Team

LADD EVERITT
Founder

Ladd Everitt is a longtime gun control professional who has worked as director of One Pulse for America, a group founded by actor and activist George Takei in response to the 2016 mass shooting at an LGBTQ club in Orlando, Florida; and as director of communications for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), a national nonprofit founded in 1974. He got his start in the movement as a volunteer, serving as the president of the D.C. Chapter of the Million Mom March, a grassroots organization created after a historic Mother’s Day rally on the National Mall in 2000. Ladd also served in a volunteer capacity with the D.C. Crisis Response Team, a group which offered comfort, support and referral services to victims and survivors of homicide in the District of Columbia. He relocated to the District of Columbia from New York in September 1993 to obtain a Masters degree in U.S. Foreign Policy at American University, and has lived there ever since.

The promotion of democracy has always been a key part of Ladd’s work. At CSGV and One Pulse, he helped to reframe the national debate on the Second Amendment by defining pro-gun activists as treasonous insurrectionists who believe their privately-held firearms trump the rule of law. Ladd actively participated in the DC Statehood movement and DC Vote coalition (which advocates for D.C. residents to have full democratic representation in the United States Congress) and founded the Ballots Not Bullets Coalition, a group of organizations concerned by the increasing use of violence—and threats of violence—to affect public policy on land use in the United States. He is the author of a guide to the gun issue for Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin’s Democracy Summer program, and has been a featured speaker for the students in that program for many years.