, however, is slowly returning to normal. The Capitol has been repaired, COVID-19 vaccines are now available, and there have been seven mass shootings within a week. Historically, the nation’s immigration policies — not its full of loopholes gun laws — have come under close inspection in troubled times. Border security is a distraction. The heavily-armed mob that should be feared is already here — living next door to us.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld at Student’s Request)

Untitled

Mass shootings and gun violence as a whole are so ingrained in the fabric of our culture that youth in particular have become unbelievably desensitized to it. While each of these stories evokes incredible emotion and heartache, anything amounting to shock factor has been completely lost. The horrifying reality is that no one is surprised when countless people are murdered at the hands of someone who had access to weapons fit for war. This is even more pertinent when taking into account January 6th’s violent insurrection. The culture and overarching attitudes surrounding guns played a large role in the events of that day and will play a large role should something similar happen in the future. With regard to this, all of my peers and I should be astonished and taken aback that this could ever happen in our country–but we are not. We are not because the history and laws in the United States allow for this kind of behavior to both exist and persist. More stringent gun control is absolutely vital to the advancement of our country….

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld Pending Student’s Consent)

Untitled

I am a student, a sister, a woman, and a citizen, as the country slowly begins to reopen, I hold two distinct fears in my heart; one, that my elementary-aged siblings may contract this virus and slowly fade away in front of my eyes, and two, that they will be taken from us as schools reopen and someone decides that they are both judge and jury, and force their last memories to be one of terror and loneliness….As an American youth, and a woman, I have been fearful of guns since the active shooter drills began in Kindergarten. We have failed previous generations in upholding their innocence, but we can be better.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School Withheld Pending Student’s Consent)

A Warm Welcome

My high school experience started with two school shooting alerts and active shooter drills, all in the first week of September. I still remember – school staff members came banging on doors, teachers swiftly killed lights and students seamlessly achieved silence. Planned and tested, as I learned later on, this was the annual norm. Not even a month had passed and I was hastily thrown into a new, vicious reality of being an American teenager….Now, uncompromising firearm regulation is more important than ever before. With gun sales rising by 40% in 2020, it is crucial to limit general weapon accessibility….In the words of activist Greta Thunberg: “We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change — and it has to start today.” I may have been lucky my school experience ended with alerts. But I’m not willing to push that luck, not for me, not for anyone else.

Past Essay Contests|

Our 2021 National High School Essay Contest is Now Closed for Submissions

The 2021 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest is now closed to new submissions, and the winners have been chosen. We’re in the process of contacting the winners, and we’ll be posting the winning essays in the near future. A total of $15,000 will be awarded to the 12 top winners, with $3,000 for first place, $2,5oo for second place, $2,000 for third place, $1,000 each for 4th through 10th place, and $250 each for 11th and 12th place. Because of the large number of outstanding essays that we received again this year, we’ll also be awarding $100 each to several additional students.

To enter the contest, students were asked to submit an essay of 500 words or fewer in response to the following prompt:

Describe the effect on American youth of the confluence of our country’s longstanding gun violence epidemic with the current Covid-19 pandemic and the threat of violent insurrection; and describe what role you believe the adoption of stringent gun control laws should play at this critical time in our nation’s history.

Please return to this page in the near future to read the winning essays in this year’s contest.

Past Essay Contests|

Our 2020 virtual National Gun Violence Prevention Conference is now available for online viewing

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, in lieu of an in person annual fall dinner this year, we hosted our first annual “virtual” fall conference via Zoom on Sunday, November 15. Our keynote speaker was Dr. Michael North of Scotland. Dr. North lost his five year old daughter, Sophie, in the mass shooting at the Dunblane Primary School in Scotland in 1996. Great Britain already had a ban on automatic and semi-automatic long guns, but the Dunblane mass shooting was committed by a man who legally owned the handguns he used to kill Sophie, her teacher, and 15 other students. Following the Dunblane mass shooting, Dr. North helped lead a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Great Britain. In his keynote presentation, which we recorded and have posted online, Dr. North humbly and eloquently describes how he and a small group of other grieving Dunblane parents who had no prior political experience or infrastructure, but who fervently believed that nothing short of a complete handgun ban would suffice to protect other children from becoming victims of future mass shootings, were able to succeed in achieving what had previously been thought to be politically impossible. Since the handgun ban went into effect in 1998, there have been no further school shootings, and the rate of gun deaths in Great Britain is currently 1/60^th the rate in the United States.

The recording of the first hour of our November 15 conference also includes an enlightening presentation by the prominent San Francisco Bay Area attorney, Anthony Schoenberg, J.D., concerning the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision, in which a narrow 5-4 majority of the Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court opinions, in ruling that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own a handgun unrelated to service in a well regulated militia. Mr. Schoenberg is a recognized expert on the Second Amendment. He received the pro bono attorney of the year award from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in 2015 for his work in successfully defending a local large capacity magazine ban against a gun lobby challenge in the case of Fyock v. Sunnyvale. In his presentation during the first hour of our November 15 conference, Mr. Schoenberg speaks about some of the more egregious distortions of the truth in the Heller majority opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, including the hypocrisy in Scalia claiming to adhere to the original text of the Second Amendment at the same time that he argues that the phrase, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” which constitutes the first half of the Amendment, is irrelevant to the proper interpretation of the second half, which states, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The second hour of the November 15 conference was devoted to a more free form discussion led by Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, during which all attendees were invited to provide input concerning how we can work more effectively together to stop our country’s epidemic of gun violence. In order to encourage the free exchange of ideas, participants in the second hour of the discussion were not asked to consent to have their comments posted online.

We encourage everyone who visits this page of the Americans Against Gun Violence website to view the moving and informative presentations by Michael North Ph.D., and Anthony Schoenberg, J.D., during the first hour of our November 15 conference. We hope that after viewing the video, you’ll be as inspired as we were, and that you’ll consider becoming an official paid member of Americans Against Gun Violence, if you haven’t already done so, and also consider making an additional contribution, if you’re able, to support our ongoing efforts to stop our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence.

Uncategorized|

Register Now for our free National Gun Violence Prevention Conference on Sunday, November 15, 12 Noon-2 PM PST, Featuring a Keynote Address by Dr. Michael North of Scotland

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, in lieu of an in person annual fall dinner this year, we’re going to be hosting our first annual “virtual” fall conference via Zoom on Sunday, November 15, from 12 noon-2 PM PST. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Michael North of Scotland. Dr. North lost his five year old daughter, Sophie, in the mass shooting committed with handguns at the Dunblane Primary School in Scotland in 1996. Dr. North subsequently helped lead a successful campaign in Great Britain to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns. (Great Britain already had a ban on automatic and semi-automatic rifles.) Since the ban went into effect, there have been no subsequent school shootings, and the rate of gun deaths in Great Britain is currently 1/60^th the rate in the United States.

In addition to the keynote address by Dr. North, during the first hour of the conference, a prominent San Francisco Bay Area attorney, Mr. Anthony Schoenberg, who successfully defended a gun lobby challenge to a local ordinance banning large capacity magazines in the case of Fyock v. Sunnyvale, will speak about the Second Amendment and the need to overturn the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision. Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, will wrap up the first hour with a reprise of portions of his talk at the American Public Health Association annual conference in October and a discussion of the opportunities and challenges that a new Biden/Harris presidential administration will present for progress in preventing gun violence. There will be an opportunity for Q&A after each of the scheduled presentations.

The second hour of the conference will be devoted to a more free form discussion in which we’ll invite supporters to provide input concerning how we can work more effectively together to achieve our goal of reducing rates of gun violence in the United States to levels at or below the rates in the other high income democratic countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings occur rarely, if ever, and in which the rate of gun deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in our own country.

There is no fee to participate in the conference, and you don’t have to already be a paid member of Americans Against Gun Violence to take part in it, but we are asking everyone who plans to participate to register in advance. Due to technical issues related to the Zoom platform, the conference will be divided into two parts, with the first hour being conducted as a Zoom “webinar,” and the second hour being conducted as a Zoom “meeting.” To register for the two parts of the conference, just click on the links below and enter your name and email address.

Click on this link to register for the webinar beginning at 12 noon PST.

Click on this link to register for the meeting that immediately follows the webinar (beginning about 1 PM PST).

After you register via the above links, you’ll be sent an email from Americans Against Gun Violence via the Zoom server with the links for logging in on the day of the conference, Sunday, November 15. In the email regarding the first hour, the starting time will be listed as 11:30 AM. This is the earliest time that you can log in. Note, though, that the webinar itself will start at 12 noon.

We’re not requiring any fee to register for the November 15 conference, but since the conference is being held in lieu of our annual fall dinner, and since our fall dinners have been our main fundraising events, we would appreciate it if everyone who plans to participate in the conference and who is not currently a paid member of Americans Against Gun Violence would take this opportunity to join for just $25/year ($10/year for students); and we’d also appreciate it if participants would consider making an additional contribution to Americans Against Gun Violence, if you’re able, to support our other ongoing work.

AAGunV in the News, Events|

Americans Against Gun Violence president Dr. Bill Durston speaks at the American Public Health Association annual conference

Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, spoke on the topic of preventing gun violence at the annual conference of American Public Health Association (APHA) on Monday, October 26. The APHA, founded in 1872, is the country’s oldest, largest, and most diverse organization of public health professionals. The 2020 annual conference was initially scheduled to be held in San Francisco but was moved to a virtual format because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Click on this link for the full text of Dr. Durston’s presentation with references in PDF format. The main points that he emphasized in his talk are summarized below.

Gun violence is a serious public health problem in our country

The problem of gun violence receives the most public attention following horrific mass shootings. Since 1983, the number of mass shootings has been steadily increasing, and the number of people killed and injured in mass shootings has been rising even more steeply as the perpetrators have employed increasingly deadly weaponry to carry out their crimes. But mass shootings account for only a tiny fraction of all U.S. gun deaths. On an average day, more than 100 Americans are killed with guns, and two to three times this many people suffer non-fatal but often devastating, life changing gunshot wounds. Since 1968, more Americans have died of gunshot wounds than all the U.S. soldiers killed by any means in all the wars in which our country has ever been involved.

Rates of gun deaths and injuries are far higher in the United States than in other high income democratic countries

This rate of gun related deaths in the United States is 10 times higher than the average rate in other high income democratic countries. The overall U.S. homicide rate is seven times higher, driven by a gun homicide rate that is 25 times higher. For U.S. teenagers, the gun homicide rate is a staggering 82 times higher than the rate for teens in other high income democratic countries. If it weren’t for a U.S. gun suicide rate that is eight times higher than in the other high income democratic countries, the United States would have one of the lowest suicide rates of any democratic country. When access to guns is restricted, people don’t generally substitute other highly lethal means to attempt suicide or commit assaults. Instead, overall rates of suicide and homicide go down.

Many factors contribute to gun violence, but the most significant factor is also the one that is least discussed – our lax gun control laws and the easy access to guns

Many factors have been cited as contributing to our country’s extraordinarily high rate of gun violence. These include: a culture of violence in the United States, and pandering to violence in the popular media; socio-economic disparity and institutional racism; drug and alcohol abuse; and mental illness. While these are all important issues that need to be addressed, the United States is not an extreme outlier in any of these areas as compared with other high income democratic countries. The factor that is least discussed, but the area in which the United States is an extreme outlier, is our lax gun control laws and easy access to guns.

U.S. gun laws are fundamentally different from the laws in all other high income democratic countries

In all other high income democratic countries, the burden of proof is on the potential gun buyer to show that he or she has a legitimate need to have a gun and can handle one safely. And recognizing that there’s no net protective value in owning or carrying a gun, many high income democratic countries don’t accept “self defense” as a legitimate reason for having a gun. In the United States, anyone of a certain age who seeks to acquire a gun can legally do so unless the government can prove through a rudimentary background check that he or she falls into one or more narrow categories of persons being prohibited from owning firearms. The U.S. background check system is so flawed that even most individuals who have gone on to commit mass shootings have been able to pass background checks and legally purchase the guns they used in their crimes.

The U.S. response to mass shootings has been dramatically different from the responses of other high income democratic countries.

It took the Australian government just 12 days to decide to ban civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic firearms after the 1996 Port Arthur mass shooting, and there were no further mass shootings in Australia for the next 22 years. New Zealand reacted in a similarly swift and definitive manner following the 2019 Christchurch mosque mass shootings. Great Britain already had a ban on civilian ownership of automatic and semi-automatic rifles, but after the mass shooting committed with handguns at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, it took the British government less than two years to decide to ban all civilian handgun ownership. There have been no further school shootings since the ban went into effect, and the gun death rate in Britain is currently 1/60^th the U.S. rate.

In the United States, by contrast, it would be too kind to say that our federal government has done nothing since 1996 to prevent mass shootings. When the CDC supported studies in the 1990’s documenting the seriousness of the gun violence epidemic in our country, Congress cut the CDC’s funding and placed a prohibition on the use of federal funds to advocate gun control. That prohibition was renewed every year through 2018. In 2004, instead of strengthening the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, Congress allowed it to expire. In 2005, Congress passed a bill giving gunmakers unprecedented protection from products liability lawsuits.

The main obstacles to adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries are four widely accepted myths

Myth #1: The Second Amendment was intended to confer an individual right to own guns.

Few people realize that first time in U.S. history that the Supreme Court ever ruled that the Second Amendment conferred any kind of individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a “well regulated militia” was in the 2008 Heller case. The Supreme Court had ruled in four previous cases that the Second Amendment did not confer such a right, including in the 1980 case of Lewis v. United States, in which the Court stated:

The Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”

The majority opinion in the Heller decision, which was written by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has been publicly condemned by respected constitutional authorities as a “radical departure” from prior legal precedent, an example of “snow jobs” produced by well-staffed justices, and as “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship.” In his book, The Making of a Justice, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Heller is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my

[35 year] tenure on the bench.” Stevens also noted that the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment had been “so well decided” prior to Heller that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called the gun lobby’s ongoing misrepresentation of the Amendment “One of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The Heller decision is worse, though, than even these harsh criticisms might indicate. In creating a constitutional obstacle, where none previously existed, to the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in all the other high income democratic countries of the world, Heller is literally a death sentence for tens of thousands of Americans annually. We should not be timid about openly stating that Heller was wrongly decided and must be overturned.

Myth #2: Honest, law-abiding people should own guns “for protection”

There is overwhelming evidence that guns in the homes and communities of honest, law abiding people are far more likely to be used to harm them than to protect them. This evidence includes the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Reports showing that guns are used in criminal homicides 34 times more often than they’re used to kill someone in self defense. We should all work to debunk the myth of “guns for protection.”

Myth #3: We can stop our country’s epidemic of gun violence without substantially reducing the number of privately owned guns in circulation.

When we talk about stopping the epidemic of gun violence in our country, we should be talking, at a minimum, about reducing rates of gun deaths to levels at or below the average for the other high income democratic countries. In the graph below, representative high income democratic countries are represented by circles, plotted according to their rates of gun deaths on the horizontal axis and their per capita gun ownership on the vertical axis. The graph also includes a computer generated “best fit” line that emphasizes that direct relationship between rates of gun deaths and per capita gun ownership. Clearly, the United States is an extreme outlier in both rates of gun deaths and per capita gun ownership.

Anyone who claims that we can stop the epidemic of gun violence in our country without reducing the pool of privately owned guns is essentially arguing that we can ignore the best fit line and instead move the lonely USA circle in the right upper corner of this graph horizontally to the left on the gun death rate axis without moving it downward on the guns per capita axis. If we were to accomplish this remarkable shift, we’d still be all alone in the left upper corner of the graph as the only high income democratic country in the world that has even been able to achieve a low rate of gun deaths despite high per capita gun ownership.

Americans Against Gun Violence is the only national gun violence prevention organization in the entire United States that openly advocates adopting stringent gun control laws – including a ban on all semi-automatic rifles, comparable to the ban that Australia enacted after the 1996 Port Arthur mass shooting, and a ban on handguns comparable to the ban that Great Britain enacted after the 1996 Dunblane Primary School mass shooting – that would lead to a reduction in the number of privately owned guns in our country. Joshua Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, summed up the limited measures advocated by other gun violence prevention organizations in his book, “Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns,” in which he wrote:

America’s gun lobby would be on the run, if only the gun control advocates would bother to chase them. Instead, trapped by their perception of the politically achievable, gun control advocates are always on the defensive….They nibble around the edges of half-solutions and good intentions dramatically out of sync with the reality of gun violence in America.

Instead of continuing to “nibble around the edges of half-solutions and good intentions,” it’s past time that we should take definitive steps to stop the epidemic of gun violence in our country.

Myth #4: We need more research

In a gun violence prevention “fact sheet” entitled, Gun Violence Is A Public Health Crisis, the APHA itself calls for more research concerning “right to carry laws;” “violence prevention programs for children;” “the link between firearms policy and suicidal behavior;” and “the effects of different gun safety technologies.” In fact, however, there is already extensive evidence showing that liberal “right to carry laws” not only do not reduce crime, but are associated with increased rates of gun violence; that so-called “gun safety” programs for children and youth do not prevent firearm related deaths and injuries but are used by the gun lobby and the associated gun industry to build their future customer base; that lax gun control laws and easy access to guns are independent risk factors for suicide; and that “gun safety technologies” are largely ineffective because, as the National Research Council has pointed out, “Firearms, after all, are designed to injure.”

It was shameful for Congress to cut the CDC’s budget for gun violence research back in the 1990’s after the CDC funded studies showing that a gun in the home was 43 times more likely to be used to kill a household member than to kill an intruder; that children under the age of 15 in the United States were being killed by guns at a rate that was 12 times higher than in the other high income democratic countries of the world; and that gunshot wounds were the fourth leading cause of years of potential life lost before age 65 in our country. This being said, more research at this point will only document more senseless, preventable firearm related deaths and injuries.

There was already enough research in 1968 for the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut to state on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

Pious condolences will no longer suffice….Quarter measures and half measures will no longer suffice….The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.

In Conclusion

Dr. Durston noted that skeptics claim that we’ll never be able to adopt stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries. He stated that he’s confident that some day we will. The only question is, how many more innocent Americans will be killed and maimed with guns before that day arrives. He called on members of the American Public Health Association to commit to joining Americans Against Gun Violence in doing everything within their power to help make that day come sooner rather than later.

Note: Dr. Durston is a board certified emergency physician and a former expert marksman in the U.S. Marine Corps, decorated for “courage under fire” during the Vietnam War.

AAGunV in the News|

Announcing the Winners of our 2020 National High School Essay Contest

Congratulations to the winners in this year’s Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest! Their outstanding essays are posted below.

The prompt for the 2020 contest was the following position statement published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in April of 2000:

Firearm regulations, to include bans of handguns and assault weapons, are the most effective way to reduce firearm-related injuries.

The contest was open to all high school students in the United States and its territories. Students were asked to describe their thoughts about the above position statement in 500 words or less. The essays were read by more than 20 Americans Against Gun Violence supporters and rated based on the criteria of accuracy, originality, clarity, cohesiveness, and overall impact.

