On Tuesday, Georgia lawmakers will return to Atlanta for the 2020 legislative session. This session, volunteers with the Georgia chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America will urge their representatives to reject efforts to strip the state’s handgun permitting system and to support legislation that would disarm convicted domestic abusers.
More information on these policies is below. If you’d like to connect with a Georgia Moms Demand Action volunteer, please reach out.
- Protecting Georgia’s permitting system: Without requiring too much time or money, Georgia’s permitting system ensures that those carrying guns in public have gone through a background check. This legislative session, Moms Demand Action volunteers will oppose HB2 and any other efforts by lawmakers to weaken the permitting system by stripping background checks for people carrying concealed guns in public.
- Disarming domestic abusers: When a domestic abuser has access to a gun, they are five times more likely to kill their victim. Currently, dangerous gaps in Georgia’s law make it easy for domestic abusers to get their hands on guns. From 2013-2017 in Georgia, 153 women were fatally shot by an intimate partner. Moms Demand Action volunteers will urge lawmakers to support SB150, which would prohibit people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes from possessing a firearm. Disarming domestic abusers would also protect law enforcement officers answering domestic abuse calls, often an officer’s most dangerous assignment. In fact, 95 percent of law enforcement officer deaths in response to domestic disturbances between 1996 and 2010 were from a firearm.
Each year, nearly 1,500 Georgians are shot and killed, and the state’s rate of gun deaths increased 24 percent from 2008 to 2017. More information on gun violence in Georgia is available here.
