Tag: Gun Control

Wed. 2/28 – Gun legislation action updates

(Keep up with the boycotts here)

“Math is hard”…

On October 31st, 2017, a radicalized muslim man from Uzbekistan killed 8 people in downtown NYC with a truck. Although it was a horrific act that Trump politicized to strike out at the immigration policies of the time, that death toll was dwarfed by our informal and continuous nation-wide shooting war against each other. At that time, we put together a graphic depiction of the number of citizens killed in the month after the Las Vegas shootings in business-as-usual America. (tl:dr…3,791 people shot, 1,195 dead).

OK, kids, long division – no calculators: At least 15,549 people died of gun violence in 2017. Find the monthly average and use that to determine how many months it will take us to surpass the 2,996 death toll of the 9/11 terrorist attack? Show your work. (Answer 2.312 months)

Extra credit: How many 9/11-attacks’ worth of deaths did we have in 2017? (Answer 5.2)

Yet we still refuse to treat this as a national emergency.

(Demonizing the mentally ill is not actually a solution. Stop it now.)

Maybe people don’t understand how many children are dying too. 

So, here’s some illustrated statistics on the deaths of our kids.

✝️ = dead, 👤 = injured

(from thetrace.org)
Since the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High, at least 69 kids under 18 have been shot. 26 of them were killed.  (Those numbers are from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive.) This is what that looks like for us visual learners.

✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ ✝️ 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 👤 Continue reading “Wed. 2/28 – Gun legislation action updates” →

March events to defeat NRA A+ Rated Steve Knight – are you in?

UGH.

Steve Knight’s stance on guns from his fundraising website:

“Our nation’s founders enshrined the right to bear firearms in the Constitution, which means the government has no right to enact arbitrary restrictions. Undermining the 2nd Amendment by crafting gun control laws aimed to reduce violence rarely results in safer communities. Instead, it is responsible gun owners who pay the price as criminals rarely comply with the laws enacted to keep firearms out of their hands. There is no law Congress can pass to stop gun violence, however we must examine better policing strategies and mental health services in order to provide a more direct path to solving the problem of gun violence.”

I could go on quite the tangent here, but I won’t. Instead I’m going to Simi Valley and Santa Clarita next month to defeat this guy. If you need more convincing, click here.

Are YOU in? -Veronica

Here’s where we are needed in March to flip the 25th: Continue reading “March events to defeat NRA A+ Rated Steve Knight – are you in?” →

NRA boycotts – No longer business as usual

(Update): Sign up to get the latest news on who’s leaving the NRA behind here. But today’s big news is that Dick‘s is done! (money.cnn) (NYtimes)

(Update): Our efforts are paying off. (NYTimes) and some of the biggest supporters are gun owners themselves.

  • “We should change the names of AR-15s to ‘Marco Rubio’ because they are so easy to buy,” Stoneman Douglas junior Sarah Chadwick tweeted. (The Hill)

#BoycottFlorida – Put Florida between a rock and a hard place…

#ItsTime #NeverAgain #GunLawsNOW #NoFloridaTourismDollars #GunReformNOW #BoycottFlorida #GunContolNow #NeverFlorida #ThinkTwiceFlorida

A brief and non-exhaustive history of state boycotts…

#BoycottFlorida started in 2013 because of another senseless killing –  the death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman after the jury was instructed to include “Stand your Ground” laws in their deliberations. Stevie Wonder, Jay Z, Madonna and others joined together to call for a removal of the law that has increased Florida’s homicide rate by firearm by 22%. Since Martin’s death, at least 26 children have died in “SYG” cases.

Why did that boycott fail? One reason… many didn’t think that state boycotts could be effective. In 2010, although Arizona lost at least $141 million after groups canceled their conventions there to protest their draconian immigration laws, nothing changed until the Supreme Court stepped in.

However, the sadder and more important reason the Florida boycott ultimately failed was because not enough of us joined in…  Continue reading “NRA boycotts – No longer business as usual” →

Friday 2/23 – Gun actions, Part 2

Updated with new Amazon link 3:30 pm!

(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJ2EZuID0e0ZhISYFf9WftVNnDqaWhgs5Hz6Kmj7ndQ/edit)

If you missed Part 1, please click here.

There are lots of continuing actions, phone calls, postcard opportunities, etc, to join in on. 

