Dear Friends,
If you’ve been reading any of my recent Americans Against Gun Violence president’s messages (and particularly if you attended our annual dinner in Sacramento on October 21st), you undoubtedly know that we brought Dr. Michael North of Scotland to be our keynote speaker at the annual dinner that was co-hosted by the Sacramento Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. As I stated in my introduction of Dr. North at the dinner, in all the years that I’ve been working on the gun violence issue, I’ve never met anyone who’s suffered a greater personal loss than Dr. North or who has subsequently done more to ensure that no one else in his country – and especially, no other child, parent, or teacher – will ever have to endure another tragedy like the Dunblane Primary School massacre.
Dr. North lost his five year-old daughter, Sophie, in the 1996 Dunblane Primary School mass shooting in which Sophie’s teacher and 15 other children were also killed. The perpetrator of the Dunblane massacre used handguns that he legally owned to commit his horrific crime. (Britain already had a complete ban on civilian ownership of automatic and semi-automatic long guns, including so-called “assault rifles”).
At the dinner on October 21, Dr. North described why he and the other grieving Dunblane parents felt that nothing short of a complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns would suffice in response to the Dunblane mass shooting; how they were able to overcome substantial obstacles in getting a complete handgun ban passed within less than two years; and why British gun control laws should serve as an example for the United States. There hasn’t been another school shooting in Britain since the handgun ban went into effect, and the rate of gun-related homicides in Britain is currently 1/100th the rate in the United States.
Dr. North stayed with us for 10 days after the annual dinner, and we’d made previous arrangements for him to speak in several other settings during that time. Given the regularity with which horrific mass shootings occur in our country, it came as little surprise that another mass shooting would occur while Dr. North was staying with us. We couldn’t have predicted, though, that on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 25, at exactly the same time that he was talking to students in the College of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies at California State University, Sacramento, a mass shooting would be taking place in Lewiston, Maine, in which 18 people would be killed and 13 others would be injured. Nor could we have predicted that the interview on the Capital Public Radio Insight program that we’d previously arranged for the morning of October 26 would end up being on the morning after the Lewiston mass shooting. An audio recording of the Insight interview with Dr. North is also available online. You can access the interview by clicking on the “Listen” icon under the heading, “How Other Countries Reduce Mass Shootings” at this link on the Capital Public Radio website.
The banquet hall at which we held the October 21 annual dinner was filled to capacity with very important people (VIP’s) like you. We’d invited numerous elected officials to be our guests at the dinner as well, though, including California Governor Gavin Newsom; California Attorney General Rob Bonta; California’s U.S. Senators, Sacramento area U.S. Representatives, and numerous other state and local officials. Not a single one of these elected officials showed up. Some sent their “sincere regrets” concerning alleged scheduling conflicts that prevented them from coming to hear Dr. North’s message. Most didn’t respond at all, though, to our invitations.[2]
In my concluding remarks following Dr. North’s keynote address at the dinner on October 21, I noted that in my experience, individuals who are often referred to as our “elected leaders” more typically act like “elected followers.” Instead of leading us in new directions that will result in a better future for our society as a whole, it seems to me that many elected officials act more like weather vanes, pointing in the direction from which they sense that the current political winds are blowing.
Abraham Lincoln, who I think most of us would consider to be a true leader, made reference to this phenomenon in a speech in one of his famous debates with Stephen Douglas in which he said:
[P]ublic sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he [or she] who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he [or she] who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He [or she] makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.[3]
In his debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln was referring to public sentiment concerning the institution of slavery, accusing his opponent of molding public sentiment in a pro-slavery direction. The same line of reasoning could apply today, though, to public sentiment concerning stopping gun violence.
We all have a role in molding public sentiment. We are, after all, members of the public, and by informing ourselves and other members of the public concerning the reasons why the United States of American is the only high income democratic country in the world in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, occur on a regular basis; why our gun homicide rate is 100 times higher than the rate in Great Britain; and why there is no legitimate excuse for failing to adopt stringent gun control laws in our country comparable to the laws that Dr. North and his British colleagues adopted decades ago; we can mold public sentiment in a way that will make it possible to enact the kinds of stringent gun control laws necessary to stop our country’s shameful epidemic of gun violence.
As a step toward molding public sentiment, please view and/or read Dr. North’s keynote address, if you weren’t present at the annual dinner on October 21; please share this message with friends, family members, colleagues, and your elected officials, and urge them to view and/or read Dr. North’s keynote address as well; and please let your elected officials know that you expect them to join us in openly advocating and actively working toward the adoption of stringent gun control laws in our country comparable to the laws in Great Britain.
Finally, if you’ve recently made a monetary contribution to Americans Against Gun Violence, thanks very much. I’ve been so involved with the planning for Dr. North’s visit and with other recent activities, including preparing our amicus brief in the Supreme Court Rahimi case, choosing the winners in our 2023 National High School Essay Contest in which we received more than 1,100 essays this year on the subject of lockdown drills, and working with student interns in creating a report summarizing all of these essays, that I’m way behind on sending personal thank you messages. If you haven’t recently made a monetary contribution to Americans Against Gun Violence – or if you’re in a position to submit another one despite my tardy thank you - please consider making a contribution now to help us continue our work.
As Dr. North noted during the Insight interview, despite our best efforts to get other gun violence prevention (GVP) organizations to join us, Americans Against Gun Violence remains the only U.S. GVP organization that openly advocates and is actively working toward adopting stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in Great Britain.
-
We’re also the only U.S. GVP organization that has filed amicus briefs in Rahimi and prior Supreme Court Second Amendment cases calling on the Court to overturn the rogue 2008 Heller decision in which a narrow 5-4 majority of Supreme Court justices ruled for the first time in U.S. history that the Second Amendment confers any kind of individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a “well-regulated militia.” As Dr. North noted in both the Insight interview and in his keynote address, the Heller decision was based in part on the “preposterous” assertion that the Second Amendment “codified” into the U.S. Constitution a broad individual right to own guns that our Founders inherited from their English ancestors as a result of the 1689 English Declaration of Rights. In fact, the 1689 English Declaration of Rights did not confer a broad right to private gun ownership, nor have the British people ever had such a right. Instead, the British people have the right to go about their daily lives without fear of becoming victims of wanton gun violence; British children have the right to go to school without fear of being gunned down in their classrooms; and British educators don’t have to include teaching their students where to hide in the event of an active shooter on campus as part of their educational curricula.
Thanks for your support of Americans Against Gun Violence. And thanks for helping us show through our actions, and not just our words, that we, like Dr. North and his British colleagues, are a society that loves its children more than its guns.
Sincerely,
Bill Durston, M.D.
President, Americans Against Gun Violence
[1] We’re indebted to our sound engineer, Steve Walker, and to our videographers, Randy Van Dalsen and Michael Stavros who all provided pro bono assistance in creating the video recording and uploading it to our Americans Against Gun Violence YouTube channel.
[2] To their credit, U.S. Representative Doris Matsui’s office set up an in person meeting with a field representative, Dr. North, PSR/Sacramento president Dr. Harry Wang, and myself on October 24; and U.S. Senator Alex Padilla’s office set up a teleconferencing meeting with a legislative consultant, Dr. North, and myself on October 26.
[3] David Zarefsky, “‘Public Sentiment Is Everything’: Lincoln’s View of Political Persuasion,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 15, no. 2 (Summer 1994), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.2629860.0015.204.
