Josh Horwitz

Joshua Horwitz, J.D., is the Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. He has spent three decades working on gun violence prevention issues.

Josh sees his role as looking around the next corner to develop new ideas and strategies for the gun violence prevention movement. For instance, in 2007 his research and advocacy was instrumental in enacting a first-of-its-kind microstamping law in California. This revolutionary technology allows law enforcement to trace guns from expended cartridge casings left at crime scenes.

In 2009, through his book Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea, published by the University of Michigan Press, Josh was the first to show how the gun lobby’s “Second Amendment remedies” approach to government was an anti-democratic attack on the rule of law and other democratic institutions that keep the rest of us free.

In 2013, Josh was one of the founders of the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy, a group of mental health and public health experts who have examined the intersection of guns and mental health. The Consortium released a set of policy recommendations designed to promote policy that will more effectively prevent those at a heightened risk of violent behavior from possessing firearms. One of those recommendations was the basis for California’s first in the nation Gun Violence Restraining Order law (AB1014) that passed in September 2014.

Josh is a graduate of the University of Michigan and received his law degree from the George Washington University. He is a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where he teaches public health advocacy and is a regular blogger at the Huffington Post.