our 6 principles

1. The Second Amendment belongs to ALL of us.

Despite the stereotypes, gun owners are from all walks of life, political parties, races, and belief systems. What unites us is our desire to protect the ones we love while exercising our fundamental rights.

2. Every responsible gun owner deserves a space where they can learn, train and build a positive community.

We don’t have enough places and spaces for all gun owners to call their own. And while everyone wants gun owners to be responsible, finding information and training that is practical, realistic and affordable can be very difficult, especially for people that need it the most (e.g. a working single mom in a neighborhood with a high homicide rate that wants to learn how to keep her kids safe). In every way possible, we need to make responsible gun owning communities accessible to everyone. Beyond changing the narrative of who gun owners are, we have to make the most life changing and lifesaving information and training easy to afford and accessible for everyone.

3. The War on Guns must not become the next War on Drugs

The punitive nature of current laws passed as a result of the gun debate are likely to mirror the mistakes made during The War on Drugs by failing to address the root of the problem and fueling mass incarceration, particularly in poor, Black, and Brown communities. We all know that the War on Drugs did not solve the problem of addictions in our communities because today overdoses kill twice as many people as guns. What the War on Drugs did was create a pipeline for poor, Black and Brown communities into prison, often for simple possession of drugs, some of which (like marijuana) are slowly becoming legal. In other words, some people went to prison and had their lives destroyed for something that may not be a crime anymore! Most Americans believe that the War on Drugs went too far but a War on Guns does not promise to be different. If anything, the War on Guns is set to replace the War on Drugs as the next driver of mass incarceration. 80% of people arrested for simple illegal possession of a firearm in Chicago (something that is often no longer a crime in Florida or Texas) were Black,overwhelmingly Black men. While the number of arrests for possession went up, so did shootings, but arrests for those shootings (as opposed to simple possession) declined. Similar trends took place in New York and Baltimore. In sum, even the most “sensible” gun laws are more about locking up poor and Black/Brown men than they are about stopping “gun violence.” Most people don’t realize that the same crime bill that helped create the “New Jim Crow “ and drive mass incarceration in 1994 also contained the Assault Weapons Ban. At the time of the Assault Weapons ban, there were an estimated 800,000 AR-15’s in circulation. Today there are over 20 million. Which means, if that ban is renewed today, a new felony will be created where someone would have to go to jail or prison. Who will that someone look like?

4. We must address the root causes of violence before anything else.

Those root causes include (but are not limited to): 1. A broken justice and public safety system that over-incarcerates and under-protects. (E.g. Despite the prison population that reached 2 million people, there are more than 200,000 unsolved homicides in the United States, and that number rises by around 6,000 every year.) 2. A broken system of rapid response and rapid care that fails people who are at extreme risk of harming themselves or others. 3. A lack of investment and historical disinvestment in communities where people are dying.

5. We must invest directly in communities where people are needlessly dying in ways that keep us all safe.

Debates don’t save lives, effective investment does. Even though mass shootings are horrific and consume our headlines, a few HUNDRED people die in mass shootings every year, about a DOZEN of those deaths are in schools. Last year 48,000 people died by guns. The majority of those were suicides (overwhelmingly White), followed by homicides (20,000) (disproportionately Black and Brown). Also last year, 100,000 people died from drug overdoses and an additional 100,000 died from alcohol-related deaths. Many of the deaths from guns, drugs and alcohol happen in the exact same communities,often to the same families. Historically, the various “get-tough” approaches,including Prohibition and the War on Drugs have failed to fundamentally save lives in those communities because the research tells us that those communities are full of economic despair and desperately lack investment. Investments in proven solutions will always save more lives than any punitive law that is passed. When we say investment, we mean: 1. Investing in targeted Community Violence and Wellness Intervention programs that have been proven to reduce deaths by: helping crime victims get services they need, working directly with people at high risk of commiting violence and ensuring people coming out of the justice system are more likely to work and less likely to commit acts of violence. 2. Invest in creating more effective early warning and rapid response systems for people who are at the highest risks of hurting themselves and others. so that no person who has committed, tried to commit or actively planned a homicide is simply walking the street and no person who has attempted a suicide is left unhelped. 3. In the long term, it means investing in an economy and a criminal justice/public safety system that works for all of us- especially the communities with most despair. As we said, debates don’t save lives, effective investment does. Afterall, we invest in the things we care about.

6. Responsible Gun owners are a part of the solution, not the source of the problem

Responsible gun owners, especially those from communities impacted by violence, have a role to play in keeping their communities safe, if only they are engaged in creating the solution rather than being dismissed as the source of the problem. We became gun owners to protect the people we love and solve the problem of safety in our lives. We believe in safer communities as much as anyone else and are willing to do what it takes to build a better future. We can do that, not by debating gun laws forever but by supporting investments in people and communities in effective ways that keep us all safe. When we say invest, it can be with the pocketboo k, the policies we support or with our personal actions.