For a safer state

Defeat dangerous gun bills Guest writer

Iabsolutely love this time of year. As the holidays draw closer, I always look forward to decorating the house with my kids and spending quality time with family and friends. The holidays offer an opportunity to step back from our busy lives, and reflect on the year that’s coming to a close and what we hope to accomplish in the new one ahead.

I’m hopeful that as our elected leaders consider what the new year will bring and what they’d like to achieve over the coming months, they will listen to the will of the people and resolve to take a different approach to gun violence prevention in the coming legislative session.

—————— Sadly, this past year brought more utter heartbreak as communities around the country were torn apart by gun violence.

In February, 17 students and teachers were killed in their school in Parkland, Fla. In May, 10 students and teachers were killed in yet another school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. And just this month, 12 people—many of them college students—were shot and killed at a bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Of course, this is just the gun violence that captured national headlines.

Every day, 96 Americans are shot and killed and hundreds more are wounded, many of them here in Arkansas. According to research done by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, since 1999 more than 8,000 people in our state have died by gun violence, leaving families and communities to pick up the pieces.

That’s what I think about when I reflect on 2018—the families that have an empty seat at the table as the holidays approach. In their honor, it is my sincere hope that our elected leaders in Arkansas will resolve to defeat any and all dangerous gun bills that are introduced this legislative session.

In recent sessions, lawmakers put forward a number of bills that jeopardized public safety in our state. These included permitless-carry bills, which would have lowered the bar for who can carry hidden handguns in public, letting violent criminals, some teenagers and people with no safety training carry guns in public. And they passed a bill forcing colleges and universities to allow people to carry guns on campus.

We cannot afford to revisit these dangerous proposals next year. Our families deserve to be safe and live free from the constant threat of gun violence. These proposals undermine our safety by advancing an agenda of guns everywhere, for anyone, no questions asked.

Simply put, these policies would make every community in our state less safe.

As lawmakers spend time with their families this holiday season, I hope they will think about what it would feel like to have gun violence touch their family. I hope they will consider the endless heartbreak that would follow and how much they would want our leaders to take action in the face of such loss.

I hope they will carry that feeling with them into the next session and focus on defeating bills that would make us less safe and advancing ones that would save lives.