Giffords
October 8, 2019
MEMO: Takeaway from the 2020
Presidential Gun Safety Forum
MEMORANDUM
TO Interested Parties
FROM Giffords
DATE October 8,
2019
RE Takeaway from
the 2020 Presidential Gun Safety
Forum
__________
On October 2, Giffords and March For
Our Lives hosted a forum on gun
safety featuring nine leading
Democratic presidential candidates.
More than 300 attendees heard
one-on-one discussions from former
Vice President Joe Biden, New Jersey
Senator Cory Booker, South Bend
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former HUD
Secretary Julian Castro, California
Senator Kamala Harris, Minnesota
Senator Amy Klobuchar, former Texas
Representative Beto O’Rourke,
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth
Warren, and businessman Andrew Yang
about their individual plans around
gun safety.
In
an
op-ed published in the Las Vegas
Sun on the day of the
forum, Assemblywoman Sandra
Jauregui of Nevada, who also
survived the Route 91 shooting, and
Las Vegas March For Our Lives
executive director Mateo Beers,
wrote
“This forum
demonstrates just how important
this issue has become for voters
who are looking for a gun safety
president who will make ending the
nation’s gun violence epidemic a
top priority. Here in Nevada, we
have shown that we can stand
together and enact stronger laws
that will protect our communities
and save lives. It’s time
Washington did the same.”
This historic gun safety forum was
the culmination of a seismic shift
in the politics of gun safety. Over
the past several years, gun safety
has become a critical issue for
voters alongside health care and
climate change, and it is shaping up
to be a defining issue in the 2020
campaign. Americans overwhelmingly
want to see action taken on gun
violence—and they’re not willing to
wait any longer.
In the lead up to next week’s
Democratic debate, here are some key
takeaways from the forum to keep in
mind when you’re tuning in:
I. Democrats share many of
the same gun safety solutions, but
also have their own creative
solutions to reducing gun
violence.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete
Buttigieg kicked off the forum,
noting that “pretty much everybody
in the parade of candidates you’re
about to see is going to call for
universal background checks, closing
the hate loophole, the Charleston
loophole, the boyfriend loophole,
disarming domestic abusers, enacting
red flag laws, extreme risk
protection orders, banning the sale
of assault weapons.”
He was right. All nine candidates
put forward robust plans for
addressing our nation’s gun violence
epidemic that included many of these
commonsense, broadly supported
solutions. As Former Congresswoman
Gabbrielle Giffords said at the
opening of the forum, “Stopping gun
violence takes courage. The courage
to do what’s right. The courage of
new ideas.”
And new ideas are just what
candidates posited at the 2020 Gun
Safety Forum. Some of these ideas
included:
Gun licensing:
Investing in government research
on gun violence:
- Several
of the candidates pushed for
more research on gun violence,
including Senator Elizabeth
Warren. Congress has long
blocked the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention from
studying gun violence as a
public health problem. “The one
area where, by and large, we
put no federal money into
researching is gun
violence,” Warren said.
Gun safety technology:
- Vice
President Joe
Biden advocated for gun
safety technology that would
allow only authorized users of a
firearm to pull the trigger. In
that vein, Andrew
Yang indicated his support
for creating a tax credit to
incentivize upgrading guns to
use smart technology, such as
biological indicators, to unlock
the firearm.
Investing in preventing violent
extremism:
- Mayor Pete
Buttigieg called for
investing one billion dollars in
preventing and fighting “violent
extremism.” This investment
would bolster the FBI’s domestic
counterterrorism staff,
revitalize the Department of
Homeland Security’s efforts to
counter violent extremism, and
study whether there is a link
between white supremacist groups
and gun violence.
Taxing firearms and ammunition:
II. Candidates understand that
gun violence is not just about
mass shootings.
Though the 2020 presidential gun
safety forum was held two years
after the mass shooting at the Route
91 Harvest Music Festival,
candidates also made sure to focus
on the everyday gun violence
that kills 100 Americans a day, from
firearm suicides and unintentional
shootings to community violence and
intimate partner homicides.
