Our schools, neighborhoods, and churches should be safe public spaces — not battlefields.
The consensus is clear – 97% of Americans agree there should be a background check for every gun purchase in this country. And in Georgia, 78% are in favor of raising the minimum age from 18 to 21 to purchase an assault rifle. Yet even with tragedy after tragedy, all we get are “thoughts and prayers” from the Good Old Boys and their corporate backers.
“Thoughts and prayers” while every day over 100 people are killed by a gun in this country. The victims are our friends, our family members, our classmates. “Thoughts and prayers” while the firearm homicide rate in the US is 25 times that of comparable countries, and our firearm suicide rates continues to be 10 times higher. “Thoughts and prayers” while women here at home, who are 21 times more likely to be shot to death than women in other high-income countries, continued to be murdered, often at the hands of an intimate partner.
Georgia Can’t Wait Solution
We must vote the Good Old Boys out of office, then get down to the real work of protecting Georgians from gun violence, while protecting good gun owners from unnecessary bureaucracy.
This means closing the gun show loophole, expanding background checks, and repealing both “permitless carry” and “campus carry”, which experts agree do nothing to make our schools or our communities safer. We must also raise the minimum age to buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21, and pass legislation that prevents the mentally ill or those convicted of domestic violence from being able to purchase or possess guns.
By enacting the above measures, we can ensure safer communities across the state, while not casting so wide a net as to prevent good, law-abiding citizens from purchasing or possessing guns. By identifying people who are at the highest risk for violence based on their past history, and stringently enforcing gun possession prohibition against those people, we can protect both our communities and the overwhelming number of good, responsible Georgia gun owners.