Just the facts, Ma’m

Knowing (and sharing!) the facts about firearms, crime trends in the U.S., and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of gun legislation are a vital part of staying safe and informed. See the relationship between gun laws and gun deaths in the U.S. in clear graphic form here.

Call out corporate collusion

The NRA, which peddles guns (and hate), funds right-wing politicians (including Trump), and opposes universal background checks, age limits, or any legislative restriction on gun sales, reaches more than 11 million people through its print and online magazines, and has about 8.7 million followers on Facebook and Twitter. They also have recently spent $35 million on NRATV in an effort to reach millions more.  Touting itself as “America’s Most Patriotic Team on a Mission to Take Back The Truth,” NRATV is distributed by Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV. The channel is available for free and exists to spread pro-gun content from the likes of Dana Loesch and Oliver North.

Let’s tell these distributors to stop shilling for the financiers of gun violence: Apple, 408-996-1010 or One Apple Park Way, Cupertino, CA 95104; Amazon 206-622-2335 or CEO Jeff Bezos, 206-266-1000 or 1200 12th Ave. South, Suite 1200, Seattle, WA 98144-2734; Roku VP Stephen Kay, 408-556-9391 or 150 Winchester Circle, Los Gatos, CA 95032. Continue reading “Friday 2/23 – Gun actions, Part 2” →

Feb. 19th – Tipping point

We’re going to put out a special gun protest call for Ventura activists later but let’s start with this.

“We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role.” (CNN)

There are two big student-led protests planned – March for our lives 3/24 and 4/20 as well as the Women’s March event on 3/14. The May 1st action has been cancelled in favor of the 4/20 version.  We believe that more is better and recognize that protests involving students are more complicated to plan and accomplish than those mainly populated with adults. We support them all and will be updating you on how we can become involved.

With the students of Parkland calling out the president and other NRA lackeys by name, we are at a tipping point.  

Action: Encourage young people to take their commitment to the next step by liking and following this page https://www.facebook.com/menext2018/.

Continue reading “Feb. 19th – Tipping point” →

Friday 2/16 – Bringing our kids to a gun fight.

It’s been 19 years since Columbine…

Those 12 kids would have been adults today, maybe with kids of their own. We can never know what talents were lost to us that day, and continue to be lost every year since then to gun violence.

Here, he reads the list of fatal school shootings since Columbine.

We really like this summation from WTF Just Happened Today about the reactions of those concerned….

Trump, in a tweet, suggested that students and neighbors should have reported the Florida shooter to authorities, because there were “so many signs” that the shooter “was mentally disturbed.” The FBI was warned in September about a possible school shooting after a YouTube user named Nikolas Cruz – the same name as the shooter who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – left a comment that read: “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” The FBI said it had investigated the comment, but was unable to identify the person who posted it. (NBC News / CNN / BBC)

  • Trump’s budget would cut millions of dollars from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which gun dealers use to verify if someone is banned from buying a gun before selling it to them. (HuffPost)
  • One of Trump’s first actions as president was to undo a regulation that would have made it more difficult for people with a known mental illness to buy guns by requiring their names to be entered into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Nikolas Cruz legally purchased the AR-15. (ABC News)
  • (from IV) The GOP health bill (AHCA), if it had passed, would have removed a requirement set forth in the ACA that mandated Medicaid to cover basic mental and behavioral (including substance-related) health services, beginning in 2020. This would have threatened the care that over 1.28 million people grappling with mental health issues receive thanks to Medicaid’s expansion. (psychologytoday). Although Trump is now calling for spending on mental health care in the wake of this shooting, his budget is advocating for sharp Medicaid cuts which will decimate mental health care. The right hand giveth a little, the left hand taketh away a lot. (nbc )

2/ A student who witnessed the shooting called out lawmakers on TV, looking directly into the camera and saying: “We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role. Work together, come over your politics, and get something done.” He added: “Ideas are great but without action, ideas stay ideas and children die.” (CNN)

3/ The leader of a white supremacist group said the gunman in the Florida shooting was a member of his “white separatist paramilitary proto-fascist organization.” Nikolas Cruz, 19, is accused of killing 17 people in one of the deadliest school shootings in modern American history. His peers say he also wore a “Make America Great Again” hat in school. (Anti-Defamation League / The Daily Beast / New York Times) Continue reading “Friday 2/16 – Bringing our kids to a gun fight.” →

Thursday – 4 easy actions on drilling, bump stocks, kids’ lunches, and who’s in charge of our bodies

(photo from https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts)

#1 – No, we want to keep drilling safety protections. Really! – Deadline Jan. 29th.

duck in oil

It’s ridiculous that we have to beg to keep basic protections that experts have created after assessing the causes of multiple devasting oil spills. But this is a new era…

So, please join in and write to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement to keep offshore drilling safety practices as-is here. As of this morning, they only have 491 comments!