We initially announced that Americans Against Gun Violence would be awarding a total of $15,000 in this year’s contest, distributed among twelve essay contest winners. After reading all of this year’s entries, however, we decided that there were so many compelling essays that we would increase the total amount of awards to $16,200, distributed among 24 winners. Also, we decided to ask Dr. Michael North, who lost his five year old daughter, Sophie, in the 1996 mass shooting at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and who subsequently helped lead a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in the United Kingdom, to make the final decision concerning the first, second, and third place winners. Dr. North not only graciously accepted this responsibility, he also recorded a moving video message concerning the importance of the students’ essays and the hope they give him that the United States of America will finally take definitive steps, comparable to the ones that Great Britain took over two decades ago, to end our country’s epidemic of gun violence.

Although we believe that our annual essay contest provides an important platform for students to publicize their views on the subject of preventing gun violence, as in past years, a number of our 2020 essay contest winners have chosen to not have their names and/or high school affiliations released in association with their essays. We understand the concerns of these students, and we support their decisions to withhold identifying information from the public. We are at the same time deeply concerned, though, about the toxic atmosphere in our country that not only makes students legitimately fear the possibility of becoming victims of gun violence, but also of being subjected to intimidation in one form or another (including a death threat in the case of one of this year’s winners) if they openly express their opinions on the subject of gun control. It is part of the mission of Americans Against Gun Violence to not only protect the physical safety of our children and youth, but to also protect their psychological well-being and to eradicate the culture of fear that suppresses open, objective discussion concerning the need for urgent, definitive action to end our country’s epidemic of gun violence, an epidemic that disproportionately harms our children and our youth.

We hope that you’ll read all of the winning essays, and that you’ll be as moved by them as we are. We also hope that you’ll agree with us that our annual Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest is an important way of fostering and rewarding critical thinking among our youth on the issue of gun violence prevention, and that you’ll consider making a tax-deductible contribution to the essay contest fund to help ensure that we’re able to continue to offer the contest in future years.

Here are this year’s winning essays:

First Place Winner ($3,000 Award)

Kobi Khong

Yorba Linda High School

Yorba Linda, California

A Shot in the Dark

…I’ve grown up in a generation of children where our greatest fears aren’t tests, but rather forgetting to say goodbye; where every single word said must be thought out since no one knows which words might be our last; where our core curriculum includes learning to cower under counters and calm our classmates’ crying….We’ve forced children to become adults far sooner than they should have to. It’s not only terrifying, but it’s also disheartening, that even after all the mass shootings, legislation wise, nothing has changed….How much longer will it take, and how many more innocent lives will be lost, before our country overturns the

[Supreme Court’s 2008] rogue Heller decision and adopts definitive gun control laws, including bans on civilian ownership of handguns and assault weapons? [Read the full essay]

Second Place Winner ($2,500 Award)

(Student’s name withheld at student’s request)

Aragon High School

San Mateo, California

Untitled

…Our response to COVID-19 has spawned economic uncertainty and roiled financial markets. The threat has disrupted travel plans for millions of Americans, produced quarantines, and generated almost non-stop news coverage. But as deadly as the coronavirus pandemic has been for older adults and people with other serious underlying medical illnesses…infection with COVID-19 causes little or no symptoms in most children and youth….Meanwhile, another epidemic that kills an estimated 40,000 Americans every year and that disproportionately affects children and youth rages unabated and with far less public alarm….[Read the full essay]

Third Place Winner ($2,000 Award)

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Never Again

How many times does our country have to say “Never again?” to another mass shooting?…We said it for Columbine in 1999, for Sandy Hook in 2012, and for Orlando in 2016. We said it again in 2017 for Las Vegas. And we shouted it on February 14th, 2018 for Parkland….Although many people claim that we won’t be able to end the gun violence epidemic in our country any time soon, I have hope that we will….I have hope that our generation has the power to say, for the last time, “Never again.” [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Hasan Alsamman

Bella Vista High School

Fair Oaks, California

Protecting Our Core Values

…In 2017, civilian gun-related deaths reached their highest level in U.S. history….This is the clear reality of gun violence in America – a reality that is inconsistent with our core values….There is undeniable evidence that the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other advanced democratic countries, including bans on handguns and assault rifles, would drastically reduce rates of firearm-related deaths and injuries in our country. Though we are faced with a deeply rooted opposition, if we are true to our core values, we cannot stop pushing for these regulations, as tens of thousands of American lives are at stake every year. [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Rom David Arca

John F. Kennedy High School

Sacramento, California

The Last Thing Our Family Needs Is A Gun

…Watching the news, I saw gun stores with lines stretching around the block. Buyers justified their purchases with fears of looting, with some dismissing criticisms with a wordy reference to the Second Amendment or prideful remarks that flaunt ownership of semiautomatic rifles like, “Say that to my AR-15.”…Growing up in a culture that is a foil to American individualism, I’ve always been fascinated by the zeal in people’s excuses for gun ownership, especially of assault weapons. I see the defense of gun ownership as a product of machismo and an irrational cling to a sense of power….The last thing our family needs is a gun. [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

I Miss You

…When the final bell rang, I went to my friends to give each other hugs and laughs. I immediately noticed someone was missing, and had been missing school for a week now. At the time, I thought nothing of it; it was normal to leave school a week before break….At home, I decided to scroll through my Instagram, when suddenly like an ambush, calls and texts flooded my phone….My friend who had been gone for a week had committed suicide. The next day, I learned that my friend used his father’s gun. [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Finn Jacobson

(High School name withheld at student’s request)

Portland, Oregon

The Epidemic They Ignore

…I have spent the last two years of my life begging adults to listen, drafting proposed gun violence prevention legislation myself and lobbying at our State Capitol. Over the past few months, I’ve seen legislators who have long turned a blind eye to our pleas to take definitive action to stop our country’s deadly epidemic of gun violence suddenly spring into action in response to the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s a crisis,” they say, and yet so is gun violence….It’s well documented that infection with COVID-19 causes minimal if any symptoms in most children and youth, yet we are taking it seriously in order to safeguard our elders. We are staying home and abiding by the regulations….When the coronavirus pandemic is over, how will the adults in power protect our health in return for our dedication to protecting theirs? [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

Katie Kenny

Oak Ridge High School

El Dorado Hills, California

This Is Not A Drill: Addressing The Gun Violence Issue In America

Run. Hide. Fight. Year after year, teachers instruct their students about what to do in the event of an active shooting, conditioning students to create a plan on how to make it out of school without gunshot wounds. In each of my classrooms, I know which cabinets I can fit in, the objects I can throw, and the routes I can run to avoid being gunned down….[Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

All Is Not Well: A Call To Action

…Nearly 40,000 people lose their lives to firearms every year in this country, and that rate is increasing. People of every color and creed are forced into fear because, in a country with more guns than people, everyone is a potential threat. The United States has a gun problem. What have we done to fix it? Nothing. We’ve given the victims: innocent men, women, and children, our hollow thoughts and prayers instead of our protection….This isn’t the American way. Enough is enough. It’s time to fight back. [Read the full essay]

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Gun Violence: America’s Lost Promise

….In some U.S. states, students can legally get an AR-15 before a high school diploma. Only in America….March of this year was the first March without a school shooting since 2002, courtesy of COVID-19. Yet the gun violence epidemic draws comparatively little attention….Our relationship with guns has grown from an affection to an addiction. As a nation, we are poorer for it. The dead and wounded are America’s lost promise. [Read the full essay]

$250 Award Winner

Lindsey Perry

Fairfield Ludlow High School

Fairfield, Connecticut

Changing the Narrative: Creating a New Normal Without Gun Violence

I was 7 years old when I learned about school shootings and ironically I was sitting in school when I did. I remember the look of anguish on my 2nd-grade teacher’s face as she explained to her class of seven-year-olds about the Sandy Hook shooting merely 30 min from our school. Back then I didn’t understand the concept of using a gun to hurt others, but now I do….[Read the full essay]

$250 Award Winner

Mayur Talele

Herricks High School

New Hyde Park, New York

Now Is The Time For Change

…There is a need for the youth of our generation to step up and remind the nation that during a time of many struggles, including the Covid-19 pandemic, in the long term, gun violence is our country’s most deadly epidemic of all….Most other advanced democratic nations promptly adopted stringent gun control laws in response to mass shootings. We, the United States, have already experienced enough mass shootings. We do not need to live through more to understand that now is the time for change. [Read the full essay]

$100 Award Winner

Sarah Allen

El Dorado High School

Placerville, California

Life or Liberty

…Gun regulation is the most effective tool to reduce gun violence. So, if politicians are truly concerned about my education, and about my potential as a consumer, voter, and worker whose role and responsibility it will be to uphold the future American economy and democracy, where is my protection?…I ask you, where is my safety, and the safety of my friends, peers, and teachers? Where is the law, created specifically so that I have the right to my “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?” Pro-gun politicians and protesters always seem to focus on the second aspect – on their liberty. But I ask, I demand: what good is your liberty if it infringes on my life?

$100 Award Winner

Nishant Balaji

Folsom High School

Folsom, California

Untitled

Guns….People justify their right to own these deadly weapons by citing the Second Amendment, but how many have actually read it? The Second Amendment states, “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.”…The phrase that’s most commonly thrown around is “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.”… But what of the rest of the amendment? Where in our society today, do we see “a well regulated Militia?”…The Second Amendment is a relic from an old time that does not apply any longer….

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s name withheld at student’s request)

Casa Roble Fundamental High School

Orangevale, California

Untitled

…Many Americans against stricter gun control are quick to claim that more regulations would infringe upon their ability to protect themselves and their families against violent perpetrators and a tyrannical government….However, in reality guns are rarely used in self-defense, and are the least employed protective behavior when violent crimes occur….It’s time to open our eyes to the glaringly obvious pattern that repeats itself every day across America….Will we continue to accept our new reality of continuous fear…at the hands of laws that sacrifice security over an unfounded “right?”…Our truly inalienable rights are infringed upon when unqualified citizens are given access to dangerous firearms which were created with no other purpose than to harm and kill, and do just that to innocents who live in a country that values much else over the safety of its people.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Gun Debate: Trumping Common Sense

With more than 393 million firearms in circulation – five guns for every family of four – there are more weapons than people in the United States. In 2018 alone, 39,740 people died from gun-related injuries….Firearm regulation is not only the best way to treat this contagion, it is our only hope….Politics has trumped common sense in the gun law debate. As a nation, we are the poorer for it. America must bolster its defense against gun violence with regulations – the most effective tool we have.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Untitled

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” Day in and day out, gun advocates echo these words. However, this simply isn’t true. When the autopsy is revealed, death by gunshot and internal bleeding is the result, not death by person. “Firearm regulations, to include bans of handguns and assault weapons, are the most effective way to reduce firearm-related injuries.” This phrase is true, and needs to be addressed to better resolve the gun violence issues in America today….

$100 Award Winner

Ashley Lucia

Granite Bay High School

Granite Bay, California

We Must Act Now

…I’ve been raised in a sheltered, small community for the entirety of my childhood. A place where citizens rarely question their security and children are safe to explore outdoors….Just last month, a man shot his wife and then himself within the confines of these same boundaries….Did anger, power, or jealousy fuel his actions?…A single weapon represents the difference between life and death for a victim….How many lives could be saved if [perpetrators] were unable to obtain the firearm?…Americans are twenty-five times more likely to be killed with a gun then any other nation. Fire-arm regulations can save us and will save us — but we must act now….

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

The Answer

One day in the future, my kids will ask me, “Mommy, what were your teenage years like?” I could sugarcoat it and tell them that it was the best thing ever and I never had a care in the world, or I could tell them the truth. I could tell them about how no matter the month or time of day, there always seemed to be a mass shooting. I could tell them how some days I was worried to go to school or even out in certain communities without fears of gun violence….I want to be able to tell them that I took part in making a change. That I helped to stop the chaos in America, and saved peoples lives. I don’t want my kids to grow up with the same fear that I had; I want to be able to send them to school and know that I will always be able to pick them up at the end of the day….

$100 Award Winner

Kareena Modha

Lincoln High School

Portland, Oregon

Too Much for Too Long

n the April 2000 issue of its journal, Pediatrics, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) addressed the severity and morbidity of firearm-related injury to children and adolescents. The issue …states “Firearm regulations, to include bans of handguns and assault weapons, are the most effective way to reduce firearm-related injuries”…For too long now, the American government has never sufficiently or successfully properly legislated gun ownership. Nor has it adequately addressed the devastating reality of gun violence….Those in power have turned a blind eye to a situation that cannot afford to be ignored any longer. Therefore, the question still remains: how many people are going to lose their lives until proper action is taken?

$100 Award Winner

Jessica Osuna

Del Oro High School

Loomis, California

Lives Above Guns

Gun violence isn’t just something I hear about on the news occasionally, it has impacted me directly. In the late ’90s, my grandfather was held at gunpoint at his workplace, a church. I’ve known people who have died as victims of drive-by shootings. My school shows us videos of how to handle ourselves if an active shooter comes on campus. We’ve had ten active shooter drills since I’ve been in high school and not one earthquake drill. Gun violence isn’t an imaginary “what-if,” it’s a realistic possibility. The idea of myself or a loved one dying at the hands of a legally or illegally purchased gun is a harsh reality….

$100 Award Winner

Madison Roeschke

Saugus High School

Santa Clarita, California

Will I Die Wearing My Backpack?

On the morning of November 14th, 2019, my sister and I sat down inside a classroom we hung out in every morning. On our way there I sent my boyfriend a video of me and my sister’s feet in sync as we walked side by side. We laughed, as we often do or say things in sync….Then I heard the first gunshot….Gracie [female student killed] and Dominic [male student killed] should still be here and they very likely would be if there was a ban on handguns and other assault weapons. A student like Nathan [shooter who also killed himself] could have been prevented from bringing a weapon such as a gun on to campus, murdering and harming others….Every night as I try to fall asleep the shooting crosses my mind. I often have nightmares where I’m stuck in that same situation, crying because I’m not sure whether or not I’ll survive. Will the last moments of my life be at school? Will I have to die wearing my backpack?…

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s name withheld at student’s request)

Cosumnes Oaks High School

Elk Grove, California

Gun Regulation: America Can Do Better

The land of the free and home of the brave; where the false interpretation of the “right to bear arms” is seemingly more important than innocent lives. This is our America….March 2020 was the first March since 2002 that a school shooting did not occur, which is a result of precautions taken by the U.S. government to limit the spread of COVID-19. It took a health pandemic to cause school shootings to cease….With the countless school shooter emergencies and lockdowns that I have experienced, it is insulting that lawmakers view the gun epidemic that has ravaged my generation as so insignificant that they are only willing to save us when they deem it absolutely necessary [to limit the spread of COVID-19]. If stronger firearm regulations had been enacted, Columbine may not have happened.. nor Sandy Hook… nor Pulse Night Club, Las Vegas, Parkland, nor countless others….

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s name and high school withheld at student’s request)

Untitled

Eventually, every teenager learns that they are just as vulnerable as everybody else. I learned this on November 14, 2019, when my bubble of invincibility was shot through by a small personally assembled gun….A handgun that even without being a semi-automatic assault rifle managed to take three lives and spill the horrors of gun violence onto an innocent learning environment. Immediately, America came down on us in a frenzy with news coverage and heartfelt messages from politicians. However, despite this brief commotion, Americans have proven their desensitization to violence – especially of shootings that result in the deaths of their innocent children – and no matter the interviews and photos, my school wasn’t the first school shooting, nor was it the last….The question that I want to ask America is this: how many more students will lay down their lives to protect America’s “right to bear arms?”

Current Year Essay Contest, Past Essay Contests|

Americans Against Gun Violence is please to announce that our 2020 National High School Essay Contest is now open to all U.S. High School Students. A total of $15,000 will be awarded to twelve winners. The deadline for students to enter is April 18, 2020. See below for full contest details and the link to the online entry form.

Essay Topic

To enter the 2020 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest, students must submit an original essay of 500 words or fewer describing their thoughts about the following position statement published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in the April, 2000 issue of the journal, Pediatrics:

Firearm regulations, to include bans of handguns and assault weapons, are the most effective way to reduce firearm-related injuries.

Click on these links to read the full article in which this statement was published and a followup article published in Pediatrics in October of 2012.

Contest Eligibility, Rules, and Link to Online Entry Form

Contestants must be high school students in good standing attending school in the United States or its territories.
Students who entered high school on track to graduate in 2020 but who graduated early are also eligible.
First and second degree relatives of Americans Against Gun Violence Board members, employees, and paid consultants are not eligible.
Contestants are encouraged to discuss the essay topic with teachers, parents, friends, and other mentors, but each contestant must write the essay himself or herself, in his or her own words.
Contestants who are under the age of 18 must have the consent of a parent or legal guardian to enter the contest.
To enter the contest, students must submit their essays and demographic information via this link. (The link has been deactivated as the deadline has passed for students to enter the 2020 essay contest. The winning essays in the 2020 contest will be posted on this page in late May or early June. Click on the Past Essay Contests link on the right to read the winning essays in our 2018 and 2019 contests.)
Essays may include a title and footnotes, but these elements are not required. Titles and footnotes do not count toward the 500 word limit.
Only one essay will be considered per student. If a student submits more than one essay, the most recent submission will be the one that is considered.
The deadline to enter the contest is 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time on Saturday, April 18, 2020. Late entries will not be accepted unless the delay was caused by a malfunction of the Americans Against Gun Violence online entry system.

Selection of Scholarship Winners

Twelve contest winners will be selected from the essays submitted.
The Americans Against Gun Violence Board of Directors will establish a panel of members to judge essays based on accuracy, originality, clarity, cohesiveness, and overall impact.
Essay readers will be blinded to all student identifying information.
Contest winners will be notified by email by Monday, May 18, 2020
At the time that students are notified that they’ve been chosen as contest winners, they’ll also be sent a signature form that includes the following elements:
- A statement that the essay submitted by the student is his or her original work
- A statement signed by a parent or legal guardian if the student is under age 18 confirming that the parent or guardian approves of the student’s participation in the essay contest
- A statement by a school official confirming that the contestant is a high school student in good standing or that the student entered high school on track to graduate in 2020 or later but graduated early
In order to receive a monetary award, the 12 contest winners must return the signed signature form within 30 days of being notified that they are contest winners.
Students don’t need to submit the signature form at the time that they enter the contest. If their school will be out of session before May 18, 2020, though, it’s recommended that contestants get the signature of a school official documenting that they are high school students in good standing prior to the end of the 2019-2020 academic school year. The blank signature form can be downloaded by clicking on this link.

Contest Awards (Total $15,000)

Upon submission of their completed signature forms, the first place winner will be sent a check for a $3,000 award; second place a $2,500 award; and third place a $2,000 scholarship.
The fourth through tenth ranked winners will each receive $1,000 awards, and the 11^th and 12^th ranked winners will receive $250 apiece.
If one or more of the twelve winners does not submit a completed signature form within 30 days of being notified that he or she is a contest winner, the lower ranked finalists and alternate finalists who have submitted their signature forms will be moved up in ranking, and the total $15,000 in awards will be distributed accordingly.
Awards will be sent by check to the home address listed on the students’ entry forms.

