I mean, besides the literacy initiatives I participate in right now.

There was a lady who used to write two or three letters to the editor every week. After a while, she was viewed as a pet nut. So that's not an option; whatever is done should be effective, and should be seen to be that way.

I used to run interference for hunter safety courses, which are actually gun safety/hunter etiquette courses, twice a year at the library where I worked. The age at which one can get a hunting license in PA is 12, but anyone who wants to hunt has to take a hunter safety course and pass the exam. Lately the trend has been to offer the book online and let people take the exam online too. The instructors I know, and I myself, take a dim view of this. The applicant misses the videos, live Q&A, and the Gun Mishandling Horror Stories told by an EMT when doing the minimum in the comfort of one's own home. (The courses are free, the instructors are certified by the Game Commission and are volunteers, and when the library hosts, the facility is free too, so no excuses.) Now that I'm working at a suburban library, there's resistance from the board to this kind of instruction, even though, I think, there are just as many guns in the 'burbs and the city but a lot less safety education. I'll take another run at that in the spring. If we have them anyway, we need to know how to act with them.

Attacking the gag orders on medical research looks like a promising avenue to me, too, after I educate myself a little more. It's fine to send email to Congress, and representatives at state houses, but I don't want to be just another voice of outrage like all the others that will be tallied and deleted. It helps to have a plan: talk to local pediatricians and trauma people to see whether they'd be interested in an organized, orchestrated discussion, also including my friends who teach junior rifle. They are "gun nuts", but they like the kids they teach, and no one wants to see anybody get shot because of stupidity, carelessness, or crazy.

And, hmmm... I wonder if anyone has introduced a proposed frivolous amendment to the constitution of the Commonwealth of PA... I'll have to ask Dave about that... He's our rep, and my kids used to deliver his newspaper...

Brainstorming. Something can be done.