Cure Violence, an initiative of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention, takes a public health approach to reducing violence and strives to change community attitudes as one way to combat the problem. Tactics have included a “Covenant for Peace in Action,” which was joined by more than 170 of the city’s religious leaders. Other cities […]

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was founded by Jim Brady, the former White House spokesman who was wounded in the head during the assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981, and Brady’s wife, Sarah. The Brady Campaign says it is “working to reform the gun industry and educate the public about gun violence through litigation […]

The New York Times maintains a Times Topics page on gun control.

An August 2012 survey found that by a large majority, Americans consider the constitutional right to own and carry a gun to be as important as the right to free speech. An even larger majority of those polled, though, voiced opposition to people carrying concealed weapons into houses of worship. What’s more, there was considerable difference of […]

Polls show that despite high-profile shootings and other incidents, the public’s enthusiasm for gun control is waning. Gallup reported that a record-low 26 percent of Americans favored a handgun ban in 2011, and 53 percent opposed banning semiautomatic guns or assault rifles. Most of those polled did want current gun control laws enforced more rigorously, though. Forty-seven […]

This June 10, 2013, roundup contains results of recent polls on gun control, gun rights and the effect of the Newtown shooting in December 2012.

Read a July 20, 2012, post at the Daily Theology blog titled “Confronting our culture of violence.” It is by Kevin Ahern, a doctoral candidate in theological ethics at Boston College. Ahern wonders if “the time is ripe for the US Bishops to clarify and teach how we might address this challenge pastorally and politically?”

Read a July 20, 2012, RNS article about religious leaders urging tighter gun control, as well as prayer, in the wake of the Colorado shooting.

“Can we talk about guns?” is a July 21, 2012, blog post at The Christian Century by Richard A. Kauffman. “Could we have a civil conversation about our differences on guns and the deleterious effect of guns in our society?” he writes. “Any chance that churches could start that conversation?”