Publication of Essays and Release of Contact and Identifying

By entering the contest, students agree to allow Americans Against Gun Violence to publish their essays in part or in whole in any way that the Board of Directors deems to be appropriate, but without any student contact or identifying information linked to the essays.
Americans Against Gun Violence will not publish or release any student contact or identifying information without the written consent of the student and, if the student is under age 18, the written consent of a parent or guardian.
When the 12 contest winners are notified that they have been chosen as winners, they will be provided with release forms to indicate to what degree, if any, they wish to have their contact and identifying information released in association with their essays.
The responses to the release forms will not in any way influence the ranking of the contest winners.

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline

The deadline for entering the contest is 11:59 PM PST on Saturday, April 18, 2020.
The students selected as the 12 contest winners will be notified by Monday, May 18, 2020.
Students chosen as contest winners must return completed signature forms within 30 days of being notified that they have been chosen as winners in order to receive monetary awards.
Award checks will be mailed to the winners upon receipt of their completed signature forms.

Click on this link for a downloadable essay contest flyer in PDF format. For additional information or questions, please email essaycontest@aagunv.org or call us at (916) 668-4160.

Past Essay Contests|

Dr. Durston delivers keynote address at SW Michigan gun violence symposium

Americans Against Gun Violence President Dr. Bill Durston was honored to be asked deliver the keynote addresses at two gun violence prevention symposiums in southwest Michigan on October 14 and 15, 2019. Both of the symposiums were organized by the SW Michigan Interfaith Action Peace and Justice Collaborative, a coalition of over 30 faith-based organizations committed to reducing interpersonal violence.

[1] The first symposium in Douglas, Michigan on November 14 was co-sponsored by the Douglas United Church of Christ and was held in their historic church house built in 1882. The second symposium in Benton Harbor, Michigan on November 15 was held in the conference room of the Berrien County Health Department and was co-sponsored by the Health Department and the SW Michigan Advocates and Leaders for Police and Community Trust (ALPACT). Both venues were filled to capacity for the symposiums. After Dr. Durston’s keynote addresses, there were panel discussions as a part of both symposiums, with panelists including other health care professionals, educators, high school students, religious leaders, law enforcement officers, victims of gun violence, and other community activists.

In his keynote addresses, Dr. Durston discussed the seriousness of the gun violence problem in the United States, the fact that the United States is an extreme outlier as compared with all other high income democratic countries in terms of our rates of gun violence, the laxity of our gun control laws, and the number of privately owned guns in circulation. He discussed the need to adopt stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all other high income democratic countries, and he described what he termed the “seven deadly myths” that impede progress toward ending the epidemic of gun violence in our country. Click on this link for the prepared text of Dr. Durston’s keynote addresses in PDF format.

The symposium in Benton Harbor was covered on the front page of the St. Joseph Herald Palladium newspaper, and the symposium in Douglas was video recorded in its entirety and posted on YouTube. Dr. Durston’s keynote address begins at 4 minutes 40 seconds (4:40) and concludes at 38 minutes (38:00) on the YouTube video. His summary remarks at the end of the panel discussion begin at 1 hour, 15 minutes, and 20 seconds (1:15:20) and conclude at 1 hour, 20 minutes, and 20 seconds (1:20:20). He also answers some additional questions later in the video.

[1] Americans Against Gun Violence is a secular, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is pleased to work with all organizations, faith-based or secular, that are committed to ending the epidemic of gun violence in our country.

AAGunV in the News|

Reservations are now closed for our November 3 Annual Dinner

Reservations are now closed Americans Against Gun Violence annual dinner on the evening of Sunday, November 3, at the Hilton Arden West, 2200 Harvard Street, in Sacramento, California. If you’ve already made reservations, we look forward to seeing you there. Doors open for social hour at 5:00 PM, dinner will be served from 6:00-7:00 PM, and the program will begin at 7:00. Don’t forget that daylight savings time ends on Sunday morning.

We’re holding the dinner in conjunction with the Sacramento Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility again this year. The program will feature a keynote address by Professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney School of Public Health. Professor Alpers is an internationally recognized expert on the issue of the relationship between gun laws, rates of gun ownership, rates of gun related deaths, and overall rates of homicide and suicide at the international level. He was one of just 20 invited participants in the summit held by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in January of 2013, following the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and he contributed a chapter, The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of its Firearms, describing Australia’s rapid response to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in the compendium, Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, that came out of the summit at Johns Hopkins.

Professor Alpers is also the founding director of GunPolicy.Org, an organization affiliated with the University of Sydney that maintains an online, interactive database that facilitates comparisons of gun laws, rates of gun ownership, rates of gun related deaths, and overall rates of homicide and suicide between the different countries of the world and between different states within the United States. The comparison data available on the GunPolicy.Org website attests to the need for the United States to urgently adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all other high income democratic countries of the world.

The program will also include a presentation by Americans Against Gun Violence president Dr. Bill Durston concerning the landmark amicus curiae brief that Americans Against Gun Violence filed in August of this year in an upcoming Supreme Court case involving the Second Amendment. Americans Against Gun Violence is the only organization in the country to file an amicus brief in this case calling on the Court to overturn the rogue 2008 Heller decision.

AAGunV in the News, Events|

Americans Against Gun Violence Asks the Supreme Court to Reverse a Death Sentence that was Wrongly Decided

Sacramento California, August 26, 2019: Americans Against Gun Violence has filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in support of New York City in the Supreme Court case of

the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (NYRPA) v. New York City. In this case, the NYRPA is claiming that New York City’s ban on carrying handguns anywhere other than to or from city-approved firing ranges violates the Second Amendment, as the Supreme Court interpreted the Amendment in the 2008 Heller decision. Although New York City has agreed to change its handgun laws to make the case moot, the NYRPA has refused to drop the case.

In the Heller decision, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Court reversed over 200 years of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court decisions and scores of lower court decisions, in ruling that Washington DC’s partial handgun ban violated the Second Amendment. Heller was the first time in U.S. history that the Court had ever ruled that the Second Amendment conferred any kind of individual right to gun ownership that was not directly related to service in a “well regulated militia.”

The majority opinion in Heller, written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, has been publicly condemned by respected constitutional authorities as a “radical departure” from prior legal precedent, an example of “snow jobs” produced by well-staffed justices, and “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship.” In his book, The Making of a Justice, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Heller is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my tenure on the bench.” Stevens added that Hellerdecision was consistent with an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called, “One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word, ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

But the Heller decision is worse than all this. By creating a constitutional obstacle, where none previously existed, to the enactment of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in every other high income democratic country of the world – countries in which mass shootings are rare or non-existent and in which the rate of gun deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in the United States – Heller is effectively a death sentence for tens of thousands of Americans annually.

In our amicus brief, Americans Against Gun Violence is calling on the Supreme Court to take the opportunity of the case of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. New York City to reverse the Heller decision. Americans Against Gun Violence is one of only three gun violence prevention organizations to file an amicus brief in support of New York City in this case, and we are the only organization to make the point that Heller was wrongly decided and should be overturned.

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Gilroy, California, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio Mass Shootings

Sacramento California, August 4, 2019: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the friends, family, and community members of the more than 30 people who were killed in three separate mass shootings within the past week, including the shootings in El Paso and Dayton that occurred within the past 24 hours. We also extend sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to the scores of other victims who suffered non-fatal injuries in these attacks. We condemn the shootings in the strongest terms along with the racist, anti-immigrant ideology and rhetoric that apparently motivated at least one of these shootings.

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis. But mass shootings account for only a small fraction of all gun related deaths in our country. Nearly 40,000 people are killed by guns in our country annually, and the rate of gun deaths in the United States is 10 times higher than in the other high income democratic countries of the world.

The reason for our extraordinarily high rate of gun violence is clear. The United States is not an outlier as compared with other high income democratic countries in terms of rates of mental illness or substance abuse; socio-economic inequality; or overall rates of violence. In fact, the rate of assault by any means other than guns in the United States is below the average rate for the other high income democratic countries of the world.

The difference that explains the extraordinarily high rate of gun violence in our country is the extraordinarily high number of guns in circulation, which is due, in turn, to our extraordinarily lax gun control laws as compared with all other high income democratic countries.

Americans Against Gun Violence calls for the urgent adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect other high income democratic countries of the world. Specifically, we call for a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles; for universal registration of all firearms and licensing of all gun owners; and for placing the burden of proof for firearm purchases on the person seeking to acquire a gun to show why he or she needs one and that he or she can handle one safely, not on society to prove that he or she meets certain narrow criteria for being prohibited from possessing a gun.

In order to adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, we must overturn the rogue 2008 Heller decision, in which a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court reversed 207 years of legal precedent in ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred any kind of individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a well regulated militia. The Supreme Court will be reconsidering the Heller decision this fall in the case of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus New York City. Americans Against Gun Violence is actively working on an amicus brief in that case calling on the Court to reverse Heller.

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Virginia Beach Mass Shooting

Sacramento California, June 2, 2019: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and coworkers of the 12 people who were killed in the mass shooting in the Municipal Center in Virginia Beach on Friday, May 31. We also extend our sympathy and wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to the other victims who suffered non-fatal wounds in the attack.

An NPR reporter who lives in Virginia Beach, Sara McCammon, commented on the PBS News Hour that people were reacting to the shooting “in sadly predictable ways.” A prayer vigil was held for the victims. Flags were flown at half staff. President Trump tweeted, “God bless the families and all.” But a local carnival went on as planned.

[1] Speaking at a press release, Virginia Beach Police Chief James Cervera credited the rapid response and bravery of his officers for preventing more people from being killed and wounded, but he was reported to be “at a loss” to provide any suggestions concerning how the shooting might have been prevented in the first place.[2]

Initial reports indicate that the shooter, who was killed by police, was an employee at the Municipal Center. He reportedly used two semi-automatic handguns in the attack, both of which he had purchased legally. Semi-automatic handguns are the most commonly used firearm in mass shootings in the United States, and most mass shooters purchase their weapons legally.[3] Handguns are also the most commonly used firearm in other gun homicides and in gun suicides.[4] Owning or carrying a handgun provides no net protective value for honest, law-abiding people.[5]

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis.[6] Our rate of gun homicide is 25 times higher than the average gun homicide rate in the other economically advanced democratic countries of the world.[7] The reason for our extraordinarily high rate of gun violence is obvious. Our gun control laws are extraordinarily lax as compared with the laws in other high income democratic countries,[8] and our rate of civilian gun ownership is extraordinarily high.[9]

In 1968, the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut stated:

Pious condolences will no longer suffice….Quarter measures and half measures will no longer suffice…The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.[10]

We have not heeded Senator Dodd’s advice, and as a result, over the past 50 years, more US civilians have died of gunshot wounds than all the US soldiers killed in all the wars in which our country has ever been involved.[11]

It is the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that the United States should adopt a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. In order to ban handguns, we must first overturn the rogue 2008 Heller decision[12] in which a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court decisions,[13] in ruling that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep a handgun in the home. Until we adopt stringent gun control regulations comparable to regulations in other high income democratic countries, we should not ask ourselves why mass shootings continue to occur on a regular basis in our country, but rather why we fail to take the obvious steps necessary to prevent them.

Note: Click on this link for a downloadable version of this press release in PDF format.

References

[1] “PBS News Hour Weekend Edition,” June 1, 2019.

[2] Laura Vozella et al., “Virginia Beach Shooting Updates: Officials Name Victims as Investigation Continues – The Washington Post,” Washington Post, June 1, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/twelve-people-killed-in-shooting-at-virginia-beach-municipal-complex-police-say/2019/06/01/4a264808-845c-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html?utm_term=.b6f231fb543b.

[3] Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan, “US Mass Shootings, 1982-2018: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation,” Mother Jones (blog), accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/.

[4] Josh Sugarmann, Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns (New Press, 2001).

[5] William Durston, “Should Law-Abiding People Own Guns for Self Protection,” Americans Against Gun Violence: Facts and FAQ’s, June 1, 2019, /wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FAQ-guns-for-protection.pdf.

[6] Max Fisher and Josh Keller, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer,” The New York Times, November 7, 2017, sec. Americas, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html.

[7] Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

[8] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country,” GunPolicy.org, accessed December 3, 2017, http://www.gunpolicy.org/.

[9] Fisher and Keller, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings?”; “Compare the United States – Rate of Civilian Firearm Possession per 100 Population,” GunPolicy.org, accessed September 18, 2016, http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compare/194/rate_of_civilian_firearm_possession/10,280,31.

[10] Thomas Dodd, “Text of Speech by Senator Thomas Dodd on Floor of U.S. Senate: The Sickness of Violence and the Need for Gun Control Legislation” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 11, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#; Thomas Dodd, “Press Release: Pious Condolences Will No Longer Suffice” (Office of Senator Thomas Dodd, June 10, 1968), http://thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/research/gun_control.htm#.

[11] Louis Jacobson, “More Americans Killed by Guns since 1968 than in All U.S. Wars, Columnist Nicholas Kristof Writes,” @politifact, August 27, 2015, http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/27/nicholas-kristof/more-americans-killed-guns-1968-all-wars-says-colu/.

[12] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[13] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Announcing the Winners in the 2019 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest

The prompt for the 2019 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest was the following excerpt from the majority opinion written by the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in the 1980 case of Lewis v. United States:

The Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”

The contest was open to all high school students in the United States and its territories. Students were asked to describe their thoughts about the above statement by Justice Blackmun, but not necessarily to defend or refute it. Winning essays were chosen on the basis of their accuracy, originality, clarity, cohesiveness, and overall impact by more than 30 Americans Against Gun Violence supporters who read and rated the essays blinded to any student identifying information. We initially announced that Americans Against Gun Violence would be awarding a total of $15,000 distributed among twelve winners. After reading all of this year’s entries, however, we decided that there were so many compelling essays that we would increase the total amount of awards to $16,200, distributed among 24 winners. (Tax-deductible donations to fund the essay contest in future years can be made via the Join/Donate page of this website.)

We are pleased to present the winning essays in the 2019 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest below. Again this year, however, several of our essay contest winners have chosen not to have either their names or their high school affiliations released in association with their essays. We understand the concerns of these students and support their decisions to withhold identifying information from the public. We are at the same time deeply disturbed by the toxic atmosphere in our country that not only makes students fear the possibility of getting shot and killed when they go to school, but of being attacked in one form or another if they openly express their opinions on the subject of gun violence prevention. It is the mission of Americans Against Gun Violence to eradicate this toxic atmosphere and to stop the shameful epidemic of gun violence that disproportionately threatens the health and safety of our children and our youth.

First Place Winner ($3,000 award)

Seo Park

Archbishop Mitty High School, San Jose, California

Redefining America without its Defining Factor — Guns ….Many Americans believe they have the right to own a gun...In fact, the Second Amendment, as it was originally written, does not prohibit the adoption of laws banning most civilian gun ownership today…The voice of my generation can write our future… Our lives are not a gun’s to take, and we will ensure that future generations are protected… We are equipped with everything we need…the truth about the Second Amendment, the facts about gun violence, the tragic stories, and most importantly, the passion and care we possess….Read the full essay

Second Place Winner ($2,500 Award)

Rhea Jansen

Freeman High School, Rockford, Washington

When the clock struck 10:08 on March 14th, there were shared looks throughout my classroom, and with a nod of our heads, the five of us stood up and walked out of the school. This came one month after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) shooting that resulted in the loss of 17 innocent lives. But the walkout wasn’t only to show unity. My tiny school experienced a similar tragedy five months earlier. It feels strange to say that we were the lucky ones, but after seeing on the news of the MSD mass shooting what could have happened at our high school if the shooter’s AR- 15 hadn’t jammed, leaving him with a handgun as his only functioning firearm, we are the lucky ones. Lucky, compared to the MSD students, even though one student at our school was killed and three others were wounded…Read the full essay

Third Place Winner ($2,000 Award)

Brandon Restler

Ardsley High School, Ardsley, New York

….Only in the United States of America do students fear for their lives every day because of senseless, preventable gun violence…. Our country must not continue to look away from the truth: the truth that guns are killing innocent people, the truth that gun violence in the United States is much more common than in other developed countries, and the truth that the Second Amendment does not protect the right of everyday citizens to own murder machines….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

Jin Chey

St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire

Student Voices: Now is the time….“You hear someone drop a book and you hear a loud noise and somewhere in the back of your mind as a 16-year-old hearing about these things you wonder, where’s the nearest exit? And do I need to be worried for my safety right now?” This feeling is the sad reality of American school life….American schools are not being protected from gun violence….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name and High School affiliation withheld at students’ request)

Misunderstanding and Vagueness….Whenever the topic of gun control would be brought up in school or in the news…the Second Amendment would usually be mentioned, though it would only be explained as “the right to bear arms”. Of course I would be somewhat familiar with the amendment as it has garnered a lot of controversy over the past few years. However, when I took a closer look at the Amendment, “militia” popped out to me. This word was never discussed…. Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

Hana Kim

(High School affiliation withheld at student’s request.)

…With the national rate of gun deaths the highest it’s been in more than 20 years and Americans being 10 times more likely to be killed by a gun than people in other developed countries, we live in a time in which we don’t possess the basic freedom from fear – a right that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed more than half a century ago. Instead, we’re forced into lockdown drills at school to prepare ourselves for the very possible threat of a shooter, stealing the innocence from a generation of youth who experienced their first lockdown when they were barely old enough to read. Indeed, the “well regulated militia” of the Second Amendment has been missing in action when it comes to preventing the harrowing number of mass shootings and other gun homicides in our country committed by individuals who were never intended to have a constitutional right to “keep and bear arms.” Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name and High School affiliation withheld at students’ request)

Constitutional Commas and the Power of Punctuation….Recent interpretations of the Second Amendment’s second comma downplay the importance of the militia as the reason for the right to bear arms. However…”A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” is an absolute construction, a structure indicating a cause and effect relationship with the clause that follows it. Thus, the comma separating this phrase from “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” is actually punctuation following the absolute clause that illustrates the inextricable relationship of the need for a militia to the possession of firearms...The countless catastrophic deaths of people in our nation due to gun violence demand that we consider the strong linguistic and historical evidence pointing to an interpretation of the Second Amendment that understands involvement with the militia to be the grounds for keeping and bearing something as powerful and destructive as a gun…Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

Marissa Plaza

Folsom High School, Folsom, California

The Lethal Toy That’s About to Take Down America…The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution has become an excuse for citizens to claim a deadly freedom. “The right to bear arms” is the only part of the Amendment mentioned anymore, and people are disregarding the entire first half of the Amendment, including the crucial phrase, “A well regulated militia.”….I refuse to be the next victim of a mass shooting. I refuse to allow the misinformed to continue allowing potentially dangerous people to purchase guns with ease. I refuse to let this great country spiral into death and disaster because of lethal toys….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

Gurashish Khangura

Argonaut High School, Jackson, California

Students enrich themselves within literature, solve puzzles as they delve into math, explore new depths to their creativity within art classes, and enroll in various classes that contribute to their diverse education. In recent times, they now also must learn how to board up their classroom windows. They memorize escape routes to classrooms from the possibly precarious outdoors. As little is being done to impede the critical prevalence of mass shootings, students must now learn how to safeguard their own lives….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name High School withheld at students’ request)

…The NRA has long interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing a largely unfettered individual right to own guns. In the 1980 case of Lewis v. United States, however, the Supreme Court directly linked any right to bear arms to service in a well regulated militia….The NRA’s sanctimonious misrepresentation of the Second Amendment continues to aid and abet mass shootings and impede solutions to the carnage…. How many bodies must litter the corridors of history before all sensible Americans take to the streets, exercising their First Amendment right to demand an end to the misrepresentation of the Second Amendment and an end to wanton gun violence in the United States of America? Read the full essay

$250 Award Winner

Yasmine Mabine

Rancho Bernardo High School, San Diego, California

The Light Upon the Trees…Where gun advocates see lack of regulations as preservation of their “freedom,” I see chaos as bullets fly through buildings and children lie on the floor. They see themselves as their forefathers fighting against tyranny, but I see people purchasing war-grade ammunition on a whim, inflicting senseless violence…. They see their constitution protecting their right to bear arms, but I see The Declaration of Independence declaring our right to life, liberty, and happiness.…”A well-regulated militia.” I wonder why I cannot see… Where was this militia as bullets took the lives of children at school?… I hold deep concern for a nation whose lens is so misconstrued that it is no longer able to distinguish a well-regulated militia from an unstable teenager with an assault rifle….Read the full essay

$250 Award Winner

Elizabeth Rieger

Edgemont Junior/Senior High School, Scarsdale, New York

The Right to Live is Not Ambiguous….Every morning at 8 am my sister and I go to school. Every morning we sit in the car, chatting about our assignments and tests. And every morning, as my sister and I part ways, an almost subconscious thought crosses my mind: “will we be OK at the end of the day?” I am sixteen years old, still learning my place in the world, and yet I have the additional daily burden of worrying whether my life, or the life of my sister, will be added to those sacrificed on the altar of the “right to bear arms.” Read the full essay

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

….Seventeen lives were taken on that Valentine’s Day at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, including my good friend, Jaime Guttenberg…. There is a reason that people want to see stricter gun control laws in this country: innocent people are dying, gone forever, like Jaime.

