White House Announces New Actions to Reduce Gun Violence

White House Announces New Actions to Reduce Gun Violence

We’re relieved to tell you that the Biden-Harris Administration announced on January 25 a series of new executive actions to help promote the safe storage of firearms. The actions implement President Biden’s Executive Order of March 2023, which promoted safe gun storage as a way of reducing gun violence and making our communities safer.

It’s great-big news because safe storage of firearms can physically prevent young people from accessing firearms. Guns that are not safely stored are closely associated with school shootings, youth suicide, unintentional shootings and theft of firearms.

Our thanks to the executive branch

It’s good news that the president has issued these executive actions. With the notable exception of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, the legislative branch has been unable to pass serious legislation on firearms in decades. That’s why we’re relieved that the executive branch still takes safe storage seriously.

Here are the three actions designed to further promote safe storage and protect children:

  • The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) will send a letter to school principals across the country explaining the importance of safe storage. DOE will encourage them to communicate with families and the community about the importance of storing firearms safely to protect students.
  • DOE will also issue a new communications template that principals and school leaders can use to explain to parents and families that it’s important to keep firearms stored safely.
  • The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will release a guide describing different types of safe storage devices and best practices for safely storing firearms. It’s the most comprehensive guide on safe storage that the federal government has ever released.

(Read those bullets again. We’re sorry that safe storage of firearms isn’t common sense in every home, but the Administration is being realistic.)

Have a look at the entire press release from the White House for full details, including other actions the Administration has taken on gun violence and grisly statistics on what happens when guns are not safely stored.

Introduced at a town hall for school principals

To emphasize the role that education leaders can play in helping prevent gun violence, the Administration conducted a town hall at the White House with school principals. Speakers included:

  • First Lady Jill Biden (pictured above)
  • The director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, Stefanie Feldman
  • U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona

Watch a recording of that town hall with the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, the Department of Education and school principals.

Again, we believe that these executive actions are evidence of sensible gun policy at the federal level. The Biden-Harris Administration is building on a record of action to promote safe storage of firearms.

It’s not too soon.

Tipping Point: My Sandy Hook Quilt

Tipping Point: My Sandy Hook Quilt

On the morning of December 14, 2012, we were preparing our annual Hanukkah party for thirty neighbors and our family. Standing at the head of our dining room table, I placed the menorah on the blue cloth with the box of candles, the matches and my husband Art’s well-worn Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book

The Today Show was on TV but I did not pay attention until I heard the loud announcement: 

“Special Report: 26 children and staff were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut.”

It was heart-stopping news to hear – hours before a party attended by eleven young children and their parents. 

Memento for a tragic milestone

That afternoon, coincidentally, we received a special delivery package of a beautiful quilt made by our dear friend Sandy. She had been bugging me for years to let her know what kind of design or pattern I wanted for our quilt. Once I had finally spotted the perfect quilt in a magazine, and Art and I had agreed on the design, Sandy created it.

Of course, neither we nor Sandy could ever have dreamed when the quilt would arrive, or that it would fit the day all too perfectly. It featured abstract windows with peaked roofs spread across the top, and some of the windows showed a cross-hatch design like a target. 

I immediately started thinking of it as my Sandy Hook Quilt because of those windows in the design and the day I received it. But I also looked at the windows as representing the strength of community and the fact that no one wants to be a target. 

That evening the children lit the candles, played the dreidel game and munched on potato latkes, so we grown-ups did not talk about the day’s horrendous tragedy. Later, we lit a separate candle and offered a prayer for the children in Connecticut. I’m grateful we were all together that night. 

Getting involved in preventing gun violence

Two days later, a ten-year-old girl who lost her first-grade brother in the Sandy Hook shooting offered a suggestion to people who own guns. She asked that they leave their guns locked up at a shooting range and use them only there. Seeing her summon that kind of fervor in the middle of her soul-searing, terrible grief made me doubly determined to get involved in preventing gun violence. 

We searched for some way to help. What can you do when it feels as though there’s nothing you can do? We began by donating to Brady International (now Brady United), since they were and are leaders in trying and winning court cases to stop gun violence. Later we joined Moms Demand Action and then San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention. All of those organizations offer opportunities for action.  

We still have our yearly Hanukkah celebration and it remains undimmed by the tragedy and coincidence of December 14, 2012. The quilt is a steadfast reminder of the tipping point we reached that day.

Jane Meyers is a volunteer with San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention.

Photo credit: Jane Meyers

The Empty Spaces that Gun Violence Creates

The Empty Spaces that Gun Violence Creates

This period of late October to early November is a particularly harrowing time of mass shooting memories. There have been lessons learned, loopholes closed, gun safety measures taken and opportunities missed.

