Just this spring, I was a teacher participating in regular drills where I hurried all my kids into a corner of my classroom, pushing them under my heavy lab tables, making sure nobody could see to shoot them through the windows, and thinking, “How has this become a routine part of my job!?!” So one of my favorite campaign activities this week was a conversation with the legislative/elections lead for Boulder’s Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America group.
The Moms (and Students, and Mayors, and Survivors) are under the umbrella of Everytown for Gun Safety, and if you want to feel hopeful about gun violence solutions, take a look at this group’s very data-based approach to reducing gun deaths. Basically, Everytown has identified the 50 most important policies for reducing gun violence, attributed point values to each policy based on efficacy, tallied the points earned by each state for their enacted policies (Colorado has climbed into the “making progress” range due to meaningful recent work by our legislators), and compared gun law strength to gun deaths per 100,000 people. There’s a clear correlation (r = -.63, p <.000) between the strength of a state’s gun laws and its rate of gun deaths. I’ve shared a few of my favorite graphs from Everytown’s website, and you can see all of this data for yourself and learn more about Everytown’s methodology here.
Everytown has a Gun Sense Candidate Designation to ensure that communities can recognize candidates who’ll be champions for good gun legislation. Elected officials must reapply for this designation every year, and as a candidate for Colorado House District 10, I’ll certainly seek this important recognition.
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