We can’t keep asking our kids to be brave while putting them in harm’s way each time they walk into school. We can’t become content with teaching every classroom of children in Michigan and across the country to confront the possibility of a massacre with regularity. Emily will prioritize proactive measures over reactive measures to address the overabundance of regulated and unregulated firearms in our country, and fight for change that addresses the root of the gun violence epidemic, instead of reacting to the aftermath.

Gun violence is now responsible for nearly 50,000 deaths in the United States annually. Firearms account for over 80% of murder weapons, and are used in 55% of suicides. So far in 2023, there are more than 500 instances of mass shootings, and over the last three years the United States has averaged more than 640 mass shootings a year. These shootings have taken place in schools, grocery stores, parks, places of worship, shopping malls, office buildings, backyard barbecues and on city streets. Emily believes living in constant fear of gun violence isn’t freedom - our kids should grow up in communities and a country free from the threat of being killed and she will do everything in her power to make that the new normal.

Unmitigated gun violence comes at a cost. Beyond the human cost of the physical harm and emotional trauma inflicted on victims of gun violence, beyond the lives lost each day, is the growing expense of responding to the ongoing gun crisis. According to testimony provided by Adam Skaggs, Chief Counsel & Vice President at Giffords Law Center, before Congress’s Joint Economic Committee in 2019, gun violence costs Americans upwards of $229 billion per year — $47 billion more than Apple’s 2014 worldwide revenue and $88 billion more than what the US government budgeted for education that year. This issue is not limited to the safety of our communities, it is also consuming the effectiveness of our tax dollars. Every dollar we spend on fixing the damage caused by gun violence, is a dollar we don’t have to spend on Medicare, Social Security, Education, and improving other aspects of American life.

Purchasing a gun shouldn’t be easier than earning a driver's license. Semi-automatic firearms, and modifications that allow for automatic firing, should have further restrictions in place to ensure that instances like the Las Vegas shooting in 2017, and the Parkland high school shooting in 2018 are no longer tragedies we can come to expect. Closing the Charleston Loophole, implementing mandatory waiting periods and putting magazine capacity limits in place are straightforward ways to make our communities safer. Emily believes the blue-print Michigan has in place for common sense gun reform - universal background checks, secure storage, and keeping firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill and people in crisis - are the minimum measures we should be pushing for at the federal level.