 Good morning everyone, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here today to launch a new community firearm safety program called Project Child Safe Columbia and also to discuss the importance of firearm safety and secure storage. My name is Joe Bartosi, I'm the president and CEO of the National Shooting Sports Foundation and I'm also the chairman of the Project Child Safe Foundation. I'm honored to be here today with Columbia Mayor Daniel Rickenman, we have Captain Kelly Yates of the Columbia Police Department along with a host of community organizations that have all joined us to support this initiative. The organizations that are here today include Representative Congressman Joe Wilson's office, the Richland County Sheriff's Department, the Columbia Police Department, the West Columbia Police Department, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the South Carolina Department of Veterans Affairs, the Kershaw County Chapter of Armed Women of America, Sand Hill Shooting Sports, Put Down the Gun Now Young People Organization, the St. Paul Baptist Church here in Columbia, as well as FN, one of our member companies and they have a factory here with over 400 jobs right here in South Carolina so we're very happy to have them to show support of the industry for this initiative and this program would not be possible without these groups support and we're grateful to have them involved. Now for those of you that may be unfamiliar with Project Child Safe, it's a national firearm safety program that was founded in 1999 by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The program promotes safe firearm handling and responsible gun ownership with a focus on securely storing guns when they're not in use. To date the program has distributed more than 40 million free gun locks through partnership with more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies and community partners across all 50 states and five U.S. territories. Here in Columbia we will provide thousands of free cable-style gun locks to gun owners through partnerships with the organization standing alongside me today. We're also offering free resources on firearm safety and suicide prevention. These locks and materials are available now to anyone who wants them, no questions asked, and they'll be available in the community moving forward. We also want to point out that keeping a gun on a nightstand on a shelf in a closet on top of the refrigerator etc. is not safe storage. That's why we're reminding gun owners to make sure their firearms are securely stored using one of the many available storage devices that best suits their lifestyle. We also know secure storage in the home and in vehicles can help play an important role in preventing thefts of guns and keep firearms out of the hands of criminals. We're doing all of this because secure and responsible gun storage and ownership works. It's a real solution for safer communities and we know that firearm accidents are preventable. It's our hope that what begins here in Columbia will spread across the entire state of South Carolina to raise awareness of how gun owners can practice firearm safety in the home. We cannot stress enough that the success of Project Childsafe communities depends on the commitment and involvement of the community leaders and organizations. So again we thank them for their support and we encourage all interested parties to reach out to us to learn more about how you can become one of our community supporters and help spread the important message of firearm safety. So once again thank you very much for being here today. It's my pleasure to introduce Columbia Mayor Daniel Rickinman. Mr. Mayor. Thank you Joe. I'm very pleased to welcome NSF and Project Childsafe to our city. I want to thank all of our community partners all those folks and groups that are listed obviously our support from Congressman Clyvern's office, Congressman Wilson's office and all the agencies that are here today we appreciate it. It's a privilege to see everybody coming together and taking part in this. Obviously as we all know child safety is a big issue for us especially when it comes to guns and having an opportunity for us to have secure storage using gun locks is a number one way to prevent firearm accidents. Project Childsafe exists to help gun owners that take steps to secure storage and spread the important message of their family, friends and community. We had done here at the city several months ago a first step into this by creating that with our officers and pushing the cable locks out there. Here we have an opportunity to join a program with national attention really to infiltrate our communities and share an opportunity for people to have storage responsible use and gun safety that protects all citizens in every neighborhood no matter where you live. As part of this child city-wide initiative our law enforcement local law enforcement community leaders will help share educational materials around the storage the distribution of these these cable locks. Our law enforcement has been partnership with Childsafe for several years and I also like to take a moment to recognize Jack Logan the founder put your guns down now. Where's Jack? Jack thank you very much for what you do and being part of our community and being an outspoken individual in our community to really push the issue forward. As you know in our community gun violence has increased roughly Chief, tell me if I'm wrong 18 percent over the last year. So for us this hits home very hard and we want to make sure that we do everything we can to support any option to reduce any accidents any potential accidents or gun violence moving forward. I want to thank Project Childsafe for the hundreds of free gun locks that have already been distributed across the city and I like to thank the citizens of Columbia for obtaining locks putting them to use and educating their families and neighborhood neighbors about firearm safety. We want as many Columbia residents as possible to know that these resources are available right now and so that gun owners can take action to keep them their families and their community safe. We look forward to working together the community to promote the practice of firearm safety not just here in Columbia but across our entire state. I hope that Columbia as the capital city will be the beacon to bring this issue forward and get more and more communities no matter if they're they're large small rural urban to come together and bring this issue forth and work together to put a lock on every gun that's out there. Ultimately the importance of firearm safety is an issue to everyone we can agree on but if you understand this better than our law enforcement community with that I'd love for y'all to give a warm welcome to my chief our chief the capital city police chief William Holbrook. Thank you mayor I'm going to speak off script a little bit I could I could not think of a more important program for for our city it certainly enhances some of the fantastic work we do we know we've got a an incredibly challenging problem with with gun crime in our city I know the mayor acknowledged mr. Logan is a he's a great example of the the grassroots action that's underway in our city and across our state with promoting gun safety you know we know we are a a gun-friendly state and we certainly applied and recognized responsible gun ownership and and that's why this program really just goes hand in glove with that we every day every week we touch hundreds of neighborhoods in our city and our our department is based on community policing that's our foundation and when we visit these these neighborhoods and participate in these community meetings having a gunlock on our tool belt is really important and every meeting we go to we travel with with gunlocks we we too have experience tragedy with young people getting a hold of a gun and harming themselves it goes much beyond the injury or the fatality of a young adult or a child it has everlasting effect on families moms and dads and in neighborhoods where these children live this is an incredible partnership an important partnership it's the right thing to do and we're we're so happy to be a part of this it the timing can be better as the mayor stood up his office of gun violence prevention our councilwoman dr oddity bustles has been instrumental on pushing child's child gunlock safety and so i think it's the it's the timing's perfect and this gives us greater capacity to reach people in our city with this preventive program and and again i thank you for helping us um we've got to drive down our our gun violence but we also got to promote responsible gun ownership and security and safety and so we thank you very much for that thank you very much chief holbrook and thank you all again for being here as we launch project child's safe columbia to continue to make communities across america safer i invite any media and attendants to speak with me along with mayor rickamant and chief holbrook at your convenience i think we have a couple of interviews lined up but i'll be happy to take those uh you know off off off stage so to speak but again thank you all for being here really appreciate what you do you know spreading the message about secure storage and safe firearms handling is is one of my passions and our industry is fully behind it and we're very proud to be be a part of this event so again thank you hi everyone councilwoman oddity bustles here at a local gunlock giveaway as the person who launched lock it up columbia it means a lot to see our community getting engaged about safe gun storage and really continuing to promote efforts to reduce gun violence in our communities it's also great to see our community partner with cpd with the sheriff's office and with so many other key stakeholders because it really does take a village to ensure that every child lives a life free from violence