One year ago, we announced the launch of the Ad Council’s Gun Violence Prevention Initiative—an expansion of our long-time commitment to address this health crisis. This multi-faceted effort was designed to support the life-saving work already happening across this space. We knew then what remains true today: no one organization or individual can address this crisis alone.
This initiative builds on years of foundational work—both within our walls and across the field. Together with our partners, we’ve built a big tent approach to gun violence prevention, addressing secure firearm storage through our “End Family Fire” campaign and raising awareness around extreme risk laws through “Pause to Heal” with partners at Brady, the Joyce Foundation, the Illinois Department of Public Health and many others.
More broadly, over the past decade, laws have been strengthened, and the tireless work of so many within health and hospital systems and across the gun violence prevention and community violence intervention (CVI) community has led to tangible shifts in how the country understands and approaches this issue.
And yet, the urgency remains.
Recognizing the need for a new conversation with new voices and credible trusted messengers, we launched “Agree to Agree” with a coalition of health care and business leaders from across the country—guided by research and insights that helped us reframe how this issue is understood and what we can all do to make a difference.
Insights That Led Us Here
Gun violence in America is a complex and deeply nuanced issue. And far too often, its youngest victims bear the greatest burden. Since Columbine, nearly 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at school. And each day, eight children are injured or killed by unintentional shootings.
With a crisis so layered, it can often feel like we are more divided than ever on how to move forward. But in reality, we agree on far more than we disagree on.
According to data from the Ad Council Research Institute:
- 80% of Americans in households with gun owners agree that practicing safe gun storage would reduce gun violence.
- 82% of Americans support temporarily restricting access to guns for someone at high risk of harming themselves or others.
And a 2024 Ad Council-Bully Pulpit International Survey found that eight in ten Americans believe that having more productive conversations can help reduce gun injury and death among children and teens.
This is the foundation for “Agree to Agree”—the latest campaign under our Gun Violence Prevention Initiative, that is built on one simple truth: progress begins with agreement.
Agree to Agree
We don’t have to agree on everything. We never will. But when we say, “agree to disagree,” we end a conversation.
What if, instead, we “agree to agree”—on the things we know to be true, the actions we know can save lives. Suddenly, we’re not in opposition. We’re moving forward, together.
We can all agree that no child should lose their life to gun violence.
We can all agree that it is outrageous that the number one killer of children and teens in this country is gun injuries. We can all agree that we want our loved ones and communities to be safe.
That’s why the message behind “Agree to Agree” is so urgent.
Where This Work Began
This campaign started with one conversation.
A conversation with Ad Council board member and Northwell Health CMO, Ramon Soto and Northwell Health CEO, Michael Dowling. Ramon said that it will take a thousand acts—large and small—to curb this epidemic and protect children and teens.
That one conversation led to more conversations with funders, with partners, with researchers. The coalition began to grow. The ideas began to come together. The individual acts of good grew into something larger. And a movement took shape.
This campaign is about the power of those thousand acts. The moments where agreement turns into action:
- A parent asks another parent if their guns are stored securely before their child comes over to play.
- A loved one steps in to temporarily separate a family member in crisis from their firearm while they seek help.
- A community-based group is able to prevent an act of violence.
- An emergency responder gets connected with the critical resources they need to take care of themselves, so they can continue taking care of others.
- Doctors and nurses get the support that they need.
A life is saved. And another. And another.
This Is Just the Beginning
This campaign is just one part of our Gun Violence Prevention Initiative, but it represents something much bigger—a commitment to meeting the moment with action, education and critical resources.
We are committed to developing more messages that engage parents, health care professionals and community leaders. We are working to expand our clinician-focused effort by building a robust digital resource hub to provide health care professionals with tools to address firearm injury prevention with the patients and families they care for. We are also working alongside the CVI community to harness the power of storytelling to educate the public on the impact of their work and the essential role they play in increasing public safety.
But we can’t do it alone.
We need more partners to join us, more funding to accelerate impact, more voices to share their stories and best practices, more trusted messengers to amplify the campaign and more places to run media.
Agreement is just the beginning. What happens next is up to us.