Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and Police Chief Val Demings will today welcome the FixGunChecks.Org truck to Orlando, a mobile billboard traveling around the country, calling attention to the problems in the nation’s gun background check system.
The truck comes to Orlando from Tucson, Arizona, where victims of the mass shooting took place there earlier this year.
Mayor Dyer and Chief Demings will be joined by community groups and victims of gun violence from Central Florida as well as victims who are traveling with the truck.
Orlando has seen a downward trend in the number of homicides over the past several years, with a 43 percent decline in 2010 over 2009. On the other hand, Orange County witnessed a 19 percent increase in homicides in 2010, over the year before.
Statistics show that thirty-four people are murdered with guns every day in the United States.
The FixGunChecks.Org truck features a clock that will toll the count of Americans that have been murdered with guns since the Tucson shooting earlier this year.
FixGunChecks.org is a project of Mayors Against Illegal Guns — a bi-partisan coalition of 550 American mayors and cities, including Orlando. The coalition came together around a simple, straightforward idea: respect the rights of responsible law-abiding Americans and keep guns out of the hands of criminals, drug abusers, the mentally ill, and other dangerous people.