$100 Award Winner

Diane Zhang

Fox Lane High School, Bedford, New York

… Justice Blackmun’s statement has been challenged by the Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v Heller, which knocked down the Washington D.C. handgun ban and granted individuals the right to bear arms. This contradicts the 2nd Amendment because it neglects that such a right only applies in relation to state militias, undermining context. Given that every day, 100 Americans are killed with guns, there is clearly a necessity in clarifying the boundaries of gun rights. Such patterns in gun violence in the United States are not an abuse of a preexisting right, but rather a catastrophic misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

….Gun advocates will profess ad nauseum that owning a gun is an individual right and the only way to solve an issue with guns is more guns–an illogical and foolish argument because it only puts more guns on the streets to hurt people.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

….Lawmakers need to view the Constitution as a living document that should respond to cultural and societal changes and developments in technology. The advances in military armaments could not have been anticipated by the authors of the Constitution. Sensible restrictions on guns specifically designed to kill human beings are not unconstitutional. On the contrary, they are consistent with the right of all U.S. citizens to, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

…The full extent of what the Second Amendment guarantees is often misunderstood, as the Second Amendment states that the right to bear arms is only given when there is a reasonable connection to upholding a civilian militia…. The 2008 Heller decision created the biggest barrier the nation ever had to gun control laws, essentially deleting the phrase, “A well regulated militia,” from the Second Amendment…. How much longer must this nation watch as children die and become desensitized to a nation plagued with violence?

$100 Award Winner

(Student Name High School withheld at students’ request)

.… As a society and a nation, we have progressed tremendously…. Yet to this day we seem to think gun ownership is crucial to the American identity. Much of this perception comes from the powerful gun lobby, particularly the NRA, and an arguably improper Supreme Court case. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia vs Heller that the 2nd Amendment’s reference to militias was a “prefatory clause” and was therefore not limiting of the right to bear arms….The founding fathers chose their words carefully, and choosing to selectively allow or ignore phrases of the Constitution as done in this case is comparable to rewriting it.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

…I attend a very conservative high school where the majority of students live in homes with firearms. Gun control is not a topic that I can bring up at school as I will be immediately ridiculed and excluded. The first line of defense in settling an argument today is, “I’ll bring my gun.” Is this a right our framers were considering when the Second Amendment was adopted?….The true meaning of the Second Amendment has been lost in translation by many Americans fueled by the National Rifle Association whose core arguments revolve around individual rights…. However, nowhere in the Amendment is the word “individual” noted….”A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” does not refer to the common American citizen….

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

On April 20, 2018, I unified over a third of my small, conservative school to rally for better gun legislation. My name was plastered in the news….Gun control opponents taunted us from afar….They spat insults toward me and fellow students….The number of times I’ve heard, “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” is uncountable, but I’ll remember the words of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun when standing my ground, for the first phrase of the Second Amendment, “A well regulated Militia,” is often omitted….Now, next time somebody asks me why I’m “against the Constitution,” I can ask them the same thing right back.

$100 Award Winner

Arielle Geismar

New York, New York (High school name withheld at student’s request)

….Our nation’s Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing no right to keep and bear arms that were not related to a well regulated militia, as articulated by Justice Blackmun in his majority opinion in Lewis v. United States. Decisions in United States v. Miller, Presser v. Illinois, and United States v. Cruikshank were all consistent with this decision…That is, until District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. A decision made when I was just 7 years old has set a wildly dangerous precedent for the rest of my life….Somehow, it’s up to me as a student to safeguard and fight for my safety, when the leaders of my country should have done this for me….

$100 Award Winner

Madeline Snoke

Mira Loma High School, Sacramento, California

….The Constitution was intended to be a living, changing document, and as times change, to be interpreted as safety, reason, and circumstance dictate. However, the issue of protection has turned into an issue of possessions. The Second Amendment is often cited by gun-owning individuals with respect to owning a weapon for themselves rather than their country. With an exponential rise in gun violence, a militia of gun-owning Americans shouldn’t be the priority. Our priority should be the safety of the people who live in this country, the people the Constitution represents.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

Constitutionally Condoned Killing in America….Gun violence in America far exceeds the rest of the industrialized world. Since 2009 there have been 288 school shootings in the United States. This is 57 times more than every other G7 country combined. …The Second Amendment talks about a well-regulated militia and the regulation of the right to bear arms. It is unlikely that such arms were intended to include instruments of war that could be easily obtained by the civilian population for private ownership and use. Military grade weapons need to be regulated by the government as intended by the Constitution.

$100 Award Winner

(Student’s Name and High School affiliation withheld pending student’s permission)

….We, as students, are worried. We pause and laugh nervously at the drop of a book, we hold our breath each time the office interrupts class over the speakers, we choke down hypotheticals during drills, and we watch as our teachers break mid-sentence….New Zealand’s prompt response to the Christchurch mass shooting is an embarrassment to the United States. It’s appalling that our nation has yet to institute meaningful reform. Federal inaction has allowed for similar events to splinter lives and provoke tragedy upon tragedy. Our representatives in government have yielded to the influence of special interest groups, and their negligence to pursue a solution has left us all vulnerable….

Past Essay Contests|

Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest

The prompt for the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest was the following statement made by the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on June 11, 1968:

The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.

The contest was open to all high school students in the United States and its territories. The deadline for students to enter the contest was May 6, 2018. Winners were chosen by more than 30 Americans Against Gun Violence supporters who read and rated the students’ essays blinded to any student identifying information. Americans Against Gun Violence is awarding a total of $15,000 to the twelve winners. Tax-deductible donations to fund the annual essay contest can be made via the Join/Donate page of this website.

Because of the personal attacks to which some high school gun control activists have been subjected in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February of this year, we gave essay contest winners the option of withholding their names and high school affiliations when their essays were published. We are pleased to present the winning essays in the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest below. We regret, however, that as a result of the toxic political culture that currently exists in our country surrounding the gun control issue, several students did not feel safe in having their names and high school affiliations published. It is part of the mission of Americans Against Gun Violence to change this culture.

First Place Winner ($3,000 award)

(Student Name and High School withheld at student’s request)

Gun Control Lessons from Around the World: The Need for Reform in US Policy and Perspective….Over 1,600 mass shootings since Sandy Hook, the United States has still been unable to pass significant gun control laws….Modernized gun reform laws are long overdue in our nation, and it is time for the US to catch up to the contemporary laws of Canada, Britain, Norway, and countless other countries….Read the full essay

Second Place Winner ($2,500 Award)

Lucas Suter

Placer High School, Auburn, California

The Weight of Firearms….I’m tired of watching the news, seeing sobbing relatives of someone shot to death. I’m tired of knowing that there are thousands more whose sobbing relatives aren’t on television. And I know we are all tired of living with the weight on our shoulders of the millions more who will be killed in our lifetimes….Read the full essay

Third Place Winner ($2,000 Award)

Katherine McCabe

Pioneer High School, Woodland, California

….So this is why we’re walking out. We’re scared, we’re angry, and we want change. ….1,077 people have died in mass shootings since the University of Texas mass shooting in 1966. Legislation hasn’t changed since that fateful day, and now, we’re demanding that it does….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name and High School withheld at students’ request)

And here we are – 650,000 gun related homicides; more than twice that many wounded; 130,000 children and teen lives lost within that 50 year time span

[since the speech by Senator Dodd] – yet, the quote is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago….People who deal with addiction say that they need to hit rock bottom in order to understand that they need to change. The question is, what is the rock bottom to have the US address its gun addiction? Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name withheld at students’ request)

Poolesville High School, Poolesville, Maryland

Fifty Years….Fifty years later, the same words are declared but by a different generation. His voice echoes in our hearts and minds as Americans continue to look toward our government and toward each other for the same essential protection that Senator Dodd asserted the urgency of 50 years ago. Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

Mila Opalenik

Amador High School, Sutter Creek, California

Where Is the Controversy? …Why is it that with all the information available, people are still uninformed about the success that other countries have had with gun control measures that don’t involve taking away all guns? …Countries like Australia and Canada have had enormous success with gun control and safety measures while still allowing gun ownership, so why have we not followed in their footsteps? Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

Luis Orozco

Lodi High School, Lodi, California

…[Senator Dodd’s quote] remains an inspiration that the fight for stricter gun laws will not go out….I feel very strongly about this movement. This is why I organized my school’s walkout on April 20th. Receiving a detention was a badge of honor for me for expressing my rights and beliefs about gun reform….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name and High School withheld at students’ request)

More of the Same Until We Change…According to a 2016 study published in the American Journal of Medicine, the United States gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than any other high-income country, which is not surprising given that America has the least stringent gun laws in the developed world…America needs to join the modern world and follow the advice of Senator Dodd. “We must adopt stringent gun control legislation,” and we must do it now….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name High School withheld at students’ request)

Why are there two fire drills today, and is that fireworks we hear in the distance? We bustle though the crowd and we are still fine, until we get frantic texts from our friends and family asking if we are alive. It is then that the news reaches us, and the fear for our lives comes upon us. An active shooter is at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School….Read the full essay

$1,000 Award Winner

Anahi Ballesteros

Franklin High School, Stockton, California

I was only 12 as I sat in Math class… but then we hear a gun go off. I remember the sounds, the screams, my teacher calling someone on the intercom….I look down at my feet and I see a bullet next to my pink vans….I tried to erase what happened to me, but then Sandy Hook occurred….and since Sandy Hook, there have been at least 1,607 mass shootings, with at least 1,846 people killed and 6,459 wounded. When will it stop? Read the full essay

$250 Award Winner

(Student Name High School withheld at students’ request)

It’s Time for A Change…No other country comes close to the number of mass shootings seen in America annually. We could blame mental health but other countries have mentally ill people too. We could blame violent movies but other countries have violent movies too. We could blame gang violence but other countries have gangs too….Gun control has been proven to work in other countries; It’s time for the United States to make a change….Read the full essay

$250 Award Winner

Taylor Motley

Mountain View High School, Mesa, Arizona

Why Do I Have To March For My Life?….We have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours planning, organizing, phone-banking, emailing, et cetera, to mobilize action to keep our voices heard….It is sad that a bunch of high schoolers have to do this….Our legislators should have protected us long ago with actual gun control measures – protected us before we had to learn how to act dead so we aren’t the next victim in a mass shooting….Read the full essay

Past Essay Contests|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Poway, CA and Baltimore, MD Shootings

Sacramento California, April 29, 2019: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the friends, family, and fellow worshipers of the victim killed in the shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, on Saturday, April 27; and to the friends, family, and fellow community members of the victim killed in the shooting at a neighborhood cookout in Baltimore, Maryland, on Sunday, April 28. We also extend our sympathy and wishes for a prompt recovery to the other victims who suffered non-fatal injuries in these attacks.

There is no uniform definition of a mass shooting in the United States.

[1] The FBI defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people, not including the shooter, are killed.[2] The website, Gun Violence Archive, by contrast, defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are wounded but not necessarily killed.[3] Using the Gun Violence Archive definition, both the Poway synagogue shooting, in which one person was killed and three others were wounded,[4] and the Baltimore neighborhood cookout shooting, in which one person was killed and at least seven others were wounded,[5] qualify as mass shootings. According to the FBI definition, on the other hand, neither attack was a mass shooting. Using the Gun Violence Archive definition of a mass shooting, on average there is almost one mass shooting a day in the United States.[6] Using the FBI definition, there are about four mass shootings a year.[7] Regardless of the definition of a mass shooting, on an average day in the United States, more than 100 people are killed with guns,[8] and two to three times this many people are wounded.[9]

The shootings in Poway and Baltimore demonstrate contrasting aspects of the gun violence epidemic in the United States. The Poway city website boasts of the city having the lowest crime rate of any city in San Diego County and one of the lowest crime rates in all of California.[10] The Poway synagogue shooting was clearly a hate crime.[11] The gunman, a white supremacist who was arrested without incident shortly after the shooting, shouted anti-Semitic rhetoric during the attack. He had also posted both anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media prior to committing the crime. It’s reported that he committed the shooting with an AR-15 style rifle which “miraculously jammed,” probably preventing the shooter from killing and wounding many more people.[12]

In contrast, Baltimore has one of the highest crime rates, including the highest homicide rate, of any city in the United States.[13] The motive in the neighborhood cookout shooting, which was reportedly committed by an unidentified “black man,” is unknown.[14]The weapon used by the shooter is also unknown, but given the reports of many shots being fired in rapid sequence, it was almost certainly a semi-automatic handgun or rifle. The attacker may have fled when someone participating in the cookout began shooting back.[15] A 25 year old man had been shot and killed in the same block one month earlier, and participants in the cookout reported that the sound of gunshots was commonplace in the neighborhood.[16]

The Poway synagogue shooting received considerable attention in the news media, with the emphasis being on the hate crime aspect of the shooting and the resilience of the Jewish community in Poway. The Baltimore shooting received far less attention outside of the Baltimore area. The media attention that the Baltimore shooting did receive focused on the culture of violence within the low income community of color in which the shooting occurred and the distrust that the community has for law enforcement officers.

The common factor in both the Poway and Baltimore shootings, as well as the common factor in the more than 200 other gun related deaths and two to three times that many gun related injuries that occurred in the United States this past weekend – if it was just an “average” weekend in the USA – is that all these deaths and injuries were committed with guns. The other common factor in the aftermath of Poway and Baltimore shootings is that the issue of gun control as a means of preventing such shootings was hardly mentioned.

Other countries deal with hate crimes; racial, ethnic, and religious intolerance; mental illness; poverty; socio-economic disparity; social injustice; and cultures of violence. But the United States in not an extraordinary outlier in any of these areas. In fact, the rate of violent assault by any means in the United States is lower than the average for the other high income democratic countries of the world.[17] Where the United States is an extreme outlier, though, is in the rate of homicide, which is seven times higher in the United States than the average for the other high income democratic countries of the world, driven by a gun homicide rate that is 25 times higher,[18] and driven in turn by the extremely lax gun control laws in the United States as compared with all other high income democratic countries[19] and the related extraordinarily high number of guns in circulation and ease with which almost anyone can obtain a firearm.[20]

It is appropriate to address the root causes of hate crimes and other forms of violence, as New Zealand has done following the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, 2019, in which 50 people were killed and 50 more wounded.[21] But it is both inappropriate and inexcusable to fail to address the final common pathway by which all mass shootings and other forms of gun violence are committed – with guns.

It took New Zealand parliament just over two weeks to adopt a complete ban on assault rifles by a vote of 119-1 following the Christchurch mass shootings.[22] It took the Australian government just 12 days to agree to ban all semi-automatic rifles following a mass shooting in that country in 1996.[23] It took the United Kingdom a little longer – two years – to decide to ban all handguns after a mass shooting in an elementary school in Dunblane Scotland in 1996.[24] Despite innumerable horrific mass shootings over the past five decades, the United States has failed to enact gun control regulations that come even close to being as stringent or effective as the laws in all other high income democratic countries.

It is the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that the United States should adopt a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. In order to ban handguns, we must first overturn the rogue 2008 Hellerdecision[25] in which a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court decisions,[26] in ruling that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep a handgun in the home. Until we adopt stringent gun control regulations comparable to those in other high income democratic countries, we should not ask ourselves why our country continues to suffer from an epidemic of gun violence, but rather why we fail to take the obvious steps necessary to stop this epidemic.

Note: Click on this link for a downloadable version of this press release in PDF format.

References

[1] Chris Nichols, “How Is a ‘Mass Shooting’ Defined?,” PolitiFact California, October 4, 2017, https://www.politifact.com/california/article/2017/oct/04/mass-shooting-what-does-it-mean/.

[2] William J. Krouse and Daniel J. Richardson, “Mass Murder with Firearms: Incidents and Victims, 1999-2013” (Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2015).

[3] “Mass Shootings,” Gun Violence Archive, 2018, http://www.shootingtracker.com/.

[4] Jill Cowan, “What to Know About the Poway Synagogue Shooting,” The New York Times, April 29, 2019, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/us/synagogue-shooting.html.

[5] Sarah Meehan, “West Baltimore Neighbors Lament Shooting at Cookout That Killed One, Injured Seven,” baltimoresun.com, accessed April 29, 2019, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-cookout-shooting-follow-20190429-story.html.

[6] “Mass Shootings.”

[7] Krouse and Richardson, “Mass Murder with Firearms.”

[8] “Fatal Injury Data | WISQARS | Injury Center | CDC,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed September 11, 2016, http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/fatal.html.

[9] “NonFatal Data | WISQARS | Injury Center | CDC,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed September 11, 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/nonfatal.html.

[10] “Community Profile | Poway, CA – Official Website,” City of Poway, California, April 29, 2019, https://poway.org/576/Community-Profile.

[11] Amy Taxin and Christopher Weber, “Rabbi Says Gun ‘miraculously Jammed’ in California Attack,” AP NEWS, April 29, 2019, https://apnews.com/14d2196c6d584b1287bc862a0e53c00a.

[12] Taxin and Weber.

[13] Luke Duncan and Ian Broadwater, “‘Neighborhoods Are Crying out’: Baltimore Has Highest Homicide Rate of U.S. Big Cities,” baltimoresun.com, September 25, 2018, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-fbi-data-20180924-story.html.

[14] Meehan, “West Baltimore Neighbors Lament Shooting at Cookout That Killed One, Injured Seven.”

[15] David McFadden, “No Arrests Day after Chaotic Shooting Attack in Baltimore,” Washington Post, April 29, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-7-shot-1-fatally-in-latest-baltimore-violence/2019/04/28/0426ab74-6a15-11e9-bbe7-1c798fb80536_story.html.

