Elk Grove Mayor Gary Davis announced Tuesday night he had backed a letter from the U.S. Conference of Mayors calling for tighter gun control laws.
"Today I joined Mayors across the nation calling on the President and Congress to enact stronger gun laws," Davis wrote on Twitter.
In the letter, the Conference of Mayors calls for three specific actions:
- Enact legislation to ban assault weapons and other high-capacity magazines being prepared by Senator Dianne Feinstein and others;
- Strengthen the national background check system and eliminate loopholes in it; and
- Strengthen the penalties for straw purchases of guns.
The letter comes less than a week after a mass killing at an elementary school in Newtown, CT. It goes on to say that Congress should increase funding for mental health care and establish a commission to look at violence in the country as a whole.
"We know that preventing gun violence – whether it is a mass shooting in a school or a murder on a street corner – will take much more than strengthening our gun laws," the letter says. "We need to reverse the culture of violence in our nation so that a violent act isn’t the first response to settling a difference or compensating for a wrong."
But gun control laws shouldn't wait for other improvements to happen first, the letter says.
Davis' name doesn't appear on the letter itself–it's signed by mayors who hold leadership roles in the Conference of Mayors, like Philidelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, its president, and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, its second vice president. The names of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also appear on the letter.
Download the letter here [PDF].
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