PETITION TO AMEND OR REJECT HB 2693, LOADED WEAPONS ON SCHOOL PROPERTY

For the love of all of our children, please take this bold step and sign our petition demanding that our Arizona Senate amend or reject HB 2693, which has already passed legislators' vote. Rather than tightening the laws regarding citizens rights to carry legal firearms upon the property of K -12 schools, it amends the existing restrictions to now allow them to be carried and kept within a vehicle onto a campus fully loaded. 

Wherever you find yourself on issues of our second amendment rights, gun control, or the NRA, and in the wake of Parkland, of Sandy Hook, and so many other schools around this great nation, now is not the time to add insult to injury. This bill is a step in the wrong direction. 

K-12 School Shooting Statistics as provided by the Center for Homeland Defense and Security
- There have been 1,300 school shooting incidents since 1970.
- 2018 had the greatest number of incidents since 1970, with 82. The next highest year was 2006 with 59 incidents.
- 2018 was the highest year for the number of victims killed, including the shooter, with 51 killed.
- California, Texas, and Florida are the top three states in the U.S. with the most incidents.
- 669 incidents occurred outside on school property and 588 occurred inside the school building.

 Hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year and a majority of these are taken out of the vehicles of legal gun owners.  Police advocate that ordinary citizens keep their guns at home and out of their vehicles as they were never intended to be used as gun safes. They ask that we to allow them, or other trained professionals, to do their job. They ask us to urge our leaders to give them all of the tools, training, and human power to do so. 
 
Let us start fighting fire with water and not with more fire. To our representatives, you are the voices of those who can no longer speak for themselves as well as the power behind the thousands of broken hearts of those who must now suffer a life of grief. You are the voices of children, parents, and teachers who live in fear. 

Please listen to the hearts of your constituents pleading, pleading for compassionate leadership. Did you obtain your high office and degree of great responsibility believing that multitudes of citizen-owned loaded weapons, some of these being fully automated mass killing machines, allowed on the grounds of the schools of all of our children, will solve the reality of the nightmare that has been created? Again, we implore all of you, including house majority leader Mr. Warren Petersen, to re-address, amend, or to find the courage to vote this bill down. 

We, as members of Arizona Jews for Justice, along with others of all faiths who view compassion to be at the heart of all that is Holy, urge that you strongly reconsider the passage of HB 2693. This is based solely on the change indicated by a strike line in section 1. I. 1. by which you will now allow loaded firearms belonging to ordinary citizens to be carried within a means of transportation onto school property. This is currently illegal... as it should be.