[16] Meehan, “West Baltimore Neighbors Lament Shooting at Cookout That Killed One, Injured Seven.”

[17] “Assault Rate in OECD Countries: 2013 or Latest Year Available, % of Adults Assaulted in the Past 12 Months,” OECD, accessed September 18, 2016, https://figure.nz/chart/yd9BelUz6xKnvNpW.

[18] Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

[19] “Gun Law and Policy: Firearms and Armed Violence, Country by Country,” GunPolicy.org, accessed December 3, 2017, http://www.gunpolicy.org/.

[20] Max Fisher and Josh Keller, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer,” The New York Times, November 7, 2017, sec. Americas, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html.

[21] The New York Times, “New Zealand Shooting Live Updates: Attack on Christchurch Mosques Leaves 49 Dead,” The New York Times, March 15, 2019, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-shooting.html.

[22] Josh Hafner, “Gun Control Bill in New Zealand Passes in Early Vote Following Attacks,” USA Today, April 2, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/04/02/gun-control-bill-new-zealand-vote-parliament-mosque-attacks/3341240002/.

[23] Rebecca Peters, “Rational Firearm Regulation: Evidence-Based Gun Laws in Australia,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 195–204; Philip Alpers, “The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 205–11.

[24] Michael J. North, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the Dunblane Shootings,” in Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 185–93.

[25] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US (Supreme Court 2008).

[26] United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US (Supreme Court 1876); Presser v. Illinois, 116 US (Supreme Court 1886); U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (n.d.); Lewis v. United States, No. 55 (U.S. 1980).

Press Releases|

AR-15 rifle with high capacity magazine

Sacramento California, April 2, 2019: Americans Against Gun Violence condemns the ruling by District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez on March, 29, 2019, in the case of Virginia Duncan et al v. Xavier Becerra, in his official capacity as Attorney General of the State of California.

California voters approved Proposition 63, which included a ban on ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds, by almost a two to one margin (63% yes to 37% no) in November of 2016. Before the date that the ban was due to go into effect, the California Rifle and Pistol Association and certain individuals, including Virginia Duncan, filed a lawsuit to block enactment of the high capacity magazine ban. Judge Roger Benitez, appointed by President George W. Bush, granted a temporary injunction against the high capacity magazine ban on June 29, 2017. On March 29, 2019, in an 86 page opinion that reads more like a gun lobby manifesto than the carefully reasoned opinion of an objective jurist, Judge Benitez ruled that the injunction was permanent.

In his ruling, Judge Benitez cites three anecdotal cases in which it is alleged that law-abiding citizens could have better defended themselves if they’d had high capacity magazines. According to the footnotes, one case was reported in the Jacksonville Times-Union on July 18, 2000. No such article can be found on the Florida based newspaper’s website archives. In the second case, which occurred in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in September 2016, a woman shot and killed a home invader using a handgun without a high capacity magazine. In the third case, which occurred in Loganville, Georgia, in January of 2013, a woman shot and critically wounded a burglar using a revolver. The burglar, who was unarmed, thought that the house was unoccupied and pleaded with the woman to stop shooting him as he lay on the floor.

While citing these three cases over the past 19 years as evidence in support of the need for civilian ownership of high capacity magazines, including one case in Florida for which no documentation can be found and two cases in Georgia in which high capacity magazines were not an issue, Judge Benitez makes no mention of the multiple mass shootings that have been committed in California with semi-automatic firearms capable of accepting high capacity magazines. These shootings include, but are not limited to, the mass shooting at Cal State Fullerton on July 12, 1976, in which 7 people were killed and 2 wounded; the mass shooting at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego on January 29, 1979, in which the principal and a custodian were killed and 8 children and a police officer were wounded; the mass shooting at a MacDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro on July 18, 1984, in which 21 people were killed and 19 wounded; the mass shooting at the Electronic Systems Laboratory in Sunnyvale on February 16, 1988, in which 7 people were killed and 4 wounded; the mass shooting at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton on January 17, 1989, in which 5 children were killed and 32 children were wounded; the mass shooting at the Petit and Martin Law Firm in San Francisco on July 1, 1993, in which 8 people were killed and 6 wounded; the mass shooting at the Goleta Post Office on January 30, 2006, in which 7 people were killed; the mass shooting in San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, in which 14 people were killed and 24 wounded; the mass shooting at Rancho Tehama Reserve on November 13-14, 2017, in which 5 people were killed and 11 wounded; and the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks on November 7, 2018, in which 12 people were killed and 1 was wounded. Instead of mentioning any of these California mass shootings, Judge Benitez describes mass shootings committed with firearms capable of accepting high capacity magazines as being “exceedingly rare.”

Judge Benitez fails to acknowledge the enormous body of evidence, including studies published in the public health and law enforcement literature, documenting that a gun in the home is far more likely to be used to kill, injure, or intimidate a household member than to protect against a home invader. This literature includes numerous studies documenting the fact that the presence of a gun in the home is an independent risk factor for the occurrence of a homicide or a suicide in the home. Instead, Judge Benitez cites a study claiming that there are “2.2 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses by civilians” annually in the United States, including “340,000 to 400,000 defensive gun uses” in situations in which “defenders believed they had almost certainly saved a life by using the gun.” Judge Benitez fails to acknowledge, however, that the study he cites was a telephone survey in which most of the respondents were white males living in southern states; that the estimate of 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually is an extrapolation from the fact that 66 out of 4,977 respondents (1.3%) reported over the telephone that they had used a gun defensively in the past year; and that not a single one of the reported defensive gun uses was confirmed through follow-up with law enforcement agencies or by any other means. Judge Benitez also fails to acknowledge that using the same type of telephone survey methodology, more Americans report having had contact with space aliens over the past year than having used a gun defensively.

Judge Benitez claims that civilian ownership of high capacity magazines is protected by the Second Amendment, and that the Second Amendment was adopted, in part, as “a check against tyranny” and “against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and as a necessary and efficient means of regaining rights when temporarily overturned by usurpation.” This interpretation of the Second Amendment, known as the “insurrectionist idea,” has been thoroughly discredited. The Second Amendment 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.

Judge Benitez would not allow individuals who disagree with his rulings to enter his courtroom armed with assault rifles equipped with high capacity magazines, and it is equally absurd to imply that the founders of the United States would include an amendment to the U.S. Constitution intended to allow individuals who disagree with their elected officials to assassinate them and violently overthrow the government.

Finally, citing the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision, Judge Benitez claims that civilian ownership of high capacity magazines is a part of an individual right to own guns “for protection” conferred by the Second Amendment. Judge Benitez fails to acknowledge, however, that in the 217 years prior to the Heller decision, the Supreme Court had ruled on four separate occasions – and lower courts had confirmed in innumerable other cases – that the Second Amendment did not confer an individual right to own guns. Specifically, in the 1980 case of Lewis v. United States, the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in the majority opinion:

The Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”

The late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called the misrepresentation of the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to own guns “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interests” that he had seen in his lifetime. In the 2008 Heller decision, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court became a party to that fraud in ruling that the District of Columbia’s partial handgun ban violated the Second Amendment. In his ruling in Duncan v. Becerra, Judge Benitez takes this fraud to a new level in asserting that the Second Amendment confers not only a constitutional right to keep a handgun in the home, but also a right for individuals to “keep and bear” assault rifles equipped with high capacity magazines.

In summary, Judge Benitez’s ruling in Duncan v. Becerra is an abomination. Americans Against Gun Violence urges California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to immediately appeal this ruling to the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It is further the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that the Heller decision should be overturned in the short term, and that in the long term, a new constitutional amendment should be adopted that clarifies the Second Amendment in a manner consistent with the excerpt above from the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the 1980 Lewis decision. Finally, it is the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that in order to reduce rates of gun violence in the United States to levels comparable to those in other high income democratic countries – countries in which mass shootings are rare or non-existent and in which the overall rate of gun homicide is, on average, 25 times lower than in our country – we must adopt comparably stringent gun control laws, including complete bans on civilian ownership of handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. Once assault weapons are banned, the issue of banning the magazines that feed these weapons would become moot.

Note: Click on this link for a referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

AAGunV in the News, News about Gun Violence|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to New Zealand Mass Shootings

Sacramento California, March 15, 2019: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the friends, family, fellow worshippers, and fellow countrymen and women of the many victims who were killed in the mass shootings at two Muslim mosques in New Zealand yesterday. We also extend sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to the many other victims who suffered non-fatal injuries in the attacks. We condemn the shootings in the strongest terms along with the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, white supremacist ideology that apparently motivated them.

Opponents of gun control in the United States will claim that the mass shootings in New Zealand, a country with much stronger gun control laws than our own country, are evidence that gun control is ineffective. In fact, the New Zealand experience is evidence in support of the effectiveness of stringent gun control laws.

The mass shootings in New Zealand yesterday were the first mass shootings in that country since 1990. Using the narrow definition of a mass shooting as one in which at least four people, not including the shooter, are killed, there have been more than 3 mass shootings per year over the last 53 years in the United States. Using a broader definition of a mass shooting as one in which at least four people, not including the shooter, are killed or injured, there is almost one mass shooting per day in the United States.

As a result of our weaker gun control laws, the estimated number of privately owned guns per capita in the United States is almost four times higher than in New Zealand. The rate of gun homicide in the United States is more than 22 time higher than in New Zealand.

Although New Zealand’s gun control laws are much stronger than those in the United States, they’re not nearly as stringent as the gun control laws in many other high income democratic countries. As noted in a fact sheet prepared by Philip Alpers, Executive Director of GunPolicy.Org and Assistant Professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, a number of measures to strengthen New Zealand’s gun control laws were proposed following the 1990 mass shooting, but none of these measures was enacted. Had the proposed measures been enacted in New Zealand, it is more likely than not that yesterday’s mass shooting would not have occurred. We anticipate that in the aftermath of yesterday’s tragedy, the government of New Zealand will react swiftly and definitively to strengthen its gun control laws in order to prevent future mass shootings.

In the United States, Congress has not enacted any new gun control legislation since the horrific mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012; at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California in 2015; at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016; at the open air music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2017; or at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed H.R.8 and H.R.1112, bills to expand background checks for gun purchases, but it is unlikely that the Senate will pass similar measures, and neither H.R.8 nor H.R.1112 comes close to being as stringent as current gun control laws in New Zealand. We should not be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs in our own country.

Americans Against Gun Violence calls for the urgent adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in most other high income democratic countries of the world. Specifically, we call for a complete ban on civilian ownership of all handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles; for universal registration of all firearms and licensing of all gun owners; and for placing the burden of proof for firearm purchases on the person seeking to acquire a gun to show why he or she needs one and that he or she can handle one safely, not on society to prove that he or she meets certain narrow criteria for being prohibited from possessing a gun. In order to adopt such stringent gun control laws, we must overturn the rogue 2008 Heller decision, in which a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court reversed 217 years of legal precedent in ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment conferred even a limited right for an individual own a gun unrelated to service in a well regulated militia.

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

AAGunV in the News, International Gun Violence Prevention, News about Gun Violence, Press Releases|

Deputy Natalie Corona

Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the family, friends, and colleagues of Davis California Police Officer Natalie Corona who was shot and killed in the line of duty on January 10, 2019. Deputy Corona was investigating a traffic accident when a man on a bicycle approached her from behind and shot and killed her with a semi-automatic handgun. Deputy Corona was 22 years old at the time of her death and had just begun working as a police officer with the Davis Police Department in December of 2018. She had first started volunteering with the department, though, when she graduated from high school, intent on following in the footsteps of her father who is a retired police officer.

The alleged gunman, 48 year old Kevin Limbaugh, later shot and killed himself. Limbaugh had no reported history of mental illness, but he had been recently convicted of a violent misdemeanor after punching a coworker in the face, and after his death, investigators found a letter lying on his bed indicating that he was suffering from the paranoid delusion that the Davis Police Department had been “hitting” him with “ultrasonic waves.”

While Americans Against Gun Violence joins many others in mourning the death of Deputy Corona, we believe that expressions of sympathy are inadequate responses to her death. We also disagree with those who would claim that her death was not preventable.

Deputy Corona is the second California police officer to be shot and killed in less than two weeks. Corporal Ronil Singh of the Newman, California Police Department was shot and killed with a handgun by a driver he had pulled over for suspected drunk driving on December 27, 2018. Nationwide, 52 U.S. law enforcement officers were fatally shot in 2018. The fatal shooting of police officers by civilians occurs rarely in the other high income democratic countries of the world. The rates of mental illness in these other countries are comparable to the rate in the United States, and the overall rates of violent assaults in most of these countries are higher than in the United States. The difference between other high income democratic countries of the world and the United States is that all other high income democratic countries have far more stringent gun control laws and far lower rates of civilian gun ownership. In particular, civilian ownership of handguns is either completely banned or strictly regulated in the other high income democratic countries of the world.

Americans Against Gun Violence calls for the urgent adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in every other high income democratic country of the world – countries in which not only are officer involved shootings rare, but mass shootings are rare or non-existent, and the average rate of gun homicide is 25 times lower than in our own country. Such laws include stringent restrictions, if not complete bans, on civilian ownership of handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. Until we adopt such laws, we shouldn’t be satisfied with mourning the victims of gun violence. Rather, we should ask ourselves why we don’t take the obvious steps necessary to prevent these killings from occurring in the first place.

Note: Click on this link for a referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Pittsburgh Synagogue Mass Shooting: Condemning Anti-Semitism is Not Enough

Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the friends, family, and fellow synagogue members of the victims who were killed in the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 17, 2018. We also send sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to the victims who were wounded. We condemn the shooting and the anti-Semitism that motivated it in the strongest terms – but we don’t stop there.

Americans Against Gun Violence calls for the urgent adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in every other high income democratic country of the world – countries in which mass shootings are rare or non-existent, and in which the average rate of gun homicide is 25 times lower than in our own country. Such laws include stringent restrictions, if not complete bans, on civilian ownership of handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. Until we adopt such laws, we shouldn’t be satisfied with condemning the motivation behind horrific mass shootings. Rather, we should ask ourselves why we don’t take the obvious steps necessary to prevent them.

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Second Annual Fall Dinner, Saturday, November 10, in Sacramento, California

Americans Against Gun Violence is holding its Second Annual Fall Dinner on the evening of Saturday, November 10. The dinner will be held in conjunction with the Sacramento Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility again this year at the DoubleTree by Hilton, 2001 Point West Way, in Sacramento.

The cost of the dinner is $50 per person ($25 for students). Reserved tables are available for groups of 10 or more. Chicken and vegetarian (including vegan) entrees are available. (The salmon option is no longer available as of November 5.) There will be a no-host bar inside the banquet room. Doors open at 6:00 PM for check-in and social hour, dinner begins at 7:00 PM, and the program begins at 8:00. Advance reservations are required. (Reservations are now closed.)

The Australian physician, Dr. Tilman Ruff, will be the keynote speaker at the dinner. Dr. Ruff is the co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. ICAN was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for the key role that it played in getting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons passed by a vote of 122-1 in the United Nations General Assembly in July of 2017.

Although the focus of Dr. Ruff’s keynote address will be the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons, Americans Against Gun Violence president Dr. Bill Durston will also be talking at the dinner about the other end of the spectrum of weapons of mass destruction – small arms – with an emphasis on the recent mass shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue and a California nightclub and the example that Australia provides for taking a swift and definitive response to such tragedies to prevent them from recurring over and over again. The program will also feature a presentation by the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence High School Essay Contest winner.

AAGunV in the News, Events, Uncategorized|

Dr. Durston to Speak at AfriPeace Foundation Benefit Dinner October 13

Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, will be the keynote speaker at the annual AfriPeace Foundation Benefit Dinner on the evening of Saturday, October 13. The dinner is being held in Edwards Plaza of the Country Day School, 2636 Latham Drive, in Sacramento, from 6-9 PM. The event is a fundraiser for the AfriPeace Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, whose mission is to promote peace, non-violence, and justice in Africa and her diaspora with an emphasis on youth education and cross-cultural exchange. Dr. Durston will be speaking on the topic, “Preventing Gun Violence: from Africa to the Americas.” Tickets for the event are $35 via advance purchase or $40 at the door. The event will also include live music and dance performances, Ethiopian cuisine, and a silent auction to benefit the AfriPeace Foundation.

AAGunV in the News, Events|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at Capital Gazette Newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland

Sacramento, California, June 29, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and colleagues of the five people killed, including the newspaper editor, three journalists, and another staff member, in the mass shooting on June 28, 2018, at the office of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. At the same time, we agree with the statement by the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut who said in a press release and a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate 50 years ago:

The regular occurrence of mass shootings is eminently preventable. The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which such mass shootings occur on a regular basis. The overall homicide rate in the United States is 10 times higher than the average rate in other high income democratic countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that is 25 times higher. The reasons for the extraordinarily high rate of gun violence in the United States are clear. Our country’s rates of mental illness and substance abuse are comparable to the rates in other high income democratic countries. We do not have a more violent society in general. Our rate of assault by any means is lower than the assault rate in most other developed countries. The reasons for our extraordinarily high rate of gun violence are our extraordinarily lax gun control laws as compared with all other high income democratic countries, the associated extraordinarily high number of guns in circulation in our country, and what Senator Dodd referred to 50 years ago as “the ridiculous ease” with which almost anyone in our country can acquire almost any kind of a gun.

In every other high income democratic country of the world, the burden of proof is on the person seeking to acquire a gun to show why he or she needs one, and that he or she is of good character and able to handle a gun safely; not on society to prove why he or she should not have one. Moreover, recognizing that there is no net protective value from civilian gun ownership, most other developed countries do not accept “self-defense” as a reason for having a gun. The alleged shooter in the Capital Gazette mass shooting, Jarrod Ramos, had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment of a young woman who refused his advances in 2011. He filed an unsuccessful defamation of character lawsuit against the Capital Gazette after the Gazette published a critical – but accurate – account of his conviction. Ramos subsequently made numerus threats against Gazette staff on social media. He was nevertheless able to legally purchase the pump action shotgun he used in the Capital Gazette mass shooting under lax federal and Maryland state gun laws. A person with this background almost certainly would not have been able to acquire a gun in any other high income democratic country in the world.

Other high income democratic countries have reacted swiftly and definitively to prevent mass shootings. For example, following a mass shooting committed with assault rifles in the resort town of Port Arthur, Australia, in 1996, the Australian government took just 13 days to agree to ban civilian ownership not only of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles, but also of all pump-action shotguns of the type used by Ramos in the Capital Gazette mass shooting yesterday and by Dimitrios Pagourtzis in the Santa Fe High School mass shooting in May of this year. There have been no further mass shootings in Australia since 1996. Despite scores of horrific mass shootings in the United States over the past half century, the U.S. federal government has failed to take any definitive action to prevent these massacres from recurring on a regular basis.

It is the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that the United States should adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in every other high income democratic country of the world. If such laws had already been in place, it’s exceedingly unlikely that the Capital Gazette mass shooting would have occurred. Until such laws are in place, when the next horrific mass shooting occurs in our country, we shouldn’t ask ourselves why these tragedies keep occurring. Rather, we should ask ourselves why we fail to take the obvious steps necessary to prevent them.