Suicide:
Firearm suicide makes up the
majority of both gun deaths and
suicides in the US, resulting in
nearly 22,000 deaths a year.
- Mayor Pete
Buttigieg explained that
suicide is the piece of the gun
violence epidemic that needs to
come “out of the shadows.”
“We’ve got to make it OK to talk
about,” he said. “We
are more likely to
lose someone to suicide if they
attempt suicide with a gun,”
noting that “we have got to
discuss the mental health issue
without ever allowing to be an
excuse to fail to act on gun
policy.” Mayor Buttigieg went
on to explain how
commonsense regulations such
as extreme
risk protection orders can
help save lives if someone with
access to a gun is experiencing
suicidal ideation.
- Senator
Elizabeth Warren pointed
out that even a
seven-day waiting period for gun
purchases would drop gun
suicides by between 7 and 11
percent.
Community violence:
For many communities, gun
violence is a daily threat. At the
forum, several attendees who had
been personally impacted by gun
violence in their neighborhoods
posed questions to the candidates
about how to mitigate this everyday
gun violence that often doesn’t
receive national attention.
- Senator Cory Booker spoke
passionately about
witnessing firsthand the
everyday scourge of gun violence
in his low-income neighborhood
in Newark, New Jersey. “We
cannot wait for this hell to be
visited upon your community for
you to be activated for this
fight,” he
said. “It is a life and
death issue for people in
communities like mine.”
- Vice President Joe
Biden discussed his
plan to spend $900 million over
eight years on programs designed
to reduce gun violence in the 40
cities hardest hit by gun
violence.
- Senator Kamala Harris talked
about giving children the
resources they need to
escape the “trauma-inducing”
cycle of poverty that causes
them to act out in “predictable
ways.” She also recommended
investing $100 billion in
neighborhoods that have
historically been redlined,
whose inhabitants are frequently
denied funds for mortgages
because of race. Under Senator
Harris’s proposal, residents of
such neighborhoods and of
federally subsidized
housing would
receive grants for
down payments and closing costs
so they could buy homes.
Research has connected home
ownership with lower crime
rates.
- Andrew Yang discussed
the underlying causes of gun
violence, arguing that
providing a basic income of
$1,000 a month for every adult
could help address gun violence:
“And there are many reasons why
I’m certain we should do this,
but it even impacts the causes,
the underlying root causes of
gun violence, because if you
look at the series of events
that lead to gun violence, what
are we talking about? We’re
talking about the composition
and stress levels in homes, in
the family.”
- Former HUD Secretary Julian
Castro also talked
about the importance of
creating after-school programs for
at-risk youth, explaining that
he invested in similar
opportunities as mayor of San
Antonio and saw positive
results. “We know…between 3:00
and 7:00pm, there’s an increased
likelihood that our young people
will meet violence… I want to
give them an enriching and
nourishing environment…. I would
take the 6 or 7 hundred million
dollars from an excise tax from
ammunition and guns, and invest
them in those efforts.”
Domestic violence
Women in the US are 25 times more
likely to be killed by guns than
women in other countries, and
approximately 4.5 million American
women report that they have
been threatened with a gun by an
intimate partner. Access to a gun
makes it five times more likely that
a woman with an abusive partner will
be killed.
- Senator Amy
Klobuchar said, “Domestic
violence is one of those
day-to-day crimes that we don’t
always talk about… Domestic
violence…is not just about the
immediate victim, it’s about our
entire community. And so when we
think about this gun issue, we
just can’t isolate it to the
mass shootings.” She went
on to cite policies
and tactics such as universal
background checks, Centers for
Disease Control research,
and straw
purchasing laws as
fundamental ways to decrease
gun-related deaths in domestic
violence situations.
- Senator Cory Booker was
asked a question by Ruth Glenn,
a domestic violence survivor and
the president and CEO of the
National Coalition Against
Domestic Violence, about closing
loopholes for spouses who stalk
or assault their significant
other — called the “boyfriend
loophole.” Senator Booker
responded by saying, “Thank you
for your courage…First of all,
through executive action, I will
close the boyfriend loophole
right away and make sure that if
you are convicted for stalking
your girlfriend, you cannot have
a gun.”
