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.