Posted on February 12, 2013 | 8:03 am

Coalition Hosting Community Forum on ‘The High Cost of Gun Violence’

Source: Toni Wellen for the Coalition Against Gun Violence

The Coalition Against Gun Violence, a Santa Barbara County coalition, is sponsoring a community forum titled “The High Cost of Gun Violence” from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21 in the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Central Library. The forum is free and open to the public.

Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider will serve as moderator and will be joined by a number of distinguished panelists to discuss one of the most critical issues facing our nation.

The CAGV’s co-sponsoring coalition members include the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, Democratic Women, Domestic Violence Solutions, The Glendon Association, La Casa de la Raza, the Santa Barbara Women’s Political Committee and the Unitarian Society.

The issue of gun violence is important to Santa Barbara as it is to many communities across the country. We will consider the high cost of gun violence not only in terms of lives lost, families shattered and victims injured, but also the impact that gun violence has on the community as a whole, i.e., as taxpayers in terms of the multiple government agencies involved in handling these critical incidents, such as law enforcement, the court system, public school safety and hospital and mental health interventions.

The panelists include:

» Denise de Bellefeuille, Santa Barbara Superior Court judge

» Kris Bergstrom, Santa Barbara Unified School District, Instructional Services Division

» Paul Erickson, M.D., medical director for psychiatry and chemical dependency at Cottage Hospital

» Dr Jamie Rotnofsky, licensed psychologist, forensic/medical/legal consultant

» Suzanne Grimmesey, MFT, Santa Barbara County Adult and Children’s Division chief, Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Services

» Frank Mannix, Santa Barbara Police Department deputy chief

» Marisa Martinez, past president of Ventura County Parents of Murdered Children

» Toni Wellen, MFT and chair of CAGV

The Santa Barbara Coalition Against Gun Violence is a nonprofit coalition comprised of 40 member organizations, united against gun violence and committed to creating a safer community for Santa Barbara County residents through its educational programs and advocacy for effective local, state and national policies and legislation.

For more information, call Wellen at 805.684.8434.

— Toni Wellen is chairwoman of the Coalition Against Gun Violence.

Comments

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» interloper on 02.12.13 @ 08:50 AM

Another group of charlatans repeating lies for the masses.
If they were actually concerned violence they would be trying to limit the ownership of baseball bats and knives, both of which injure far more every year than guns. Get real!

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» JohnTieber on 02.12.13 @ 09:53 AM

interloper:

I believe this group is well-intentioned, yet needlessly gun-phobic and ignorant regarding the constitution.

They’d serve the public better by renaming and refocusing their group to: Coalition Against Pharmaceutical Violence.

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» AN50 on 02.12.13 @ 11:30 AM

These people see a kid pick up a rock and throw it at another kid and the first thing they want to do is ban rocks. That is so much easier than trying to figure out why a kid would want to throw a rock at another kid.

But here is another reason to ban rocks, they know that they are weak and if a rock were available to them, they would throw that rock at another kid too. So really, banning rocks is more about them acknowledging their own weakness, their own desire to be “controlled” than about stopping the throwing of rocks by anyone.

I use “rocks” in the above diatribe, because as many of us have noted, the anti gun zealots are obsessively fixated on a thing, not the people using the thing. We jail millions of people a year because they put a chemical in their body and we don’t like that particular chemical. Ignored is the reason they do it or the behavior they exhibit while it’s in them.

Far too much freedom is destroyed using the “thing” fixation rather than the hard work of figuring out people or the even harder task of being responsible for your own actions and holding others responsible for theirs, regardless of the things they do it with. So we punish things and thus all people are punished rather than those who behave badly with whatever thing they use.

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Coalition Hosting Community Forum on ‘The High Cost of Gun Violence’

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