Your comment doesn’t have to be amazingly original. Cruise through here for some ideas, find something that sounds sort of like you after coffee and mix it up a bit.

Here’s a sample of comments already submitted: 

  • Please protect our coastal environment! Do not weaken the current regulations on offshore drilling. The current regulations incorporate valuable lessons learned from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, when 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the sea, killing nearly a million seabirds and still causing effects in the Gulf. The proposed rules loosen controls on blowout preventers and third party certification that safety devices will work under the extreme conditions in which they are placed. The impact of another spill like the Deepwater Horizon, which the new rules practically guarantee, will far outweigh the benefits of reducing operating costs for oil companies that can well afford them. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement should be committed to the safety of offshore drilling operations, not with oil company profits. Strong regulation and an independent BSEE are needed to ensure that offshore drilling can coexist with other important uses of our coastline, including recreation, tourism, fishing and wilderness.
  • I am writing to inform you of my concern for the announced drilling for oil off the coastline of the US. What a terrible idea! We should be preserving our environment instead of destroying it. This country already has enough sources for oil production. Why do this? Do the oil companies really need more money? Just asking.

#2 – Please comment on “bump stocks” to the ATF. Deadline Today!

Link here.

#3 – They’ve already attacked protections on clean water and air. Now they’re coming after kids’ nutrition. Comment thru Jan. 29

Continue reading “Thursday – 4 easy actions on drilling, bump stocks, kids’ lunches, and who’s in charge of our bodies” →

Monday #TrumpShutdown – 3 actions!

In 2013, Trump laid the blame for any government shutdown directly on the president. Hmmm… not so much now..

Brighten the President’s morning by leaving him a personal message!

In case you haven’t seen or heard this…

Call him or leave a written message! Here’s a starter script to get you going…

Good morning, President Trump!

You have an amazing opportunity to avoid being remembered in history books as the President who inflicted the greatest moral and economic wound of the 21st century by expelling nearly 800,000 productive people from America, the only home they’ve ever known.

It’s too late to change the history that DACA, CHIP, the Federally Qualified Health Centers and the Puerto Rico recovery effort were placed behind destroying our health care and personally enriching yourself with tax cuts when the clock ran out.

However, you can still do the right thing now. Be brave.

Call him on his comment line: 202-456-1111

If you can’t leave a message, write a message here:  https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

 Tell the Democrats to be strong.

Vicente-Fox-Trump-ladder Continue reading “Monday #TrumpShutdown – 3 actions!” →

Tuesday’s Call-in Prescription

Today is our “Evacuation Special” as our town is literally on fire and we’ve relocated to a location with terrible internet access. Today’s post will be notable  for its lateness and weird format.

We’re asking people to make two important calls today! And then do some fun things.

#1. Pass a Clean Dream Act. 

Even if you’ve called on this before, do it again.

#2. Read “Kill the concealed carry for everyone!” for background. They’re voting on this in the House TOMORROW (Wednesday).

Using the same kind of reverse logic that results in a tax bill for the middle class that is actually harmful to them, the GOP has decided that overriding common-sense safety provisions of states run by grownups will make us safer.

This actually passed out of committee (*^?^**!!!) so ignore the references to talking just to committee members. Call your own Representative and both Senators, no matter how you imagine they’ll vote. Note that three Democrats openly support this bill, because they feel they have to to survive. Too bad.

Minimal Script: I’m calling from [zip code]  to express my opposition to (H.R. 38(for Reps),  S.446 (for Senators)

More Script if you want it: This bill would invalidate state-level concealed carry restrictions, make it difficult for law enforcement to verify whether a weapon is legally carried, and essentially allow permitless carry across the country. Continue reading “Tuesday’s Call-in Prescription” →