Advocates for gun control rallied against firearms violence on the steps of San Francisco City Hall Friday as Mayor Daniel Lurie proclaimed it Gun Violence Awareness Day in the city.
Organizers from several nonprofit organizations that work on legislative, preventative, and awareness programs related to gun control shared their experiences and campaign goals. Multiple members of the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Paul Miyamoto made remarks, detailing efforts to reduce gun violence and thanking supporters for their work.
The rally was organized by the nonprofit organization Everytown for Gun Safety and its associated group Moms Demand Action.
About two dozen people stood on the steps of City Hall, most of them wearing orange in support of another campaign by Everytown for Gun Safety, which calls on supporters to wear orange this weekend to create awareness about gun violence.
Advocates for stronger gun control, including some who have lost family members to firearms, spoke about solutions such as requiring background checks to purchase firearm barrels to prevent their use in firearms made with 3D printers.
Other solutions included local legislation that could make it possible to voluntarily have a firearm stored out of the house in San Francisco and supporting gun buyback programs, which offer cash for turning in firearms.
Some of the organizations represented at the rally were Brady, formerly known as the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, the organization Pierce’s Pledge, which seeks to protect children from gun violence during family law matters, and United Playaz, a San Francisco-based youth development and violence prevention organization.
Advocates for healthcare and youth-based solutions also called for policy changes.
Ruth Borenstein, the co-leader of San Francisco’s Brady chapter, and the leader of Brady’s state legislative campaigns, told the crowd of a few dozen people that California has made great progress in its gun control efforts after previously being the state with the highest gun violence mortality rate.
She said advocacy campaigns like the organization’s push to ban ghost guns in San Francisco, and later, statewide, showed that change is possible.
She highlighted one of Brady’s current priorities of getting state legislation passed that would require background checks to purchase a gun barrel. That could prevent people from making plastic guns with 3D printers from accessing a critical gun part that cannot be reliably printed.
“The new twist in 3D printed guns is that they have these barrels that are plastic and they can’t really withstand the shock, so you might get one or two shots off, and it might even explode in your hand, so people are using the steel barrels that are in normal guns, and they’re doing all the 3D printing except for the barrel. They buy a barrel online or in the gun store,” she said.
Safe gun storage was a priority for multiple speakers, including Lesley Hu, who started Pierce’s Pledge after her 9-year-old son Pierce was murdered in San Francisco by his father during a custody dispute in 2021.
The pledge asks lawyers and other involved parties to do what they can to prevent gun violence during family law proceedings, including communicating the risks of gun violence during divorce and custody disputes. Hu said 120 family lawyers had signed the pledge.
On average, a child is murdered roughly every six days in the United States by a parent involved in a custody dispute. Almost half of those deaths involve firearms, according to the nonprofit legal organization Center for Judicial Excellence, which has been tracking such killings since 2008.
Since then, at least 989 children have been killed by a divorcing or separating parent, including 456 who died after being shot, according to the organization.
Hu pointed out that the vast majority of firearms used in suicides and school shootings come from guns kept at home.
“It takes each one of us to know about guns in the home and what to do with them, because at some time in your life, there might be a friend, or a sister, or a daughter that is in a critical moment in their life, and there might be a gun, and you could be that one that helps save their life or their children’s life by telling them they can take that deadly weapon out of the home,” Hu told supporters.
The second part of Pierce’s Pledge commits lawyers working in family law to “pledge to expect my clients to declare weapons and guns they may have in their possession and that they store them in a secure off-site location with a third-party or otherwise separate themselves from those firearms during the case, or as may be required under state or federal law.”
To create more ways to voluntarily store firearms out of a residence, Pierce’s Pledge’s firearm storage specialist Cody Dougherty successfully lobbied for the state to pass Senate Bill 368 in 2023, which requires federally licensed firearms dealers to store firearms for someone who requests the service.
California is the only state that has such a requirement, according to Dougherty.
Pierce’s Pledge created a nationwide map to help locate a gun dealer who has affirmed that they offer voluntary gun storage.
But San Francisco’s last federally licensed gun store closed in 2015, leaving nowhere in the city to temporarily store a firearm outside of a residence.
That’s why San Francisco Supervisor Stephen Sherrill is working with the San Francisco Police Department to create such a program, he said. He also said he is crafting legislation that would create options to store firearms without going through law enforcement.
“If you’re in crisis, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a handgun and we want people to have an option to voluntarily give their handgun to law enforcement, to a self-storage facility, which, right now in San Francisco, is not possible,” he said.
He said the legislation was still in its beginning stages and could not offer a timeline to establish the program.
Representatives for the youth development group United Playaz also held signs and spoke at the rally. The group holds gun buybacks and hosts youth educational and community events.
Founder and executive director Rudy Valintino said the organization’s gun buybacks have made an impact in getting guns off the street, and said teaching youth about the risks of gun violence is a crucial component of gun control.
“There’s so many different dimensions that we could attack, but the most important to me is education to young people,” he said.
United Playaz is opening a new headquarters at 1044 Howard St., with a ribbon cutting scheduled for Thursday at 11 a.m.
Everytown for Gun Violence will hold a march across the Golden Gate Bridge while wearing orange on Saturday at 11 a.m. from the San Francisco side of the bridge. The organization will also host events Saturday in Richmond and Pleasanton that require an RSVP. Participants can find out more information and register at https://momsdemandaction.org/events.
