A former Cape and Islands state senator on Tuesday called for a movement to purge “as many guns out of society as possible,” and pushed for a sweeping overhaul of gun laws.

“The first thing to do is stop manufacturing and selling them, and the second thing to do is have a very lucrative buyback-and-confiscation program,” Dan Wolf, a Harwich-based Democrat who served three terms with the Massachusetts Legislature, said at a Grandmothers Against Gun Violence meeting.

Wolf, the CEO of the independent regional airline Cape Air and a past gubernatorial candidate, was invited by the nonprofit organization to speak at Cape Cod Synagogue in Hyannis. He urged attendees to pursue civil disobedience beyond organized marches, noting his own prior arrests for what he called “passive, nonviolent resistance.”

“My plea to you is you have to make it an existential issue for the politicians, you have to block the halls to their office,” Wolf said. “There’s nothing more attractive than an old woman getting arrested,” he added, a remark that drew laughs from the grandmother-dominated crowd.

This year alone, there have been almost 15,000 incidents of gun violence in America, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. Since 2014, 346 people have been killed by guns in Massachusetts. Yet while fewer people are fatally shot here than anywhere else in the country, enough cases exist to reflect “a desperate state of cyclical poverty” which must be confronted before widespread gun violence can be addressed, Wolf said. Part of that should involve busing students into Cape Cod during the summer, he added, which would both satisfy youth unemployment and provide businesses with adequate seasonal help in lieu of using H-2B visa workers from overseas.

“I know what a scourge this is,” Judith Page of Sandwich, who attended the meeting, told the Barnstable Patriot. “I think he certainly is admirable in what he’s trying to do, but that’s going to take a whole lot more people to start feeling like that and willing to run for office, which is hard to do.”

Grandmothers Against Gun Violence formed in 2013 after the shooting deaths of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. "We are not political; we are for safety," said Kathleen Glueck, the group's former president and grandmother of a student who attended Sandy Hook.

The group’s next featured speaker, on May 2, will be Attorney General Maura Healey, who last year announced her office’s crackdown on the ban on assault weapons and sales of copycat guns.

For more information, visit the organization's website at capecodgag.org.