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:
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.
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.