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

Press Releases|

Presenting the Winners of the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest

The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.

First Place Winner ($3,000 award)

(Student Name and High School withheld at student’s request)

Second Place Winner ($2,500 Award)

Lucas Suter

Placer High School, Auburn, California

Third Place Winner ($2,000 Award)

Katherine McCabe

Pioneer High School, Woodland, California

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name and High School withheld at students’ request)

And here we are – 650,000 gun related homicides; more than twice that many wounded; 130,000 children and teen lives lost within that 50 year time span

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name withheld at students’ request)

Poolesville High School, Poolesville, Maryland

$1,000 Award Winner

Mila Opalenik

Amador High School, Sutter Creek, California

$1,000 Award Winner

Luis Orozco

Lodi High School, Lodi, California

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name and High School withheld at students’ request)

$1,000 Award Winner

(Student Name High School withheld at students’ request)

$1,000 Award Winner

Anahi Ballesteros

Franklin High School, Stockton, California

$250 Award Winner

(Student Name High School withheld at students’ request)

$250 Award Winner

Taylor Motley

Mountain View High School, Mesa, Arizona

AAGunV in the News|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Santa Fe High School Mass Shooting

Sacramento, California, May 21, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, classmates, and colleagues of the eight students and two teachers who were mortally wounded during the mass shooting on May 18, 2018, at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas. We also extend our sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to all the other victims of the shooting.

The regular occurrence of mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, is eminently preventable. The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which such mass shootings occur on a regular basis. The overall gun homicide rate in the United States is 25 times higher than the average rate in other high income democratic countries. The gun homicide rate for U.S. high school aged youth is 82 times higher. The reasons for the extraordinarily high rate of gun violence in the United States are not higher rates of mental illness or substance abuse, not a higher level of socioeconomic disparity, and not a more violent society in general. The reasons for our extraordinarily high rate of gun violence are our extraordinarily lax gun control laws as compared with all other high income democratic countries, the associated extraordinarily high number of guns in circulation in our country, and what the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut referred to 50 years ago in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate as “the ridiculous ease” with which almost anyone in our country can acquire almost any kind of a gun.

Other high income democratic countries have reacted swiftly and definitively to mass shootings. Following a mass shooting in the resort town of Port Arthur in 1996 committed with assault rifles, the Australian government took just 13 days to decide to ban civilian ownership not only of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles, but also of all pump-action shotguns of the type used in the Santa Fe mass shooting. The legislation also included strict regulations concerning storage of guns, which would have prevented the Santa Fe mass shooting. There have been no further mass shootings in Australia since 1966. Following a mass shooting at the Dunblane Elementary School in Scotland committed with handguns in 1996, Great Britain, which already had stringent regulations on civilian ownership of handguns, passed legislation within two years to ban handguns completely. A handgun was also used in the Santa Fe mass shooting. The rate of gun related deaths in Great Britain is one fiftieth the rate in the United States, and there have been no further mass shootings in Britain involving handguns since the handgun ban was enacted. Despite scores of horrific mass shootings on U.S. school campuses over the past half century, the U.S. federal government has failed to take any definitive action to prevent these massacres from recurring on a regular basis.

In the same speech on June 11, 1968, in which he referred to the “ridiculous ease” of acquiring guns in our country, Senator Dodd stated:

When the next horrific mass shooting occurs in our country, we shouldn’t ask ourselves why these tragedies keep occurring. Rather, we should ask ourselves why we choose not to prevent them.

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Nashville Mass Shooting

Sacramento, California, April 24, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and colleagues of the four young people who were killed in the mass shooting on Sunday, April 22, at the “Waffle House” restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee. We also extend our sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to the other two young people who were seriously wounded in the shooting. We applaud the bravery of the unarmed bystander, James Shaw, who was also injured as he wrestled the shooter’s assault rifle way from him.

Mr. Shaw’s courageous act demonstrates the deceit in the gun lobby’s claim that “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” This is not the first time that an unarmed bystander has stopped a mass shooting in progress. In a study of 160 active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013, the FBI found 21 cases in which unarmed bystanders disabled the shooter and only one case in which an armed civilian other than a paid security guard or off-duty police officer stopped the shooting.

The alleged shooter in the Nashville killings, 29 year old Travis Reinking, had reportedly demonstrated signs of serious mental illness on multiple occasions. The AR-15 style assault rifle that he used in the mass shooting had at one point been taken away from him by law enforcement officers and given to his father for “safe-keeping.” His father reportedly gave the rifle back to Reinking at some point prior to the Nashville shooting. At the time of this writing, it is unclear if any state or federal law was broken in the transfer of the assault rifle back from father to son.

The fact that Travis Reinking was able to ever obtain an assault rifle demonstrates what the late Senator Thomas Dodd (D-Connecticut) described in 1968 as “the ridiculous ease” with which almost anyone in the United States can get almost any kind of gun. The rate of mental illness in the United States is comparable to the rates in other high income democratic countries of the world, but the rate of gun homicide in the USA is 25 times higher than the average rate in those other democratic countries, and the USA is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis.

It is the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that there is no legitimate civilian use for high powered semi-automatic rifles of the kind used by Travis Reinking and numerous others to commit mass shootings in recent years. We believe that the United States should follow the example of Australia and move rapidly to ban all civilian ownership of such weapons. We further believe that the United States should heed the advice of Senator Thomas Dodd who said in June of 1968:

“Pious condolences will no longer suffice….Quarter measures and half measures will no longer suffice….The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country of the world.*”

Such gun control legislation includes stringent restriction, if not complete bans, on civilian ownership of handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. Such gun control legislation also requires placing the burden on anyone seeking to obtain a gun to show good reason why he or she needs one rather than placing the burden on society to prove that he or she should not have one.

*The final sentence in this quotation is the prompt for the Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest.

Note: Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Announces the Opening of Our 2018 National High School Essay Contest

The Americans Against Gun Violence 2018 National High School Essay Contest is now open to all high school students in the United States and its territories. A total of $15,000 will be awarded to the 12 contest winners. The prompt for the contest is the following quotation from the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, who said in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on June 11, 1968:

“The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.”

The deadline for students to enter the contest is 11:59 PM on Sunday, May 6. (The entry form for this contest was closed on May 7.) (more…)

AAGunV in the News, Events, Uncategorized|

Protests at March 27 Sacramento City Council Meeting Regarding Officer Involved Shooting

Sacramento, California, March 27, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence supports peaceful protest as a legitimate means of achieving social change. It does not, however, support the kind of verbally abusive, physically threatening protest that disrupted the Sacramento City Council meeting on two occasions this evening. The purpose of the meeting was to allow Sacramento Police Chief Daniel Hahn and Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert to report on what they were doing in response to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, Stephon Clark, by two Sacramento police officers on March 18; and for the City Council to listen to public commentary concerning the shooting. Americans Against Gun Violence president Dr. Bill Durston was present at the meeting and had prepared the following statement, but he and other attendees were prevented from speaking due to the disruptions caused by the protesters.

Mayor Steinberg and Council Members,

My name is Dr. Bill Durston. I’m a former expert marksman in the US Marine Corp, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, and a retired emergency physician. I’m speaking tonight on behalf of Americans Against Gun Violence as the president of this organization.

We’d first like to commend Mayor Steinberg, Chief Hahn, members of the Sacramento Police Department, and members of the community for the restraint that everyone has shown in avoiding any further violence in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Stephon Clark by two police officers on March 18. At the same time, we share the belief of many members of the community that there is reasonable doubt as to whether this shooting was justified.

It’s the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that we have not only the ability, but also the moral responsibility to reduce rates of gun violence in the United States to rates comparable to other high income democratic countries – countries in which mass shootings, shootings of civilians by police, and shootings of police by civilians are rare or non-existent, and in which overall rates of gun violence are one tenth the rate in our country. To achieve such dramatic reductions, we need to adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws in those other democratic countries. We further believe that stringent regulation of civilian gun ownership should be accompanied by stringent regulation of the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers.

The Stephon Clark shooting raises reasonable doubts as to whether the Sacramento Police Department has stringent regulations on the use of lethal force by its officers, and if it does, whether officers are sufficiently trained to abide by those regulations.

We would like to propose the formation of a task force that includes strong representation from civil society, including representation from Americans Against Gun Violence, to review standards for the use of lethal force by the Sacramento Police Department as well as to consider ways to reduce overall rates of gun violence in our community, our state, and our nation.

Thank you.

Press Releases|

CalPERS Board Votes Against Divesting from Assault Weapons Dealers

Americans Against Gun Violence is disappointed that the Investment Committee Board of Directors of the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) voted on Monday not to study a proposal by California State Treasurer John Chiang to divest CalPERS pension funds from businesses throughout the country that are engaged in the sale of military style assault weapons that are illegal for sale in California. CalPERS had previously divested from the manufacturers of such weapons following the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. CalPERS is the nation’s largest pension fund, with over $350 billion in assets. The portion of those assets that is invested in businesses involved in the sale of guns is currently unknown. Read the full press release

Press Releases|

Please Call In as Students Walk Out

On Wednesday, March 14, high school students across the country are planning to walk out of class and/or engage in other activities to demand the adoption of definitive gun control laws in our country to prevent further mass shootings like the one that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14. The national student action, which was inspired by the activism of the surviving Marjory Stoneman Douglas students, is scheduled to begin at 10 AM in all time zones and to last 17 minutes – one minute for each of the 17 people (14 students and 3 staff) killed in the Parkland mass shooting.

Americans Against Gun Violence has reached out to the students to offer our full support through individual letters to some of the most vocal students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, through a press release applauding all the student gun control activists, and through an open letter to all student gun control activists in Dr. Durston’s most recent Americans Against Gun Violence President’s Message.

In solidarity with the students, we are asking all of our members to please devote at least 17 minutes yourself on Wednesday, March 14 (or some other day this week that your schedule allows) to contact your US Senators and your US representative and let them know that you expect them to openly advocate and do everything within their power to enact stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in every other high income democratic country of the world – countries in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, are rare or non-existent, and in which high school aged youth are killed by guns a rate that is 82 times lower than in the USA. Such laws include stringent restrictions, if not complete bans, on civilian ownership of handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. Please identify yourself as a member of Americans Against Gun Violence when you make your contacts with your elected officials, and please let them know that you are in full support of the student protests.

Thanks for supporting the students, and thanks for supporting Americans Against Gun Violence. Working together, we will stop the shameful epidemic of gun violence that afflicts our country.

AAGunV in the News|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Mass Shooting at California Veterans Home

Sacramento, California, March 11, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and colleagues of Christine Loeber, Jennifer Golick, and Jennifer Gonzales Shusheba, who were shot and killed on Friday, March 9, by a former client who took them hostage at a home for veterans with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Yountville, California. The three women worked as executive director, clinical director, and staff psychologist, respectively, at the home.

The shooter, Albert Wong, who apparently shot and killed himself after murdering the three women, was reported to be a decorated veteran of the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. He was described by a former Army colleague as, “Hands down, the best soldier we had,” and by a former foster parent as, “A fine young man.”

The mass shooting at the Yountville veterans home was a “small one,” by US standards. In fact, it would not even qualify as a mass shooting by some definitions, which require that there be at least four victims, not including the perpetrator. The shooting obviously has an enormous adverse effect, however, on the lives of the victims, on everyone who knew and loved them, and on the community that they served.

At the same time that we extend our sincere sympathy to all those affected by the shooting, we wish to emphasize that the regular occurrence of such tragedies, which has become the norm in the United States, is preventable, and that expressions of sympathy are not nearly enough. As the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut stated in 1968:

Pious condolences will no longer suffice. Quarter measures and half measures will no longer suffice. The time has now come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.

California has some of the strongest gun control measures in the United States, and the rate of gun related deaths in California is about 30% lower than the national average. But the rate of gun related deaths in California is much higher than in any other high income democratic country of the world. For example, the rate of gun related deaths in California is 8.5 times higher than in Australia and 35.8 times higher than in Great Britain.

While California’s gun control laws may be among the strongest in the United States, they would not qualify as even “quarter measures” or “half measures” in any other high income democratic country. Contrary to the laws in other high income democratic countries, no one in California (or in the rest of the United States) needs to show a good reason for having a gun before acquiring one. Instead, to deny a gun purchase, the government must show that the individual meets certain limited criteria for being prohibited from owning a gun, and suffering from PTSD is not one of these criteria. Furthermore, recognizing that there is no net protective value from owning or carrying a gun, most other democratic societies do not accept “self-protection” as a legitimate reason for having a firearm.

In order to prevent future mass shootings, and in order to reduce the extraordinarily high daily number of gun related deaths and injuries in California and the rest of the United States, we must adopt definitive gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in place in Australia, Great Britain, and every other high income democratic country of the world. Such laws include stringent regulation, if not complete bans, on civilian ownership of handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. Until we adopt such laws, we should not be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs.

Click on this link for a fully referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Applauds Student Gun Control Activists Who Are Speaking Out in Aftermath of Mass Shooting

Sacramento, California, February 19, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence applauds the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and other high schools across the country who are speaking out concerning the need for definitive gun control laws to protect them and their fellow classmates from horrific mass shootings like the one that occurred on February 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida. Below are excerpts from some of the students’ statements.

Condolences and saying we’re so sorry for your loss is obviously important, but what we need at this point is not to say that anymore because there shouldn’t be any more people that die. We need to take action. (David Hogg, student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, during interview on PBS News Hour, February 15, 2018)

We can’t ignore the issues of gun control that this tragedy raises. And so, I’m asking — no, demanding — we take action now. Why? Because at the end of the day, the students at my school felt one shared experience — our politicians abandoned us by failing to keep guns out of schools. But this time, my classmates and I are going to hold them to account. This time we are going to pressure them to take action. (Cameron Kasky, student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in op-ed entitled “My Generation Won’t Stand for This,” posted on CNN, February 16, 2018)

We need to prevent this from ever happening again. Because you see it on the news and you say, “That’s not my kid, it’s not my problem.” Well, what if one day it is your kid that gets shot? Then are you going to finally care? Then will something finally get done? (Lexi Gendron, student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in interview on NBC News, February 17, 2018)

To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you… Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call

[slang term for nonsense]. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call [slang term for nonsense]… They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call [slang term for nonsense]. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call [slang term for nonsense]. (Emma Gonzalez, student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, as reported on CNN, February 17, 2018)

The points that these students are making are true; their demands for the urgent adoption of definitive gun control laws are reasonable; and their calls for the ouster of elected officials who place the interests of the gun lobby above the safety of American children are entirely appropriate. We are reaching out to these students to offer them our full support.

Note: Click on this link for a PDF version of this press release.

Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Parkland, Florida High School Mass Shooting

Sacramento, California, February 15, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, classmates, and colleagues of all the students and staff who were mortally wounded during the mass shooting yesterday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. We also extend our heartfelt sympathy and sincere wishes for a speedy and complete recovery to all the other victims of the shooting.

The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, occur on a regular basis. There is no mystery as to why regular mass shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon. The reason is what the late Senator Thomas Dodd (D-Connecticut) described in 1968 as “the ridiculous ease” with which almost anyone in our country can get almost any kind of gun. And there’s no mystery as to what we need to do to stop the epidemic of gun violence that afflicts our country. To again quote Senator Dodd from 1968, “The time has come that we must adopt stringent gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world.” Unfortunately, the stringent gun control regulations that Senator Dodd called for in 1968 have not been enacted, and since 1968, more US civilians have died of gunshot wounds than all the US soldiers killed in all the wars in which our country has ever been involved.

The main cause of the epidemic of gun violence in our country – the extraordinarily high number of guns in circulation and the associated ease with which almost anyone may acquire a gun – and the obvious steps necessary to stop the epidemic – the adoption of stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws in all other high income democratic countries – are rarely mentioned in coverage of high profile shootings.

It is the position of Americans Against Gun Violence that the United States should adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all other high income democratic countries. Such laws include stringent regulations, if not complete bans, on civilian ownership of handguns and all automatic and semi-automatic rifles. Such laws need not prevent responsible hunters and target shooters from practicing their sports with traditional sporting rifles and shotguns. In order to stringently regulate or ban handguns, the Supreme Court’s radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment in the 2008 Heller decision must be overturned.

Click on this link for a referenced version of this press release in PDF format.

Press Releases|

Study shows that U.S. youth are 82 times more likely to die of gun homicide than youth in other countries

A study published in the journal Health Affairs in January of 2018 reported that during the years 2001-2010, youth ages 15-19 in the United States were 82 times more likely to die of gun homicide than youth in 19 other high income democratic countries (Ashish P. Thakrar et al., “Child Mortality In The US And 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis,” Health Affairs 37, no. 1 (January 2018): 140–49). Data published by Centers for Disease Control show that since 2010, the rate of gun homicide for U.S. youth ages 15-19 has increased another 8%. Data for the other 19 high income democratic countries are not currently available. See the Americans Against Gun Violence President’s Message, Sacrificing Our Children to the Gods of the Gun Lobby, for further discussion of the extraordinarily high rate of gun related deaths in U.S. children and youth.

News about Gun Violence|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Highlands Ranch, Colorado Mass Shooting

Sacramento, California, January 1, 2018: Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt sympathy to the family, friends, and colleagues of Deputy Zackari Parrish who was killed in the mass shooting in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, on the morning of December 31, 2017, as he and fellow officers were responding to a domestic disturbance call in an apartment building. We also extend our heartfelt sympathy and sincere wishes for a speedy and complete recovery to the four other law enforcement officers and two civilians who were wounded in the shooting.

The Highlands Ranch mass shooting demonstrates the less publicized aspect of officer involved shootings – cases in which law enforcement officers are shot by civilians in the line of duty. In 2016, the FBI reported that 66 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty, up from 41 officers feloniously killed in 2015.

[i] Of the 66 law enforcement officers murdered in the line of duty in 2016, 62 (94%) were killed with guns (37 with handguns, 24 with rifles, and one with a shotgun). The other four slain officers were struck by motor vehicles.

The Highlands Ranch mass shooting also demonstrates one of the fallacies in the argument that civilians should carry guns “for protection.” The “guns for protection” argument fails to take into account the element of surprise involved in criminal assaults. According to initial reports, at least four of the five officers who were shot by the single assailant in the Highlands Ranch incident were taken by surprise and hit by bullets within a matter of seconds, before they could fire their own weapons.[ii] The officers had been trained to anticipate that all suspects may be armed. The County Sheriff, Tony Spurlock, commented after the shooting:

We respond to every call anticipating that everyone has a gun. This is Colorado. Everybody has a gun.

The fact that at least four of the five officers shot in the Highlands Ranch mass shooting were unable to defend themselves with their own weapons is consistent with a previous FBI report that showed that 85% of law enforcement officers killed by guns in the line of duty never fired their own weapons,[iii] and 20% were killed with their own guns.[iv] It was also reported that all of the officers shot in the Highlands Ranch incident, like 82% of the slain officers in the 2016 FBI report,[v] were wearing body armor at the time that they were shot. Given that highly trained law enforcement officers wearing body armor who are shot and killed in the line of duty usually don’t have a chance to even fire their own weapons, it’s unlikely that most civilians will be available to effectively defend themselves with a gun. On the contrary, one study has shown that someone carrying a gun at the time of an assault is four times more likely to be killed than someone who is not carrying a gun.[vi]

The Highlands Ranch mass shooting also adds to enormous body of evidence demonstrating the need for definitive gun control regulations in the United States. The United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings,[vii] shootings of police by civilians, and shootings of civilians by police[viii] occur on a regular basis. Moreover, the overall rate of gun homicide in the United States is 25 times higher than the average rate in other economically advanced democratic countries.[ix] The reasons for the extraordinarily high rates of gun violence in the United States are clear. The United States has by far the most lax gun control laws and the highest rates of gun ownership of any high income democratic country in the world.

