My son was killed in a mass shooting - so I have direct and painful knowledge of the havoc that gun violence is having in our country. I live in a state where many communities are seeing people shot every day just because they live in a certain zip code. Suicide rates are through the roof especially among our veterans. We need change as the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. This organization works very hard to find common ground and bring common sense to our gun laws so these tragedies can be reduced. They try to change laws, educate on gun safety and promote a culture of respect and responsibility towards firearms. They have many gun-owners among their supporters. Their spokesperson is the valiant Gabby Giffords, herself a survivor of gun violence. She gives me hope and inspiration to keep trying to make things better for our children and grandchildren. This is a worthy non-profit doing much to make a difference.
This organization brought in millions of dollars of outside money to lobby heavily for legislative changes that abrogate the State Constitutional rights of the citizens of my state. When it failed to accomplish this in both regular and special legislative sessions of the legislature, it disseminated mis-, dis-, and mal-information using logical fallacies and flawed statistics to misrepresent a very real violence problem as a firearm problem. This organization takes advantage of the victims of violence by speaking broadly and generally on their collective behalf in the form of advertising and out-of-state “community organizers” to lead the public toward the irrational fear of objects rather than to help the public address the real problems of violence and recidivism in this Republic.
In addition, this organization employs a policy writer who wrote the draft legislation for the state legislature, which copied and pasted it into both successful and unsuccessful legislation, though this policy writer is not a resident of this state. 5his organization employs the same tactic in all states, getting as many state legislatures to adopt this singular policy language as law in an attempt to nationalize the abrogation of the rights of the people at the local level.
Furthermore, this organization uses the initiative (or proposition) process to bypass state legislatures with the same policy model when legislatures representing their constituency fail to pass bills that meet this organization’s increasingly aggressive standards. In my state, a spate of initiatives were passed outside of the legislative process which have further abrogated the State Constitutional rights of residents of this state; this was accomplished by leveraging the significant financial donations from other states within this state, effectively passing outside state laws, using outside state money, within this state, based on mis-, dis-, and mal-information. These initiatives, passed years ago, have not had the promised effect on the rates of violent crimes, and have instead only made the continued compliance with the law by law-abiding citizens more costly, more burdensome with a greater level of bureaucracy, and vastly increased the scope of government record-keeping, which further abrogates privacy rights.
The mission statement of this organization is disingenuous and this organization actively works to erode fundamental rights nationwide by preying upon victims of violence.