III. The issue of guns will have
staying power through 2020.
With gun deaths in the United
States reaching their highest level
in almost 40 years, it’s clear that
the US faces a public health crisis
on a massive scale. According
to
Pew
Research Center surveys, a
majority of both Democrats and
Republicans support gun safety
proposals like universal background
checks and an assault weapons ban.
As many Democratic candidates
noted
at the forum, universal
background checks are supported by
90-plus percent of Americans.
The candidates who attended the
forum recognize that Americans are
demanding commonsense gun safety
laws—and that’s not going to change
anytime soon.
- Senator Elizabeth
Warren said, “This is not
going to be a one and done,” she
said. Warren likened gun
violence to automobile deaths in
the 1960s. The country focused
on bringing those numbers down
through research-based policy
solutions—first with safety
glass and seatbelts, then
airbags and other innovations.
Senator Warren said
she’s committed to bringing
the same persistence to
our gun violence epidemic.
IV. States have taken the lead on
enacting gun safety measures in
recent years, but it’s time for
federal action.
Across the country, states have
taken the lead on enacting gun
safety laws that are saving lives.
Earlier this year, Nevada Governor
Steve Sisolak, who ran on a bold gun
safety platform, and the state
legislature enacted the strongest
gun laws the state has seen in
decades. They closed a background
check loophole that allowed
unlicensed sellers to circumvent
background checks, banned bump
stocks, enacted red flag laws to
keep guns out of the hands of those
who pose a risk of harming
themselves or others, and more.
In addition, in the months since the
school shooting in Parkland,
Florida,
over
110 gun safety bills have been
signed into law in 32
states and Washington DC. But even
if one state has strong gun laws, a
neighboring state’s lax laws make it
all too easy for dangerous
individuals to acquire guns and
traffic them into states with strong
gun laws. The candidates attending
the forum voiced support for state
efforts to reduce gun violence, but
also acknowledged the need for
federal action to remedy our
inconsistent patchwork of state
laws.
- Senator Booker said
guns used in states with
strong gun laws are
frequently transported from
states with lax
laws. Eighty percent of gun
deaths in New Jersey are a
result of out-of-state weapons,
according to statistics compiled
by the state.
- Several of the candidates
pledged to take executive action
if Congress remains gridlocked.
Senator Warren said she
would use the power of the White
House to increase scrutiny of
gun sellers and roll back Donald
Trump’s executive actions on
guns on her first day in
office. Senator
Harris said
that if Congress doesn’t act
in her first 100 days in
office, she would “take
executive action to put a
comprehensive background check
system in place” and ban assault
weapons.
V. The gun safety movement is
eclipsing the gun lobby.
In the 2018 midterm elections,
gun safety moved from third rail to
top tier in some of the most
contentious campaigns. Campaign
ads touting gun safety far
outnumbered ones focused on gun
rights. And gun safety groups like
Giffords outspent the NRA by tens
of millions of dollars, even in the
deepest of red states, like Texas.
While the NRA’s approval rating
continues to decline, the momentum
behind gun safety supporters is only
accelerating.
Many of the candidates were pointed
in their criticism of the gun
lobby’s greed and bullying, and
pledged to stand up to gun
manufacturers and the gun lobby if
elected.
- Mayor Buttigieg stressed
that the NRA’s position on
universal background checks is
not indicative of the larger
population’s views. “When you
have the NRA fighting it tooth
and nail, they’re not speaking
for gun owners—they’re speaking
for gun company
executives,” Buttigieg
said.
- Andrew Yang pledged
to give all Americans $100 to
donate to candidates or causes,
which he argued would weaken the
gun lobby that has prevented the
country from treating gun
violence as what it is: a public
health crisis. “When the NRA
lobbyists or the gun lobby comes
along and says, ‘I’m going to
give you $100,000 to bury this
legislation,’ you say, ‘I don’t
care about your $100,000.