Click on this link for a downloadable copy of this press release in PDF format.

References

[i] “FBI Releases 2016 Statistics for Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty,” Press Release, Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed December 31, 2017, https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2016-statistics-for-law-enforcement-officers-killed-and-assaulted-in-the-line-of-duty.

[ii] Sarah Aarthun and Steve Almasy, “Denver Shooting: Deputy Killed, 6 Wounded by Barricaded Suspect,” CNN, December 31, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/31/us/colorado-shots-fired/index.html.

[iii] “Killed in the Line of Duty: A Study of Felonious Killings of Law Enforcement Officers” (Uniform Crime Reports Section, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, September 1992), 5, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/139198NCJRS.pdf.

[iv] “Killed in the Line of Duty: A Study of Felonious Killings of Law Enforcement Officers,” 40.

[v] “2016 LEOKA Report Released,” Story, Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed January 1, 2018, https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2016-leoka-report-released.

[vi] Charles C. Branas et al., “Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault,” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 11 (November 1, 2009): 2034–40, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2008.143099.

[vii] “Mass Shootings: How U.S. Gun Culture Compares with the Rest of the World,” Washington Post, accessed January 1, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/mass-shootings/.

[viii] Jamiles Lartey, “By the Numbers: US Police Kill More in Days than Other Countries Do in Years,” The Guardian, June 9, 2015, sec. US news, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries.

[ix] Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” The American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.

AAGunV in the News, Press Releases|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to House Vote on H.R. 38 (Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act)

Following the mass killing of 20 first grade children and six adult staff in 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, 2011, issued the following statement:

In response to a horrific series of shootings that has sown terror in our communities, victimized tens of thousands of Americans, and left one of its own bleeding and near death in a Tucson parking lot, Congress has done something quite extraordinary — nothing at all.

On December 6, 2017, in passing the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 (CCR Act), the U.S. House of Representatives once again proved that Congresswoman Giffords’ assessment was too kind. Instead of taking action to stop gun violence, the House of Representatives voted by a margin of 231-198 to facilitate it.

The CCR Act provides that someone who can legally carry a concealed handgun in one state – even if no permit at all is required in that state – can legally carry the concealed gun in every other state in the Union, regardless of the gun laws in the other states.

A committee of the National Academy of Science conducted an extensive review of the effect of concealed carry laws and concluded that the available evidence does not support claims by the gun lobby that allowing private citizens to legally carry concealed weapons reduces crime. On the contrary, the Violence Policy Center has documented over a thousand firearm related killings committed by persons with concealed weapons (CCW) permits since May of 2007, including numerous mass shootings, murder suicides, and murders of police officers. Another study by the VPC showed that over a five year period, Texas CCW permit holders were arrested for 5,314 crimes, including murder, rape, robbery, child molestation, and kidnapping. Moreover, CCW permit holders were arrested for weapons related crimes at a rate that was 81% higher than the general population. Another study of CCW permit holders in Florida showed that over 1,400 individuals who had pleaded guilty or no contest to felonious crimes had subsequently been granted CCW permits.

There is no credible evidence to support the romantic notion that someone with a concealed handgun is likely to be able to stop a mass shooting in progress. In a study of 160 active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013, the FBI found only one case in which an armed bystander other than an off duty police officer or a paid security guard stopped the shooter. In 21 cases, unarmed bystanders successfully disabled the shooter. In the aftermath of the mass shooting in which Congresswoman Giffords and 12 others were wounded and six people, including a nine year old girl and a district court judge were killed, a bystander with a concealed handgun nearly shot Ken Veeder, the unarmed man who took down the shooter, Jared Loughner. One of the authors of the FBI report on active shooter incidents, J. Pete Blair, has warned, “The last thing you want to do in an active shooter event is to pull your gun and go looking for the shooter.” Drawing a gun, he warns, increases the chances of being shot and killed by the shooter, by someone else with a concealed handgun, or by police who respond to the incident.

There is also no credible evidence to support the argument that carrying a concealed weapon protects the individual gun owner. In fact, a study of assault victims in Philadelphia showed that someone who was carrying a gun at the time of the assault was more than four times more likely to be killed than someone who was not carrying a gun.

Despite the extensive evidence that carrying concealed handguns confers much greater risk than benefit both to the person carrying the gun and to the general public, the NRA has been remarkably successful in getting states to adopt liberal concealed carry laws. Currently, 11 states don’t require any permit at all for people to carry concealed handguns. Of the other 39 states that do require permits for concealed weapons, 30 have “shall issue” policies that allow authorities little nor no discretion in refusing to issue a permit if the person requesting the permit is not prohibited by state or federal criteria from owning a gun. The other nine states have “may issue” policies under which authorities may refuse a request for concealed weapon permit from a legal gun owner if the authority believes the person requesting the permit doesn’t have a good reason for carrying a concealed handgun or is otherwise at risk for misusing a firearm.

Gun violence has been appropriately called America’s “shameful epidemic.” There is no mystery as to why the United States is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis or why the rate of gun related deaths in our country is 10 times higher than the average in other civilized nations. It’s because of our lax gun control laws. And there’s no mystery regarding what we need to do to stop the epidemic of gun violence in our country. We need to adopt stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in place in every other high income democratic country of the world. The 231 members of the House of Representatives who voted to make requirements for carrying a concealed handgun in every state as lax as the requirements in the weakest state should be ashamed.

AAGunV in the News|

Letter to the Editor re: What to tell children about school shootings

An edited version of following letter to the editor regarding the November 14, 2017 Tehama County, California mass shooting, which included a shooting at Rancho Tehama Elementary School, was published in the November 26 issue of the Sacramento Bee.

What To Tell Children About Mass Shootings

The two articles in the Sunday Bee concerning the Rancho Tehama Elementary School shooting describe a “family fun day” featuring “pizza and hugs;” security measures such as lockdown drills, high fences, and police on campus; and child counseling as laudable responses. The term, “gun control,” though, is not mentioned in either article, nor is it mentioned that US children are killed by guns at a rate 12 times higher than in the other high income democratic countries; that the US is the only country in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis; that other countries like Britain and Australia responded quickly to mass shootings by banning all handguns (Britain) and banning all semi-automatic rifles (Australia). If school counselors were to be honest with children traumatized by mass shootings, they would tell them to move to some other democratic country where grownups love their children more than their guns.

Bill Durston, MD, President, Americans Against Gun Violence

AAGunV in the News|

More about the Coalition Against Gun Violence of Santa Barbara County

The Coalition Against Gun Violence of Santa Barbara County lists the following “Agenda for Action” on its website.

To raise awareness throughout the entire community — children, teens and adults — that the spreading epidemic of gun violence is a menace to us all, and that combatting it requires each of us to take a stand;
To counter advertising campaigns by the gun lobby and gun manufacturers encouraging gun acquisition through education about the risks associated with gun ownership;
To expose the culture and impact of gun violence and its glorification in all media, including movies, TV, videos, music, magazines, and electronic games, and to work for remedies;
To encourage legislators at all levels of government to make the effective prevention of gun violence a high priority.
To work with local law enforcement agencies and organizations that focus on crime prevention;
To support state and national violence prevention organizations to eliminate gun violence;
To help promote strategies which limit easy access to guns in our community.

At this time, however, the Coalition does not fully support the position of Americans Against Gun Violence concerning the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in every other high income democratic country of the world. While we support the Coalition’s “Agenda for Action” as a step toward reducing gun violence, we believe that more definitive steps need to be taken to reduce rates of gun violence in the United States to levels at or below the rates in other high income democratic countries. We have reached out to the Coalition and hope to enlist its full support in the near future.

More about other organizations|

More About the International Action Network on Small Arms

Among it’s other activities, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) brings together representatives of “civil society” from around the world to make their voices heard at the Biennial Meeting of States (BMS) at the United Nations every two years where progress on the program to eradicate the illicit international trade in small arms is reviewed by UN delegates. Americans Against Gun Violence President Dr. Bill Durston spoke on behalf of U.S. civil society at IANSA sponsored events at BMS 5 in 2014 and at BMS 6 in 2016.

The term, “small arms and light weapons” refers to weapons that can be carried by a single individual, ranging from handguns to shoulder mounted grenade launchers. Most of the daily carnage from small arms and light weapons worldwide results from the use of handguns and rifles.

IANSA was co-founded by Rebecca Peters, who also served as the organization’s first executive director. Ms. Peters received the Australian Human Rights medal, Australia’s highest civilian honor, for the key role that she played in getting a complete ban passed on all semi-automatic rifles and self-loading shotguns in Australia within just 13 days of the infamous Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Since 1966, there have been no further mass shootings in Australia.

Dr. Durston first met Rebecca Peters at BMS 5 in 2016. He subsequently invited Ms. Peters to be the keynote speaker at the annual dinner of the Sacramento Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility in 2015. Ms. Peters inspiration and counsel was a significant factor in the founding of Americans Against Gun Violence in 2016. Click on this link to read Ms. Peters’ article regarding the importance of the role that Americans Against Gun Violence plays in the U.S. gun control debate.

More about other organizations|

More About the Brady Campaign and Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence

Until recently, the stated goal of the Brady Campaign and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence had been to cut the number of annual US gun deaths in half by 2025. The Brady website now states that its goal is to reduce the number of annual gun deaths by 25% by 2025. Brady does not support any gun control legislation, though, that does not include a “grandfather clause.” Grandfather clauses in gun control bills allow individuals who already legally own any category of guns being banned in the new legislation, including assault weapons, to keep them. The Brady Center website states that it works to “inspire safer attitudes and behaviors around the 300 million guns already in our homes and communities and new gun purchases taking place every day.” Unlike Americans Against Gun Violence, Brady does not advocate overturning the 2008 Heller decision, banning handguns, or banning all automatic and semi-automatic rifles.

Between 2001, when the Brady Campaign was founded, and 2018, the most recent year for which national data on gun deaths are available, the annual number of gun deaths in the United States has increased from 29,573 to 39,740. Even if Brady were to achieve its previous goal of cutting annual firearm related deaths in half by the year 2025, there would still be nearly 20,000 preventable gun deaths in in the USA in 2025, and the US rate of firearm related deaths would still be 2.5 times higher than in Canada, 6 times higher than in Australia, and 30 times higher than in Great Britain.

Americans Against Gun Violence acknowledges and respects the important work that the Brady Campaign has done and the fact that many Brady activists have lost loved ones to gun violence. We believe, however, that our country’s goal should be to reduce rates of gun violence in the USA to levels at or below the rates in other high income democratic countries, and that in order to achieve this goal, we must adopt the same kinds of stringent gun control regulations that have long been in place in those other countries. The adoption of such regulations will require overturning the Heller decision and substantially reducing the number of privately owned guns in the United States.

Despite our differences, Americans Against Gun Violence will continue to work as closely as possible with Brady to foster and defend gun laws that are likely to reduce the extraordinarily high rates of gun violence in our country and to oppose legislation that will have the opposite effect.

More about other organizations|

More about the Giffords Law Center

While the Giffords Law Center is, in general, a good source of information about gun laws in the United States, we have concerns about the change in direction that the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (LCPGV)has taken, especially on the issue of the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment, since partnering with the Giffords organization.

The LCPGV filed an amicus brief in the the 2008 case Supreme Court case of District of Columbia versus Heller in support of the constitutionality of Washington DC’s partial handgun ban and safe storage laws. Gabrielle Giffords was at that time a congresswoman from Arizona, and she signed on to an amicus brief in support of Dick Heller’s claim that the District of Columbia’s handgun and safe storage laws violated the Second Amendment. In a rogue decision that reversed over 200 years of prior legal precedent, including four prior Supreme Court decisions, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court ruled in Heller that the District of Columbia’s handgun and safe storage laws did, indeed, violate the Second Amendment.

The majority opinion in the Heller decision, written by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has been publicly condemned by respected authorities as an example of “snow jobs” produced by well-staffed justices and as “gun rights propaganda passing as scholarship.” The late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Heller is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court announced during my [35 year] tenure on the bench.” In Heller, the five member majority of the Supreme Court endorsed an interpretation of the Second Amendment that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger had called, “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word, ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The LCPGV website formerly described the Heller decision as being a “radical departure” from the Supreme Court’s previous interpretation of the Second Amendment. Since partnering with the Giffords organization, though, the Giffords Law Center has published a pamphlet describing Heller as a “landmark” decision that “affirmed the right to keep a gun for self-defense.” In fact, however, the Supreme Court didn’t “affirm” a right to individual gun ownership in the Heller decision. In Heller, the Court created an individual right where none previously existed. As the LCPGV noted in its own amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, there was no constitutional right, Second Amendment or otherwise, for anyone to own any kind of gun unrelated to service in a well regulated militia prior to the rogue 2008 Heller decision.

Americans Against Gun Violence is also concerned about a statement in the same pamphlet under the heading of “Slippery Slope to Confiscation:”

Nevermind that no serious organization advocates for mass firearm confiscation…or that collecting America’s 357 million firearms would be a logistical impossibility….In reality, smart gun laws are about saving lives and ensuring responsible gun ownership, not taking away guns.

Prior to its partnership with the Giffords organization, the LCPGV had correctly stated on its website that the United States has by far the highest rate of gun violence of any high income democratic country of the world, and that:

The reasons for this great disparity are clear: Americans own far more civilian firearms – particularly handguns – than people in other industrialized nations, and U.S. gun control laws are among the most lax in the world.

Americans Against Gun Violence believes, as the above statement implies, that in order to reduce rates of gun violence in the United States to levels comparable to the rates in other high income democratic countries, we must adopt comparably stringent gun control laws. Such laws need not preclude responsible hunters and target shooters from practicing their sports with traditional sporting rifles and shotguns, but the adoption of such laws will require the surrender and destruction of many other firearms, including handguns and assault rifles. Substantially reducing the pool of guns in our country is not a “logistical impossibility.” Other countries have done it, and so can we. The longer we wait, though, the more guns are sold, and the more difficult it becomes to reduce rates of per capita gun ownership in the United States to rates comparable to other high income democratic countries.

We’ve formally addressed these and other concerns with the leadership of the Giffords Law Center, and we’re awaiting a reply.

Uncategorized|

More about GunPolicy.org

The GunPolicy.org website includes an interactive interface that allows users to compare rates of gun deaths, rates of gun ownership, and gun control laws among most of the countries of world, including the United States and other high income democratic countries. Professor Philip Alpers, who is the founding director of GunPolicy.org, was the keynote speaker at the Americans Against Gun Violence annual dinner in 2019.
Chris Hemsworth rivela il suo segreto per raggiungere il corpo MUSCOLARE per “Thor 4” magnum clen 40 clenbuterolo quali muscoli lavorano con la cyclette? | mondo del fitness.

More about other organizations|

More about the Violence Policy Center, VPC Executive Director Joshua Sugarmann, and the 2019 VPC High School Video Contest

The executive director of the Violence Policy Center, Joshua Sugarmann, was the keynote speaker at our Americans Against Gun Violence first annual dinner on October 22, 2017. (Click on this link to read Mr. Sugarmann’s speech.) In addition to co-authoring numerous reports with his colleagues at the VPC, Mr. Sugarmann is the author of the 2001 book, Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns, and the 1996 book, NRA: Money, Firepower, and Fear.

In Every Handgun Is Aimed At You, Mr. Sugarmann wrote:

We founded Americans Against Gun Violence in 2016 in part because we believed that Mr. Sugarmann’s statement was still true at that time and that our country needed a new organization that would put the gun lobby on the run; that would change the perception of what kind of gun control legislation is politically achievable in the United States; and that would advocate that our country take definitive measures – not merely “nibble around the edges of half-solutions and good intentions – to stop the epidemic of gun violence in America.

More about other organizations|

Americans Against Gun Violence Responds to Texas Mass Shooting

Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of all the people killed in the mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on November 5. We also extend our deepest sympathy to all the surviving victims along with sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery.

At the same time, however, we agree with the statement made by the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut in 1968, following the assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy:

Since Senator Dodd made this staement in 1968, more U.S. civilians have died of gunshot wounds than all the U.S. soldiers killed in all the wars in which our country has ever been involved.

The Sutherland Springs mass shooting, in which at least 26 people were killed and 20 others wounded by a lone gunman using a semi-automatic rifle, comes exactly five weeks after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history in Las Vegas, Nevada, in which at least 58 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded by a single gunman using similar firearms. Since the Las Vegas mass shooting, as has been the case after every other horrific mass shooting in the United States, Congress has done nothing to prevent similar mass shootings from recurring on a regular basis.

The regular occurrence of mass shootings is preventable. Mass shootings occur rarely, if at all, in other high income democratic countries of the world, all of which have far more stringent gun control regulations than the United States.

(more…)

Press Releases|

AAGunV President Speaks at California Pension Fund Meeting re: Divesting from Gun Industry

Americans Against Gun Violence president Dr. Bill Durston was invited by the California State Treasurer’s office to speak at the meeting of the Board of Directors of the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) on November 1 concerning a proposal by Treasurer John Chiang that CalSTRS completely divest from any companies involved in the distribution or sale of guns that are banned in California. CalSTRS, which has $215 billion in assets, had previously divested from companies that manufacture firearms that are illegal in California after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.

The Chairman of the CalSTRS Board, Mr. Harry Keiley, noted that the meeting was being held on the one month anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting. Mr. Keiley paid tribute to three California teachers, Sandra Casey, Kelsey Meadows, and Jenny Parks, who were killed in the shooting.

Sandra Casey

Jenny Parks

Kelsey Meadows

Dr. Durston stated that Americans Against Gun Violence supported the divestment proposal by Treasurer Chiang as an important symbolic gesture, but that divestment alone would be unlikely to have any measurable effect on preventing future mass shootings or reducing the daily toll of gun violence in California or the rest of the country. He called on the CalSTRS Board to go beyond divestment and join Americans Against Gun Violence in working toward the adoption of stringent gun control regulations comparable to the regulations that have long been in effect in all other high income democratic countries.

Read Dr. Durston’s full statement

AAGunV in the News|

Joshua Sugarmann

An interview with the keynote speaker at our October 22nd annual dinner will be aired on Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio Insight program between 9-10 AM and again between 7-8 PM on Wednesday, November 1, the one month anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting.

The interview with Joshua Sugarmann, who is the founder and executive director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington DC, was recorded at the CPR studio the morning after Mr. Sugarmann delivered his keynote address on the topic, Gun Violence in America: A Preventable Epidemic. (Click on this link to read the full text of his speech.)

During the broadcast on November 1, the interview can be heard in the Sacramento area on KXJZ 90.9 FM; in the Tahoe/Reno area on KKTO 90.5 FM; in the Stockton/Modesto area on KUOP 91.3 FM, and in Quincy on KQNC 88.1 FM. The interview can also be heard via live streaming from any site with internet access during the broadcast and for approximately 7-10 days afterward through the CPR Insight archives.

