San Francisco Chronicle Article: The AAPI community’s political power is growing. Now it wants to tackle gun violence

Below is an excerpt from a San Francisco Chronicle article highlight AAPI Victory Alliance’s advocacy work to end gun violence, and our rally on April 16 to urge banks to stop financing the gun industry. Read full article by Joe Garofoli here.

"Varun Nikore, who has been organizing Asian American and Pacific Islander voters for 25 years, calls what’s going to happen Sunday in San Francisco’s Portsmouth Square the next big test of the community’s growing political power.

After seeing national AAPI turnout jump 10 percentage points between the 2016 and 2020 election — more than any other racial or ethnic group — Nikore, executive director of AAPI Victory Alliance, wants to see whether the community is ready to “take the next step.”

That step is scheduled to happen at 1 p.m. in the heart of Chinatown, where Nikore’s left-leaning AAPI Victory Alliance will join forces with the youth-led March for Our Lives for a rally and news conference on gun violence — an issue it hasn’t waded into much.

Sunday’s rally will focus on Wells Fargo, whose headquarters is in San Francisco. Organizers are calling on the bank to sever its ties with the gun industry. The bank “has been the gun industry’s top financier,” Bloomberg News reported in 2018. The bank’s CEO Charles Scharf said in 2020 that its relationship with the National Rifle Association was “declining.” It had previously backed the NRA’s line of credit and mortgage loan commitments.

But activists say the bank’s relationship with the gun industry is still too cozy. In a letter to the bank last month, Nikore urged it to “stop financing an industry whose profiteering has directly cost lives in our communities and the communities where Wells Fargo operates.”