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.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — City leaders and LGBTQ+ advocates across San Francisco marked the official start of Pride Month on Friday with events that celebrated community and underscored the activism at Pride’s core.

From Twin Peaks to the Castro, community members emphasized Pride is both a celebration and a protest, especially in a year where advocates say attacks on the transgender community have reignited a sense of urgency.

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“We’re not going to tolerate that,” said San Francisco resident Chad Davis-Montgomery, one of dozens of volunteers who helped lay out the pink triangle on Twin Peaks – a decades-old symbol of both remembrance and resistance.

During the Nazi regime, the pink triangle was used to mark queer people during the Holocaust, similarly to how Jewish people were marked by the Star of David. Organizer Patrick Carney said the giant triangle at Twin Peaks is still used as an educational tool to remind others of its dark history.

Earlier Friday morning, city leaders raised the Pride flag at City Hall – the same site where gay rights icon and former San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated. Mayor Daniel Lurie and other city leaders leaned into the city’s legacy of LGBTQ+ inclusion.

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“When we raise this flag, we are celebrating everyone here today and the activists who came before us,” Lurie said. “Let it remind us of how far we’ve come and how much further we will go when we show up for each other, fight for each other.”

But the mood wasn’t entirely celebratory. In the Castro, a group of LGBTQ+ veterans rallied in protest of the Trump administration’s Wednesday decision to rename the USNS Harvey Milk.

“I am heartbroken by what they are doing to us veterans,” said one protester.

The mix of joy, resistance, and remembrance set the tone for a Pride Month that organizers say will continue to celebrate identity – while also confronting threats to the community head-on.

SAN FRANCISCO – A 4-alarm fire sparked at a row house in San Francisco’s Richmond district early Friday, sending people fleeing from their homes and requiring 130 firefighters to respond to the scene.

Video shared by the San Francisco Fire Department shows huge flames just pouring out of a second-story window at a row house on Fifth Avenue near Balboa and Anza streets.

The call came in at 2:04 a.m. 

Five buildings were affected by that fire and some 35 people have been displaced.

No one was injured. 

The Red Cross was called in to help and Muni buses were being used as  temporary evacuation centers for those residents.

San Francisco Fire Chief Dean Crispin said the community did a great job; the neighbors were already self-evacuating. 

“I think the most important thing is to have a family plan,” Crispin said. “Make sure that everybody in your family knows exactly the evacuation routes, where you’re going to meet outside the building, and how you’re going to evacuate your pets. And make sure that you listen to the orders from firefighters when they arrive. Some people get anxious, and we’re concerned that they may not make the best decision, but if they have a plan, a pre-plan, things will go a lot better.”