Organizers expect hundreds of people to attend the Michigan Gun Violence Prevention Summit this Monday, January 29 and Tuesday, January 30.
Lauren Jasinski is an organizer of the event. She was also a teacher at Oxford High School when a teenage shooter took the lives of four students in November 2021.
Jasinski says the summit is intended to support groups that will be most involved in implementing the state's new gun safety laws: educators, law enforcement officials, health care professionals, and community organizers and activists.
She says the new laws will require awareness and cooperative action among different groups to effectively implement them.
That includes the state's safe storage law, which requires firearms to be locked up when a minor is on the premises.
"We can partner with school districts and they can share safe storage information," Jasinski said. "They can remind families that safe storage is going to keep everyone safer and healthier, that we want to keep guns out of the hands of young people."
The Extreme Risk Protection Order law provides for the temporary confiscation of firearms, "to intervene when somebody is in crisis and they know that they're a firearm owner, to temporarily remove those firearms from somebody that could be dangerous," Jasinski said.
Other laws include:
- People with domestic violence convictions of any kind won’t be allowed access to guns for eight years under one of the new laws
- Nearly all Michigan gun sales will require a background check of the buyer, not just for handguns or firearms purchased from a federally licensed dealer, as the state's previous law required.
Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist will be the keynote speaker at the summit on Monday, and state Attorney General Dana Nessel will be the keynote speaker on Tuesday.
