Local school districts advance gun safety
Local, county governments supporting initiatives in recent weeks
MPUSD, Pacific Grove district adopt resolutions supporting program focused on ending shooting deaths.
MONTEREY >> Schools and local governments in Monterey and elsewhere in the county are increasingly coming out in support of gun safety initiatives, including two in Monterey in the past week.
Last week the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District voted unanimously to adopt a resolution supporting the BeSMART Educational Campaign, a program focused on ending shooting deaths by urging gun owners to ensure they are locked away or are secured with trigger locks.
This week was the Monterey City Council’s turn to address the continued adoption of the program. In December the Pacific Grove Unified School District passed a resolution in support of the program, the first school district in the county to do so.
The program is part of a national effort by the nonpartisan
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a nonprofit group whose stated goal is to advocate for stronger laws and policies to reduce gun violence. It was formed one day after 20 children between 6 and 7 years old, and six adult staff members, were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The killer, Adam Lanza, got the weapons from his mother’s home. Following the carnage, he shot himself in the head. “No other country accepts gun violence rates as high as the United States,” said Wendy Root Askew, a member of the MPUSD board of trustees. “It is insane that we fail to take action given over 30,000 deaths and 80,000 injuries occur annually.”
The Monterey County Board of Supervisors were ahead of the game when it passed a resolution — different from the BeSmart program — in 2018 advocating “action from our federal representatives to adopt stricter controls governing the sale, transfer, possession, manufacturing and distribution of all firearms, dangerous weapons and ammunition.”
BeSmart organizers are quick to point out that the program is about gun safety, not gun control.
“BeSmart makes no judgments about guns,” said Susan Meister with Monterey County Moms Demand Action. “It says if you’ve got them, lock them up.”
At Monterey City Hall, Police
Chief David Hober said in a report to council that the program highlights the public safety risk of unsecured guns. He noted that responsible gun storage is associated with an 85% reduction in the risk of selfinflicted and unintentional gun injuries among children and teenagers.
“There is a wide consensus among medical professionals, police chiefs, gun control advocates and gun rights groups that the use
of trigger locks or lockboxes to store unsupervised firearms in the home substantially reduces the likelihood that children or teens will use such firearms to inflict injury and death,” Hober wrote.
California makes a person criminally liable for keeping a loaded firearm in a home when the gun owner knows or reasonably should know that a child is likely to gain access to the firearm, and the child kills or injures another person, or brings it to school. In 2014 California made it illegal to negligently store or leave a loaded firearm on their premises where
a child can gain access to it, regardless of whether or not that child brings the gun into a public place.
On average some 50 lives are lost each year in Monterey County, Askew said. Half of those killings are youth homicide victims between 10 and 24 years old and over 100 life-threatening gunshot injuries
Back in Pacific Grove, one of the leading advocates responsible for getting the BeSmart program in front of school-board members was Carolyn Swanson, a Pacific Grove mother of a firstgrader. She said this kind of local action can be a powerful tool to address the public health crisis of gun violence.
“There were a lot of community members who were willing to stick their necks out to get this passed,” she said.
Having a daughter in school isn’t the only reason Swanson got involved in promoting gun safety. When she was a sophomore in high school three of her friends — two girls and a boy — committed suicide.
“All were by guns,” she said, “I’ve never forgotten that.”