We know from past experience that the radio station will receive complaints from the gun lobby about the interview with Mr. Sugarmann, who has been condemned by the NRA as being “the most effective anti-gun rabble rouser in Washington DC.” After listening to the interview yourself, please contact CPR either by phone at (916) 278-8900 or by email by clicking on this link, and please let the station know your opinion about the interview and about the importance of public radio devoting more air time to publicizing the need for the adoption of stringent gun control laws in our country comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in every other high income democratic country of the world.

AAGunV in the News|

Mass Shootings Are Preventable: Response to the Las Vegas Massacre

Americans Against Gun Violence extends heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of all the people killed in the mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1. We also extend our deepest sympathy to all the surviving victims along with sincere wishes for a prompt and complete recovery.

The massacre in Las Vegas, in which at least 58 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded, is the deadliest mass shooting to date in U.S. history, eclipsing the number of casualties in the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, in which 49 people were killed and 58 injured. Unless definitve gun control laws are adopted, however, the Las Vegas massacre will not be the last mass shooting in U.S. history, nor will it continue to stand as the worst.

Preliminary reports indicate that the perpetrator of the Las Vegas massacre, Stephen Paddock, obtained all of the semi-automatic rifles that he used in the shooting legally under the lax U.S. gun laws, along with the “bump stocks” that allowed the rifles to function similar to fully automatic machine guns. Paddock used these weapons for the purpose for which they were designed – to kill and maim large numbers of people in a short period of time. Americans Against Gun Violence believes that there is no legitimate civilian use for such weapons. Civilian ownership of such semi-automatic rifles is either strictly regulated or completely banned in all other high income democratic countries.

The legislation that has been introduced in Congress following the Las Vegas massacre to ban “bump stocks” does not qualify as even a “quarter measure” in the terminology used by the late Senator Thomas Dodd. It’s likely that Stephen Paddock would have been able to kill and maim very nearly as many people using semi-automatic rifles without “bump stocks.”

Following a mass shooting in 1996 in the resort town of Port Arthur, Australia, in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded by a single gunman using semi-automatic rifles, it took the Australian government just 13 days to ban all semi-automatic rifles. The Australian government subsequently bought back approximately 1 million semi-automatic rifles and melted them down. There have been no more mass shootings in Australia since the ban went into effect, and overall rates of firearm related deaths and injuries, which were already much lower than in the United States, have continued to fall.

The U.S. Congress should follow the example of Australia and pass veto proof legislation to ban all semi-automatic rifles. Until such a ban is adopted, we should not be surprised when the next horrific mass shooting occurs. Rather, we should ask ourselves why as a nation we lack the political will to prevent such massacres.

Press Releases|

Make Reservations Now to Attend the October 22 Annual Dinner in Sacramento, California

~~Click on this link~~ to make reservations to attend the first annual dinner of Americans Against Gun Violence at the DoubleTree by Hilton, 2001 Point West Way in Sacramento, California, on the evening of Sunday, October 22, 2017. (This link was deactivated after the deadline to make reservations is 11:59 PM on Wednesday, October 18.) The event will mark the first full year that Americans Against Gun Violence has been in operation, and it will provide an opportunity for us to reflect both on the progress that we’ve made up to this point and on the formidable challenges that lie ahead. Doors open for social hour and check-in at 5:00 PM, dinner begins at 6:00, and the program begins at 7:00. The cost of the dinner is $45 per person ($25 for students).

We’re honored to have an outstanding keynote speaker, Josh Sugarmann, lined up for the dinner. Josh is the executive director of the Violence Policy Center based in Washington DC. The Violence Policy Center has long been one of our country’s most credible sources of information on the many facets of gun violence in the United States. Josh has worked for more than three decades in the file of gun violence prevention. He’s written innumerable articles and reports on the subject, and he’s the author of two books, NRA: Money, Firepower & Fear, published in 1992, and Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns, published in 2001. Josh will speaking at the October 22 dinner on the topic, Gun Violence in America: A Preventable Epidemic.

For more details concerning the October 22 annual dinner, please see the September 2 President’s message.

AAGunV in the News, Events|

AAGunV President quoted in article on declining long gun sales

Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, was quoted in an article on the front page of the Sacramento Bee on July 24, 2017 concerning the decline in long gun sales in California after Donald Trump became President. Dr. Durston noted that grandfather clauses that are typically included in US gun control laws, allowing people who already have the types of guns in question to keep them if they obtained them before a ban goes into place, lead to surges in gun sales when potential buyers fear that a new gun ban is imminent, as after a mass shooting or when it appears that a candidate who supports gun control will be elected.

AR-15 rifle

Sales of AR-15 style assault rifles surged after the Pulse nightclub massacre and when it appeared that Hillary Clinton would be elected president, but they’ve declined since Trump assumed office. Sales of handguns, though, have continued to rise. With more than 300 million guns already in circulation in the United States, and with handguns accounting for most firearm related deaths in our country, Dr. Durston noted that a decline in new sales of long guns without a reduction in the total number of guns in circulation would not be expected to lead to a significant reduction in rates of gun violence.

AAGunV in the News, News about Gun Violence|

Save the Date of October 22 to Attend the Americans Against Gun Violence Annual Dinner

The first annual dinner of Americans Against Gun Violence will be held at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Sacramento, California, on the evening of Sunday, October 22, 2017. The event will mark the first full year that we’ve been in operation, and it will provide an opportunity for us to reflect both on the progress that we’ve made up to this point and on the formidable challenges that lie ahead.

We’re honored to have an outstanding keynote speaker, Josh Sugarmann, lined up for the dinner. Josh is the executive director of the Violence Policy Center based in Washington DC. The Violence Policy Center has long been one of our country’s most credible sources of information on the many facets of gun violence in the United States. Josh has worked for more than three decades in the arena of gun violence prevention. He’s written innumerable articles and reports on the subject, and he’s the author of two books, NRA: Money, Firepower & Fear, published in 1992, and Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns, published in 2001.

Details will be posted on this website in the near future regarding the exact time and location of the annual dinner, menu choices, cost, and how you can make reservations both for the dinner itself and for overnight accommodations if you’ll be coming from out of town.

AAGunV in the News, Events|

Letters to the Editor of The Sacramento Bee re: Arlington Mass Shooting

Re: “Your ‘thoughts and prayers’ are meaningless. To stop mass shootings we need to do this”

Marcos Breton is completely and utterly on point. For those of us who have asked our representatives to do something about guns, ammunition and the efforts of the gun lobby, it’s hard to know what’s next. I so appreciate your public, loud call for more action on all our behalf. An Americans Against Gun Violence Member, Davis, California

We need serious and effective national gun control as found in New Zealand, Australia and other countries. Gun freedom, as practiced in the United States, is the major reason for needless deaths. There are real-life gun control models in use around the world that would vastly reduce gun deaths in this country if our politicians had guts to do what is right. They do not. They are all afraid of the NRA. I am a lifetime gun owner and user but support gun control models like those now in use in many other very free and productive countries. I even support controls that will restrict my usage if it saves all those lives. Doug Sutherland, Roseville, Califonria

AAGunV in the News|

Americans Against Gun Violence extends sincere condolences and wishes for a prompt and complete recovery to all the victims of the mass shooting that occurred at a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia this morning. Preliminary reports indicate that at least four people, including U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, were wounded in an attack by a lone gunman as members of the Republican Party and their staff were practicing for an annual charity softball game against members of the Democratic Party.

The mass shooting in Virginia today, which comes just two days after the one year anniversary of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history – the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, in which 49 people were killed and 58 injured – demonstrates that no one in the United States is safe from the threat of gun violence.

Americans Against Gun Violence concurs with the following statement by a U.S. senator from Connecticut:

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 legislation in force in virtually every civilized country of the world.

Unfortunately, however, this statement was made 49 years ago by the late Senator Thomas Dodd, following the assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. In the intervening 49 years, Congress has failed to enact the stringent gun control legislation that Senator Dodd called for, and as a result, more U.S. civilians have been killed by guns than all the U.S. soldiers killed in all the wars in which the United States has ever been involved.

We are deeply saddened by the mass shooting that occurred in Virginia this morning, but we hope that it will provide the impetus necessary for all members of Congress to work together toward the adoption of definitive gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in place in every other high income democratic country of the world – countries in which mass shootings are rare or non-existent, and in which overall rates of gun violence are far lower than in the United States.

News about Gun Violence, Press Releases|

On June 12, 2016, a lone gunman, Omar Mateen, committed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, killing 49 people and wounding 58 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Mateen was subsequently killed by police. The shooting was classified as a hate crime, as most of the patrons of the Pulse nightclub were members of the LGBT community. It was also classified as an act of terrorism based on a claim of allegiance to the Islamic State that Mateen made during the shooting, although Mateen was born and raised in the United States and had no known formal ties to any terrorist organization.

Since the Pulse nightclub massacre, Congress has not taken any action to prevent future mass shootings or to stop the epidemic of gun violence that claims more than 90 lives on an average day in the United States. Please contact your elected representatives at the state and federal levels to demand stringent gun control laws comparable to the laws that have long been in place in every other high income democratic country of the world – countries in which mass shootings are rare or non-existent and in which overall rates of firearm related deaths are much lower than in the United States. See Dr. Durston’s June 11 President’s Message for more talking points. Click on this link for contact information for your elected representatives.

News about Gun Violence|

Letter to the Editor published in the Sacramento Bee re: article about gun violence research

Re: “UCD doctor’s research is a danger to the gun industry (Dan Morain, May 28): There’s already abundant evidence that guns in our homes and communities are much more likely to be used to kill innocent people than to protect them. The rate of gun deaths is 10 times higher in the United States than in other developed countries. The main reason for this vast difference is our weak gun control laws and the extraordinarily high number of guns in circulation.

In 1968, the late Sen. Thomas Dodd, D-Conn., called for the adoption of stringent gun control laws comparable to laws in place in other democratic countries. Since 1968, more U.S. civilians have died of gunshot wounds than all the U.S. soldiers in all the wars in which our country was ever involved. More research, in the absence of definitive gun control laws, will only document more senseless deaths. Bill Durston, MD

AAGunV in the News|

Welcome, Americans Against Gun Violence: A Message from Australian Human Rights Medal Winner Rebecca Peters

As most people know, the United States leads the industrialised world in gun violence. For example, according to data collated by the organization, GunPolicy.org, based at the University of Sydney, a person living in the US is over 50 times more likely to be murdered with a handgun than a person living in Europe or Australia. This is perhaps not surprising given that the United States leads all other nations in domestic gun production as well as in imports and exports of firearms. The US also leads the rest of the world in the number of advocacy groups campaigning for improved firearm regulations.

Until the founding of Americans Against Gun Violence a few months ago, the range of policy recommendations put forward by the dozens of other firearm injury prevention advocacy organizations in the United States has been generally quite modest. Examples include expanding background checks to a larger proportion of gun buyers, banning new sales of assault weapons, and blocking gun sales to people already identified by government authorities as dangerous. While these are vitally important proposals, they constitute what should be an absolute minimum level of regulation. Observers outside the US – and indeed, many Americans – have wondered why more ambitious measures, like the ones already in place in other high income democratic countries, are rarely mentioned.

Gun control regulations in most industrialised nations include:

A requirement for a license to possess (buy, own, use) any firearm, subject to suspension or revocation for violations of the law or of license conditions. Only license-holders can purchase ammunition.
Registration of all firearms
Either a complete ban or very stringent regulation of civilian possession of handguns and semi-automatic rifles
Rejection, in most cases, of “self-defence” as a legitimate reason for acquiring firearms, given the overwhelming evidence that there is no net protective value from owning or carrying a gun.

Background checks extending far beyond a computer check of criminal convictions and involuntary commitments for mental illness (The onus is on the potential gun buyer to prove that acquiring a gun would not jeopardise community safety, not on society to prove that he or she is a criminal or mentally unstable.)
Mechanisms to deter the accumulation of personal arsenals

It is understandable that most of the US advocacy groups are promoting a more limited gun control agenda, given the perception that more definitive gun control measures are not politically achievable at present. Nonetheless, reducing the huge public health and social problems created by the proliferation of guns in this country – including over 33,000 gun deaths per year – will likely require stronger measures. From the political point of view, as well, there is a need to test the assumption that advocating definitive gun control measures is political suicide in the USA.

Enter Americans Against Gun Violence, a non-profit organization incorporated in March of this year and first opened for general membership after the June 12 Pulse nightclub mass shooting. Americans Against Gun Violence openly advocates the adoption of definitive gun control regulations in the USA, similar to those already in place in other high-income democratic countries.(Actually, a few states do have regulatory frameworks not too far below the international norm, though the effectiveness of these regulations is undermined by neighbouring states with weaker laws. A more ambitious approach will help to highlight and promote those good examples.)

If US rates of gun violence drop to something around the levels in other comparable democracies, the public health benefit will be enormous. For example, if the rate of firearms-related deaths in the United States in 2014 (10.54 per 100,000 population) had been the same as the rate in Australia (1.02 per 100,000), more than 30,000 American lives would have been saved in that single year.

Even if Americans Against Gun Violence doesn’t immediately succeed in its goals, the existence of such an organization can change the terms of the gun control debate. Currently, the US mass media portrays the gun control debate as a contrast between two extreme positions. At one extreme is the NRA, opposing almost any restrictions on access to guns and ammunition; at the other end of the spectrum, according to the media, are the majority of gun violence prevention organizations – even though the measures that they advocate are exceedingly modest by international standards. To the extent that the position of Americans Against Gun Violence is seen by journalists as the new extreme, the positions of other firearm injury prevention groups are likely to be seen as all the more reasonable by American standards.

The more ambitious approach of Americans Against Gun Violence will also be welcomed by violence prevention advocates, policymakers, and victims of gun violence in other countries, who are battling the flood of guns unleashed onto the global black market by the loophole-ridden American laws. Around the world, members of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), are working with their governments and communities to strengthen firearm regulations, transform cultures of violence, and improve public safety capacity and performance. But the full benefit of these advances cannot be felt until genuine progress is made upstream, in the source country whose lax gun laws provide a ready source of weaponry for bad actors in other countries, including Mexican drug lords and the Islamic State.

So welcome, Americans Against Gun Violence! My colleagues and I at IANSA look forward to working with you toward a safer United States and Planet Earth.

About the Author:

Rebecca Peters earned her law degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia. In the 1990s she chaired the National Coalition for Gun Control, leading the campaign that succeeded in securing the reform of Australia’s gun laws after the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur, Tasmania. The reforms, announced just 12 days after the massacre, created uniform gun laws across the country, including a ban on all self-loading rifles and shotguns. Ms. Peters was awarded Australian Human Rights Medal, Australia’s highest civilian award, for the key role that she played. She subsequently became the founding director of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). She continues to advise IANSA and is currently working with gun violence survivors in Guatemala. Ms. Peters may be contacted via IANSA through the following links:

http://www.iansa.org/

https://www.facebook.com/IANSAnetwork

https://twitter.com/IANSAnetwork

Click on this link for a fully referenced PDF version of this newsletter.

International Gun Violence Prevention|

AAGunV President Speaks at August Peace Event:
Attendees “Take a Stand” against Gun Violence and Nuclear Weapons

Americans Against Gun Violence president, Dr. Bill Durston, spoke at the annual August Peace Event in Sacramento, California on Sunday, August 7. The event is held every year to commemorate the atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, respectively, in 1945. Dr. Durston was asked to speak at this year’s August Peace Event concerning what actions citizens could take to help ensure that nuclear weapons would ever be used again. Americans Against Gun Violence was a co-sponsor of the event.

Dr. Durston noted that the weaponry of armed violence can be seen as a continuum, with handguns at one end of this continuum and nuclear weapons at the other. A nuclear war, which could be triggered by a terrorist attack, an accidental launch, a false alarm, or the action of a rogue nation or rogue leader, could wipe out human civilization overnight. Day in and day out, though, firearms are the weapons of choice for the commission of armed violence. As former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said during an address at a small arms conference in 2006:

“The death toll from small arms dwarfs that of all other weapons systems – and in most years greatly exceeds the toll of the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In terms of the carnage they cause, small arms, indeed, could well be described as ‘weapons of mass destruction”

Every year at the August Peace Event, the story of Sadako and the 1,000 Cranes is retold. Sadako was a young Japanese woman who survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast in 1945 but who later contracted leukemia, probably due to the radiation to which she was exposed. According to Japanese legend, if one folds 1,000 paper cranes, his or her wish for a long and healthy life will be granted. Sadako succeeded in folding over 1,000 cranes as she battled leukemia, but her wish to live was not granted, and she died 10 months after her leukemia was first diagnosed.

Dr. Durston urged attendees at the August Peace Event to help us write a story with a happier ending – The Story of Sacramento and the 1,000 Phone Calls – by calling President Obama and their elected members of Congress to demand that they oppose any further spending on “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal and that they instead work toward the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. At the same time, Dr. Durston urged attendees to demand that the President and members of Congress work toward the adoption of definitive gun control laws in the USA – laws comparable to those already in place in every other high income democratic country of the world.
Attendees at the August Peace Event enthusiastically supported Dr. Durston’s call to action, and many volunteered to have their pictures taken “taking a stand against gun violence and nuclear weapons.” Selected photos from the August Peace Event will be used to create the banner on the Americans Against Gun Violence website.

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"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…"

"…gun control legislation comparable to the legislation in force in virtually every civilized country in the world."
Senator Thomas Dodd, June 11, 1968

Past News Items

Note: The deadline for students to enter our 2024 National High School Essay Contest was April 20. The contest is now closed to new entries. Return to this page in late May to read the winning essays.

· Essay Topic

· Contest Eligibility and Rules

· Selection of Contest Winners

Scholarship Awards (Total of at least $15,000)

Publication of Essays and Release of Students’ Names and High School Affiliations

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline

Essay Topic

Contest Eligibility, Rules, and Online Entry Form

Selection of Contest Winners

Contest Awards (Total of at least $15,000)

Publication of Essays and Release of Students’ Names and High School Affiliations

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline

From the President of Americans Against Gun Violence

The 2022 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest

Is Now Closed for New Submissions from U.S. High School Students

Note: Deadline to enter the contest was 11:59 PM on Saturday, April 16, 2022. Return to this page after May 16 to read the winning essays in this year’s contest.

Essay Topic

Contest Eligibility and Rules

Selection of Contest Winners

Contest Awards (Total $15,000)

Publication of Essays and Release of Contact and Identifying Information

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline

Essay Topic

Contest Eligibility, Rules, and Link to Online Entry Form

Selection of Scholarship Winners

Contest Awards (Total $15,000)

Publication of Essays and Release of Contact and Identifying

Summary of Essay Contest Timeline

Click on this link for a downloadable essay contest flyer in PDF format. For additional information or questions, please email essaycontest@aagunv.org or call us at (916) 668-4160.

Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Americans Against Gun Violence National High School Essay Contest

AAGunV President Speaks at August Peace Event: Attendees “Take a Stand” against Gun Violence and Nuclear Weapons

AAGunV President Speaks at August Peace Event:
Attendees “Take a Stand” against Gun Violence and Nuclear Weapons