I’m getting $1 million from the
people.’ That’s how we override
the stranglehold,” he said. “We
break the stranglehold that the
NRA and the gun lobbies have
over our laws.”
If it wasn’t already clear before
the 2020 Gun Safety Forum, it’s
eminently clear now: the leading
Democratic presidential candidates
stand in sharp contrast to President
Trump on the critical issue of gun
violence. Any one of them is poised
to do more to save lives in their
first 100 days than Trump has done
in his entire term so far.
Giffords
September 19, 2019
MSNBC to Exclusively Moderate
2020 Gun Safety Forum with Top
10 Presidential Candidates
Today, March For Our Lives and
Giffords announced that MSNBC will
exclusively moderate and
livestream the upcoming 2020 Gun
Safety Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Craig Melvin, “MSNBC Live” anchor,
will serve as the Forum’s
moderator. The Forum will take
place on October 2, 2019,
in Las Vegas, one day after
the second anniversary of the
Route 91 Harvest music festival
shooting, the deadliest mass
shooting in recent American
history. The forum will be
streamed live on NBC News Now and
featured across MSNBC programming.
The upcoming 2020 Gun Safety Forum
will be attended by the 10
presidential candidates who
qualified for the third Democratic
debate on September 12. Candidates
include: Former Vice President Joe
Biden; New Jersey Sen. Cory
Booker; South Bend, Indiana Mayor
Pete Buttigieg; Former HUD
Secretary Julian Castro;
California Sen. Kamala Harris;
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar;
Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke;
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders;
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth
Warren; and businessman Andrew
Yang.
The 2020 Gun Safety Forum will
provide the candidates with the
opportunity to directly engage
voters and present their plans to
address America’s gun violence
epidemic. Forum attendees will
include survivors of gun violence,
students, family members of those
impacted, elected officials and
gun violence prevention advocates.
“Giffords and March for Our Lives
are proud to collaborate with
MSNBC on a landmark forum so that
voters and viewers can hear
directly from candidates about how
they would address America’s gun
violence crisis. Gun safety and
the fight to save lives will be
one of the defining issues of the
race for president in 2020,”
said Peter Ambler, Executive
Director, Giffords.
“We are excited to announce that
MSNBC will join both March For Our
Lives and Giffords to broadcast
live the 2020 Gun Safety Forum, so
that presidential candidates can
share what we hope are bold,
ambitious, and comprehensive plans
to address America’s gun violence
crisis,” said Bria Smith,
Board Member, March For Our Lives.
Since last month, the nation has
experienced a string of mass
shootings that have captured
national attention and once more
reminded all Americans of the need
to comprehensively address gun
violence in America. Shootings in
Gilroy, CA, El Paso, TX, Dayton,
OH and Odessa, TX — not to mention
other gun tragedies that did not
make news headlines — have made it
clear that state and federal
policymakers must act immediately
and with a sense of urgency to
prevent future gun deaths.
Gun deaths in the United States
have reached their highest level
in almost 40 years, with nearly 40,000
Americans killed by a gun in
2017. Communities across
America continue to be tragically
impacted by gun violence that has
increased in intensity over the
last several years, particularly
in schools and other civic spaces.
Too often, communities of color
disproportionately bear the
continued impact and trauma of our
nation’s gun violence epidemic.
Americans overwhelmingly support
gun reforms that will make
communities and our nation safer.
In a September 10, 2019, PBS
NewsHour, NPR and Marist poll:
- 83%
of respondents support
background checks for private
and gun show gun sales
- 72%
of respondents support
creating a national “red flag”
law
- 72%
of respondents support
mandatory gun licenses before
purchasing a gun
- 61%
of respondents support a ban
on the sale of high capacity
magazines
- 57%
of respondents do not support
allowing school teachers to
carry guns
Giffords
AUGUST 1, 2019
Giffords and March For Our
Lives Team Up to Host Nation’s
First Presidential Forum on Gun
Safety
Historic
forum will be held on October
2, 2019, one day after the
second anniversary of the Las
Vegas Route 91 Harvest
Festival shooting