Student-led organization wants voters to support candidates fighting to end gun violence
Courtesy photo.
PHOENIX – March for Our Lives Arizona is continuing its months-long campaign to encourage young voters to back candidates who pledge to work to end gun violence.
“This is the first of many events we have planned this summer and fall aimed at turning out the vote like never before in support of candidates ready to stop the cruel insanity of mass shootings,” said March for Our Lives Arizona Executive Director Jordan Harb.
Among its upcoming events, the organization is hosting a gubernatorial candidates town hall on August 14 and a statewide bus tour later in the month.
WHO: March for Our Lives Arizona
WHAT: Voter registration drive action
WHEN: Friday, July 6, 6 p.m. (gathering time), voter registration canvassing starts at 6:45 p.m.
WHERE: Songbird in Phoenix
March for Our Lives Arizona is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit organization funded in part by the Our Lives Our Vote grant from NextGen Arizona, Giffords and a range of individual and group donations. Jordan Harb is a NextGen America fellow and co-founder of MFOL Arizona.
For more information about March for Our Lives Arizona, visit us on Facebook or phxmarch4ourlives@gmail.com. To make tax deductible donations: https://www.marchforourlivesaz.org.
Facts on gun violence:
- Arizona now ranks 47 out of 50 states as having the weakest gun laws in the nation, according to the Giffords Law Center annual scorecard.
- Every day nearly 100 people are killed with guns in the United States
- More than 100,000 people every year are killed or injured with guns nationwide
- A mass shooting –meaning four or more people shot in one incident, not including the shooter – happens in the U.S. 9 out of every 10 days
- Firearms kill 33,000 people every year in the U.S.
- Two-thirds of gunshot victims are suicides and most of them are killed with handguns
- More than 85 percent of people who commit suicide with a gun are men
- A woman is five times as likely to be killed in a domestic violence incident if a gun is present
- The number of Arizona children who commit suicide in Arizona every year has jumped more than 80 percent since 2009, and about one-third of all suicides by children involves a gun
- In Arizona, 2,200 shootings a year occur, including 600 children who are killed or injured
- Every day, an average of seven children are killed with guns in the U.S., and about every three days a child in Arizona is killed by a firearm
- Black men are 13 times more likely to be killed by guns than non-Hispanic white men
- Hispanics are killed by guns at twice the rate of non-Hispanic whites
- More Americans have been killed by guns since 1968, about 1.5 million people, than in all the U.S. wars combined.
- Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every adult.
- The homicide rate by firearm in 2012 was 22 times higher in the United States than in Australia, which hasn’t had a mass shooting since 1996, the year it passed major gun violence prevention legislation
- In the U.S., fewer people die in states with strong gun laws
Sources include the CDC, Gun Violence Archive, Arizona Department of Health Services, Everytownresearch.org, Violence Policy Center, Giffords Law Center, and the National Center for Health Statistics