America ‘needs gun #MeToo’ to end shootings

As America reels from yet another devastating school shooting, what can be done to convince politicians and the public to give up their deadly weapons?

Nineteen children aged seven to 11 years old and two adults are dead following the massacre in Uvalde, Texas.

It is the 20th US school shooting this year - one of the worst in the country’s history, and the deadliest attack since Sandy Hook in 2012. 

As a community mourns, investigators are trying to piece together events at Robb Elementary School after the gun rampage by 18-year-old Salvador Ramos.  

Here in the UK it was two gun massacres, in Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996, that sparked serious reform to our gun laws.

Subsequently, the UK’s Gun Control Network - a collective of campaigners and victims’ relatives - successfully lobbied to ban handguns in 1997. 

But still, such tragedies keep happening here, including last year in Plymouth and in Cumbria in 2010. 

Gill Marshall-Andrews, from Richmond, chairs the network and joins the Leader to discuss what more can be done to convince US authorities to get a grip on gun violence.

She discusses the network’s successful campaign, and shares her views on what strategies could help convince and cajole America to lay down its guns - a monumentally hard task given the right to bare arms enshrined in the US constitution.

We also talk about the continuing challenges of gun reform here in the UK and, following last year’s shotgun murders in Plymouth, whether the government is doing enough to improves safety around firearms ownership.

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