(WHTM)– Gun violence is called a pandemic in Pennsylvania and across the country. Governor Josh Shapiro is proposing a new office focused on firearms to combat it.

Shapiro insists it will make communities safer, but critics say it will only succeed in wasting more money.

“Some people in this building, all they want to do is offer thoughts and prayers,” Lt. Governor Austin Davis said.

The Shapiro administration wants to create the Office of Gun Violence Prevention which would create and coordinate strategies to reduce firearm carnage.

“Now is the time to double down on our efforts and make sure that even more is being done and that we’re even more effective,” Davis said.

The new office would cost $1 million to start and it would come from $100 million in new public safety dollars the governor’s proposing.

“We haven’t done enough to address gun violence and there are hundreds more empty seats at family dinner tables every year to prove it,” State Rep. Dan Frankel (D-Allegheny) said.

“We’d all like to stop gun violence,” Presidente Pro Tempore Senator Kim Ward (R) said. “But it appears that $100 million to coordinate what’s already happening in our government, in our state government is very excessive.”

Ward hasn’t seen specifics of the new office but has suspicions.

“I do know from the bills that we received from the Democratic House is mainly what they want to do is to take away people’s gun rights,” Ward said. “I’ve never seen ever in my life a gun shoot itself. I think the problem is mental health and societal. It’s not the gun itself.”

It’s likely that state dollars aimed at the problem will increase. So too, sadly, will deaths.

Moms in anguish are hard to ignore and powerful advocates.

“It is shameful, shameful that this is a leading cause of death for children,” Frankel said.

Will adding a new office and more bureaucracy help? Maybe, maybe not. But supporters argue the state’s strategy of doing nothing isn’t working either.

“Thoughts and prayers are not enough,” Davis said. “We need real action in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”