This email went out to someone I know who works for UAMS.  While I don’t find it particularly surprising that “leadership” are anti-gun, I was a bit surprised that they are so brazen as to email all their employees.  A public employee, working for a public university, telling subordinate employees to support gun control measures……

I forwarded to my local rep.  I would suggest as many as possible do the same.

State employees don’t get to make political statements via state email system.

Colleagues,
For many of us, one of the first school shootings we remember was on March 24, 1998, when an 11-year-old boy set off a fire alarm at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro and then, along with his 13-year-old accomplice, shot and killed a teacher and four classmates and injured 10 others as they exited the building. The following year, on April 20, 1999, 13 people died and 20 more were injured at a shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. In the 24 years since the incident at Westside, school shootings have resulted in 182 more deaths and 629 injuries in the United States.
The community of Uvalde, Texas, and we as a nation, are now mourning the loss of 19 innocent school children and two of their teachers, struggling to make sense of this tragedy. These incidents are becoming all too common, and yet we as a country have remained unable to prevent them from happening again. And, it’s not just school shootings. Guns were responsible for 45,222 deaths in the United States in 2020. Suicides represented 54% of these deaths, and 43% were murders. The remainder were unintentional, involved law enforcement or were of undetermined circumstance. In 2021, more children died from gunshots than from car crashes.
In March 2021, a few days after a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, my Connections message was about the need to declare gun violence a public health emergency and focus on death and injury prevention rather than the politics of gun ownership. As I said then, this is not a Second Amendment issue. This is a public health crisis. Like with any public health issue of this magnitude, we need a  multi-pronged approach to implement effective solutions. These require pragmatic healthcare, community-based and legislative interventions.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions provides a framework for how we as healthcare professionals and as a health sciences university can advocate for an evidence-based public health framework to create solutions that can result in meaningful change.
An easy, but important, first step is safe storage of guns. Project ChildSafe provides free gun locks through local law enforcement agencies. I’m pleased to share that the UAMS Police Department participates in this program. You can go to our Police Department on the second floor of the Distribution Center (next to the Parking Department) and ask for free gun locks (up to 5 per person) during office hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. If you have guns in your home, I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity to protect your family from another gun tragedy.
To prevent more needless deaths and injuries from gun violence, we must move the conversation away from just a political argument to a public health strategy where we save lives through policy and education, just as we have with auto safety and tobacco use.  The chart below is from the Johns Hopkins center mentioned above and outlines how a public health-based legislative or regulatory approach might be applied to gun violence prevention.
REGULATEAllow federal agencies to regulate firearm manufacturers and ensure gun safety.
LICENSINGRequire firearm purchasers to submit an application, undergo a background check, and take safety education to obtain a license to own a firearm.
REGISTRATIONPass firearm registration laws to ensure that firearms are registered at each point of sale.
PROHIBIT RISKY PEOPLEExpand firearm prohibitions to include individuals who are at elevated risk for violence.
MANUFACTURING STANDARDSRequire manufacturers to make firearms safer, including requiring that guns be outfitted with microstamping technology.
AGE REQUIREMENTSEnact stronger age requirements for owning or possessing all types of firearms.
LICENSING RENEWALRequire gun owners to renew their license on a routine basis.
ONGOING MONITORING AND REGULATIONAllow the Consumer Product Safety Commission to regulate safety of firearms and ensure industry accountability.
LIABILITYRepeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) to hold firearm manufacturers accountable for dangerous and reckless distribution of firearms.

This table from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows how car seats, seat belts, air bags, motorcycle helmets and minimum drinking age laws have saved more than 500,00 lives in the United States in the past 50 years. We as a nation have an opportunity – and an obligation -- to end the gun violence crisis by implementing policies to provide safeguards around gun ownership and addressing the root causes of gun-related deaths and disabilities. These root causes include despair, loneliness, hopelessness and depression. Coupled with easy access to guns and the finality of a gunshot, too many lives are at stake.
Together, we can make things better.                                                                            -
Be safe and be well.

who was this signed by?

My ??
I taught many years in that system.

Stephen Mette.

https://news.uams.edu/2019/11/25/stephen-mette-named-senior-vice-chancellor-for-uams-health/

We need to contact our elected representatives about this (I did)

They think they can say and do whatever they want to without consequence, and conservatives are certainly not afforded the same leniency. Were a conservative to send out an email like this supporting the second amendment, he or she would find a pink slip inbound very quickly

They have enough pull/clout at UAMS(for whatever reason) that UAMS was added to the carry laws specifically as gun free.