By Khalida Sarwari
The Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, home to biannual gun shows that the county’s supervisors are seeking to curtail, will be the site of a summit on gun violence on Saturday.
The Tully Road venue will serve a daylong gathering for anyone that has gun reform on their mind, from faith-based groups to folks in the business community, community leaders to nonprofits and gun hobbyists to second amendment defenders. And, of course, students: they inspired Supervisor Dave Cortese to think up the idea for the summit in the first place.
“The March for Our Lives movement has been absolutely part of the stimulus for this,” Cortese said. “One of the absolutely significant motivations that I had in terms of bringing this forward is to make sure that the young people who started this movement will know their government institutions will create that space to make sure their voices are heard.”
Participants shouldn’t expect a town hall setup; opportunities for interaction and dialogue will be far greater here. With members of the county’s behavioral health department and a cadre of attorneys on stand-by to answer questions and settle any disputes that come up, the program will have professionals facilitating roundtable discussions about various gun-related topics, from gang violence prevention to school safety and from suicide prevention to residents’ legal rights and duties. This is one place where an otherwise rare sighting of a gun control advocate sitting next to a gun enthusiast is a possibility. But, that’s actually the point, Cortese said.
“The good news is if we come up with commonalities it will feel good that we took people from disparate points of view that were still able to identify solutions,” he said. “I’m open to the best ideas that come out of this summit…It really is a bottoms-up process.”
And, what’s the point of all this dialoguing if lawmakers are slow to make impactful changes? Cortese said he’s not looking to host a feel-good event, but rather the objective of the summit is to move the needle on gun reform by piggybacking on the momentum that the recent youth-led movement has built.
He’s also hoping to emulate the success of the “Older Adult and Mental Health Summit” his office launched in 2011. That event generated a report that now serves as an operating manual for the county on tackling mental health issues, he said.
“This absolutely cannot become a one-off, nothing other than a dusty report on a shelf,” said Cortese. “We know the stakes are high, that if nothing comes out of this in terms of change this will be a failure. The flip side is that’s a risk worth taking. Colleagues throughout the country will be watching to see what will come out of this and whatever good comes out of it people will want to replicate.”
Added Cortese, “it’s a revolutionary time and we’re trying to capture some of that energy in this summit.”
Ideas produced from the summit will be put into a report that is expected to be released by the end of the year, said Cortese. That report will be used to inform all future decisions the Board of Supervisors makes about guns.
The event generated a bit of controversy earlier this year when it was first announced as a summit on “Gun Violence and Mental Health Summit.” Mental health advocates complained that the title stigmatized people with mental illness as violent, prompting Cortese to broaden the title in order to prevent future misunderstandings.
The program takes place April 28, 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds Fiesta Room, 344 Tully Road, San Jose. There will be translations in Spanish and Vietnamese. Participants can register here.
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Summit on gun violence at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds on Saturday
