Last week, Everytown for Gun Safety launched a new initiative: the Everytown Authors Council, which consists of authors, illustrators, editors and agents who are in favor of gun control.

Those who make up the council agreed to fight for “common sense solutions” to the “gun violence” problem. This is their pledge:

We believe there are many common sense steps we can – and must – take right now to help save American lives from gun violence.

• We believe we have a responsibility to help keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people – including convicted criminals, domestic abusers, stalkers, and people with dangerous mental illness.
• We believe in gun safety – that we have a responsibility to store guns safely, unloaded and out of the reach of children.
• We believe everyone has a role to play in reducing gun violence and that every action, no matter how small, helps bring us closer to a future free from gun violence.
• We believe the creative community has an opportunity to use our communication skills and the power of culture to galvanize many more Americans in the gun violence prevention movement.

Jodi Picoult, the author of Wonder Woman, has become the face of the Authors Council. According to Picoult, authors have a responsibility to speak out in favor of gun control.

“Authors are singularly suited to speak out on the need for common-sense gun laws, and to tell the stories of those who have been devastated by gun violence in this country,” Picoult said in a statement. “Our job as writers is to get people to engage and to start talking–and this is a conversation we as a nation badly need to have.”

The NRA addressed the issue in a blog post.

“One would hope that shameless shilling on behalf of a statist billionaire [Michael Bloomberg] would be derided in any artistic community. Unfortunately, many in America’s ‘creative’ class appear all too willing use their ‘art’ in service of Bloomberg’s vanity project,” the blog post reads. “As such, the gun-owning public should do their best to apprise the general public of the gun control movement’s propaganda techniques, and consider their own consumption of media accordingly.”