May 1, 2019: What’s New on the Gun Violence Prevention Front

Posted on May 01, 2019 at 12:00 AM

WNDC joined 221 other advocacy organizations in signing a gun violence research letter sent to House and Senate leadership and members of both Appropriations Committees. The letter generally speaks to the public health emergency of gun violence and specifically urges Congress to appropriate 50 million dollars in the FY 2020 budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to fund gun violence research.

Members of the Task Force to Prevent Gun Violence contacted via email or phone WNDC “National Members” (those living outside the DC metro area in various states), asking them to help in our efforts to demand that Senate Majority Leader McConnell allow a conversation on the Senate Floor on S. 42, the universal background checks bills, something 97% of Americans support.

Task Force also joined DC Moms Demand Action for “Happy Hour Phone Banking” at the Club on Thursday evenings to help affect change in laws that keep all Americans safe from gun violence.

On April 4, the House voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) with an important gun safety provision that would close the “boyfriend loophole” to keep guns away from convicted domestic abusers and stalkers. The fight now goes to the Senate, whose cowardly NRA-owned leader has so far refused to break loose from his master’s leash. So, we still await a Senate Floor conversation on universal background checks and now VAWA, complete with this vital provision, something, of course, the NRA opposes.

At a testy April 10 hearing by the House Committee on Education and Labor, Betsy Devos pushed for arming school teachers;however, the Giffords Law Center was able to uncover certain documents regarding this unlawful decision to permit the use of
federal grant funds to arm teachers in classrooms across America. Read more here: https://bit.ly/2VbTta5.

— Shelly Livingston and Ellen McGovern, Co-Chairs, Task Force to Prevent Gun Violence