Think of 2017, at Sutherland Springs Church in Texas.

Think of 2018, at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California.

Think of 2023, in Lewiston, Maine.

I’m sharing comments from a column by Kate Woodsome, who lived in Portland, Maine. Her take is “Gun rights advocates will focus on mental illness. Gun-control advocates will focus on guns.” 

Living with everyday loss

Kate writes, “What the country should focus on is supporting the survivors. To do this, we need to understand the empty spaces that gun violence creates. People go missing from homes, schools and friendships. A sense of safety and security vanishes. In the void, fear, grief, and rage take their place. Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder move in.” 

Kate’s perspective of needing to understand the empty spaces that gun violence creates is so important. It bridges the mass shootings that garner the media attention and addresses everyday gun violence like suicides, community violence and domestic violence. It opens the lens to include all the people on the fringes: the doctors, the educators, the co-workers, the neighbors on the streets that children pass as they walk to school, and the people at the bowling alley in Lewiston that night. 

Fill the empty spaces with Community

Reflecting on the toll that gun violence takes, a pastor told Woodsome, “We don’t really know how to address the empty spaces, so we pretend they aren’t there and hope they’re going to scar over.” Kate adds, “There is something that can keep us individually and collectively from falling further apart. Community. It fills the space. It means that the community, our bullet-ridden country, needs to acknowledge the terror that gun violence sows.” 

I can’t think of a better argument for why community violence intervention and prevention (VIP) funding is so important. Community is why the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act has been so influential. It’s why we must push our local elected and government officials to think of community when they focus on preventing gun violence. 

Debbie McDaniel-Lindsey is a volunteer with San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention.

photo credit:

GVP Interview with Therese Hymer

GVP Interview with Therese Hymer

Our own Therese Hymer (shown below at San Diego Board of Supervisors meeting) was interviewed this week on local station KNSJ, 89.1 FM.

The hour-long interview covered the wide-ranging package of gun-safety bills passed recently by the California Legislature and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom.

To learn more about the new laws and how they help prevent gun violence, listen to the interview:

 

photo credit (top): Office of Governor Gavin Newsom

“There would have been nearly 140,000 fewer firearm-related deaths”

“There would have been nearly 140,000 fewer firearm-related deaths”

On August 15, California Attorney General Rob Bonta released the first-ever data report from the Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP). The report summarizes gun violence data in California and throughout the U.S. and has the potential to guide policy and strategy discussions related to reducing gun violence.

No mean feat

Releasing the report is a pretty big deal, even for a state like California, which prides itself on common-sense gun legislation.

After all, it was only a year ago, in September 2022, that AG Bonta established the OGVP with the mission of reducing and preventing gun violence, firearm injury and related trauma. The OGVP supports the California Department of Justice in gun-violence reduction efforts by:

• promoting research and data collection

• increasing awareness about effective legal and policy strategies

• collaborating with federal, state and local partners

Favorable data points

From the press release, here are data points that will reassure you when you watch the nightly news and wonder whether your and our work is paying off or not:

• Over the last 30 years, California has reduced its gun violence rate from 50% above average among the rest of the United States to 33% below average.

• Between 2006 and 2022, California’s gun-homicide rate among youths fell by 50%. Over that same time horizon, those rates rose by 23% in Florida and 48% in Texas.

• Between 2015 and 2021, the number of unserialized firearms (ghost guns) recovered as crime guns in California jumped from 26 to over 12,000. Mercifully, from 2021 to 2022 the number decreased by 7%.  Thank heaven for small favors – not to mention enforcement actions, affirmative litigation and legislation.

AG Bonta’s office points out that “if the firearm mortality rate in the rest of the United States had matched California’s between 2013 and 2022, there would have been nearly 140,000 fewer firearm-related deaths nationwide in that decade alone.” (emphasis theirs)

That’s a lot of people who would still be alive. It’s a lot more people who would not have had to grieve them. And it’s a lot of time that family and friends could have spent attending their graduations, birthday parties and weddings. Instead of wishing they were still alive.

Find out more

Take a look at the complete data report. You’ll find additional information and data on gun violence in California including:

• Additional comparisons of California and national data

• Analysis of Gun Violence Injuries in California by intent, lethality, and county

• Analysis of gun violence factors, disparities, and recent challenges

• Domestic violence and firearms

• Data on mass shootings

• Strategies for breaking the cycle of violence

Have a look also at the Mandated Crime Guns in CA Report, with exhaustive details about firearms in California: who sells them, who manufactures them, who isn’t serializing them, and where (city/county) they’re being used in crimes.

Not every state in the union publishes this kind of data. (In most states, it’s prohibited.) Phone the attorney general’s office at (916) 210-6000 and let them know that gun-violence prevention is important to you.

And tell your friends in other states.

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