Tom Diaz is an American writer, lawyer, and public speaker on the gun industry and gun control issues. He was formerly senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center and is one of the more prominent advocates for a strict system of federal gun control in the United States. Biography His father was born in Mexico but emigrated to the United States in his teens, becoming a career soldier but spending most of his time in the military as a bandleader. Tom Diaz is a graduate of the University of Florida and the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was an editor of the Law Journal. He has been in private and government practice since 1972. He was a gun enthusiast and NRA member until while working as a Congressional staffer he did research on gun legislation and interviewed victims of gun violence. Mr. Diaz was counsel to the Congressional House Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice from August 1993 to January 1997. During that time, he was the lead Democratic counsel in the House on firearms and terrorism, but worked on a range of other issues. Diaz was assistant managing editor of The Washington Times from 1985 to 1991. From 1991 to 1993 he worked at a think tank specializing in international organized crime and counter-terrorism. From 1993 to 1997 he was the lead Democratic counsel on counterterrorism and firearms issues for the Crime Subcommittee of the U.S. House of representatives, helping to conduct fact-finding hearings and write key antiterrorism and gun control legislation. He was also the lead Democratic counsel during 10 days of intensive House hearings in 1995 on the events at the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas in 1993. Views Diaz has written numerous monographs on the proliferation of firearms in the United States and on the impact of the easy availability of specific classes of firearms on gun crime, death and injury in the United States. He has appeared on numerous television and radio media outlets, has been written about and quoted in print media, and his op-eds have been widely published. He has charged that the gun industry uses claims of increased lethality to increase sales. David Corn wrote: In his book Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, Tom Diaz, a former NRA member and competitive shooter who became a gun control activist, shows that the gun industry in recent