Cleary Gottlieb has partnered with Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (Giffords Law Center) to develop a comprehensive survey that examines how hate crimes are defined and penalized and to what extent violent hate crime offenders are prohibited from the purchase or possession of firearms.
The extensive results of the project serve as the basis of a published report, “How America’s Gun Laws Fuel Armed Hate,” identifying how current firearm laws are failing to adequately protect vulnerable communities from armed hate, and highlighting ways in which lawmakers can strengthen gun safety laws to respond to such threats.
Cleary attorneys began work on this project in the weeks just prior to the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, which took the lives of 23 people, most of whom were Latinx. In 2020, the research continued past the five-year anniversary of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting, in which nine Black parishioners were murdered. In a painful spotlight on this issue, the final report was published just one day before the mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, in Atlanta on March 16, 2021.
Giffords Law Center—the United States’ leading policy organization dedicated to researching, writing, enacting, and defending proven gun laws and programs—is on a mission to save lives from gun violence by shifting culture, changing policies, and challenging injustice. The center works at the local, state, and national levels to provide free technical assistance to lawmakers, advocates, legal professionals, law enforcement, and citizens who seek to make their communities safer from gun violence.
Read the report, “How America’s Gun Laws Fuel Armed Hate,” here.