Events

Our 2023 Annual Dinner, Saturday, October 21

We’re pleased to announce that after a three year hiatus due mainly to Covid-related concerns, we’ll be resuming the tradition of holding our annual fall dinner, hosted jointly with Americans Against Gun Violence. Our 2023 dinner will be held on the evening of Saturday, October 21, at the Hilton Arden West, 2200 Harvard Street, in Sacramento. The dinner will feature a keynote address by Dr. Michael North of Scotland on the topic, “Gun Control in Great Britain after the 1996 Dunblane Primary School Mass Shooting: A Model for the United States to Follow”

The annual dinner is open to the general public, but advance paid donations are required. The cost of the dinner, which is just the amount that the hotel charges us, is $60 per person. Reservations can be made via the Join/Donate page of this website. Social hour, including a no-host bar, will begin at 6:00 PM, dinner will be served at 7:00, and the program will begin at 8:00. 

We’re extremely honored to have Dr. North as our keynote speaker at this year’s annual dinner. Dr. North lose his five year-old daughter, Sophie, in the 1996 mass shooting at the elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, in which Sophie’s teacher and 15 of Sophie’s fellow students were also killed and 10 other students and three other teachers were wounded. The mass shooting was committed by a man who legally owned the handguns he used to carry out his heinous crime. (Britain already had a ban on civilian ownership of automatic and semi-automatic long guns, including so-called “assault rifles.”) Following the Dunblane Primary School mass shooting, Dr. North helped lead a successful campaign to completely ban civilian ownership of handguns in Great Britain within less than two years.

There hasn’t been another school shooting in Britain since the handgun ban went into effect, and the rate of gun-related deaths in Britain is currently 1/70th the rate in the United States. Dr. North will speak about how he and other grieving Dunblane parents overcame seemingly unsurmountable obstacles to achieve the handgun ban, why they felt that nothing short of a complete ban on civilian handgun ownership would suffice in response to the Dunblane massacre, and why the British handgun ban should serve as a model for gun control in the United States.

Dr. North will also address the fraudulent claim by the U.S. gun lobby – a claim endorsed by a current majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices – that the Second Amendment “codified” into the U.S. Constitution a broad individual individual right to gun ownership that our country’s founders inherited from their English ancestors. In fact, the English people do not have – and never have had – such a right. Instead, they and their children have the freedom to go about their daily lives without fear of becoming victims of wanton gun violence.

In addition to the keynote address by Dr. North, the program will include an update by our PSR/Sacramento President Dr. Harry Wang concerning other PSR activities over the past year, and Dr. Bill Durston will speak briefly about the activities of Americans Against Gun Violence.