August 3, 2015

Amy Schumer Announces Plan To Tackle Gun Control


Amy Schumer just joined the gun control fight.

During a press conference on Monday, the comedian, along with her cousin New York Senator Chuck Schumer, unveiled a new initiative to tackle gun violence. Last month, 59-year-old John Russell Houser allegedly opened fire inside a Louisiana movie theater during a screening of Schumer’s latest film “Trainwreck.” He killed three people, including two women, before killing himself.

“Unless something is done and done soon, dangerous people will continue to get their hands on guns,” Schumer told reporters. “We need a background check system without holes and fatal flaws.”

The three-part legislative plan will seek to limit gun access to the mentally ill and violent criminals by rewarding states that provide thorough background check information while penalizing states that fail to do so. The two also called on Congress to fund greater mental health and substance abuse programs.

Over the weekend, Schumer responded to an open letter from a daughter of a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting survivor that urged her to speak out and support gun control legislation. The letter, posted on Medium, asked Schumer to be a “voice for our generation and for women—two groups who make up most of the victims of the gun violence in our country.”

“These are my first public comments on the issue of gun violence,” Schumer said on Monday. “But I promise you they will not be my last.”

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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