How I Became a Fewer-Guns Activist
I came to the gun control movement for the same reason I suspect you picked up this book: I was pissed off. I was pissed off by the toll that gun violence has taken in our country and by craven politicians who claim to pray for the survivors while propping up the NRA and perpetuating a gun culture that exists nowhere else in the developed world. I wanted to do something about it.
I was born in the Soviet Union and eventually made it to America with my family to escape the persecution of Jews. It was hard to succeed, even to get by, for Soviet Jews. We faced limitations in education, employment, and life in general. My parents became targets of horrific anti-Semitism as they were coming of age, and I myself remember young children, no older than five or six, mocking me for being Jewish as we all lay in the children’s section of a Soviet hospital. (I ended up there after managing to tip over an upright piano onto myself.)
As immigrants, my family moved all around New Jersey in search of better opportunities, communities, and schools. The experience of having to assimilate to an entirely different culture and language sparked my interest in the policies and attitudes that shape our society and give meaning to our culture.
I first became interested in politics during the 2000 election. I had just started high school in Livingston, New Jersey, when Al Gore and George W. Bush began campaigning for president. Something about that race forced me to start changing the channel on our TV from MTV’s Total Request Live to CNN and MSNBC. At first I caught only brief glimpses of the news, but halfway through that year, I knew far more about the candidates’ education, health, and, yes, gun policies than the ranking of pop music videos. I became the kid who would stay after class to talk to his teacher about the presidential race, and as a result, I’d miss my bus home and have to walk. One day, as I was scanning through the radio stations on my bright yellow Sony Walkman, I stumbled on a talk show hosted by a man named Bob Grant, broadcasting from WOR, New York, at 710 on the AM dial. He was a far-right conservative talk-show host. I later learned that he was considered the godfather of conservative talk radio and a mentor to contemporary radio stars like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin. I was hooked, but not by Grant’s political ideology. I couldn’t get behind his hatred of immigrants or his support for an economic system that strongly favored the rich. I was mesmerized by Grant’s ability to carefully construct arguments and woo his audience to his beliefs. I was attracted by the power and utility of political persuasion.
Suddenly my innocent political conversations with teachers turned into full-blown political debates, and I became a most loyal listener of conservative talk radio and viewer of cable TV news. By the time I entered my junior year of high school, I would steal newspapers from the school library and read them in gym class, highlighting or underlining key facts or arguments. I wanted to grow up to convince people of things. I wanted to mold arguments that would rid us of injustices like the ones I experienced as a young child growing up in the Soviet Union and later as an immigrant in America.
I did not apply those skills to gun control until late 2015. By then, I had been working in politics for nearly a decade, most of that time as a reporter for ThinkProgress, a news site run by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC. I covered many of the policies that animated the Obama years, from health care reform to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, as well as his administration’s efforts to reform the immigration system. My first exposure to guns as seen through the lens of politics happened as a result of tragedy—the December 14, 2012, massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. As I followed the administration’s failed attempt to expand background checks and pass an assault weapons ban, I became familiar with the general arguments on both sides of the debate.
Then, on December 2, 2015, a man and a woman walked into a community center in San Bernardino, California, and killed fourteen people with four semiautomatic weapons.1 They had committed the 366th mass shooting of 2015. Almost immediately, I began receiving news alerts and push notifications on my phone. I tried to ignore them, as I was busy shooting a video with a colleague. At the end of the day, I sat back down at my computer and read my Twitter feed, the best place to receive up-to-the-minute updates on breaking news events. I had made a column in the platform to track tweets from members of Congress. By early afternoon on December 2, it was overflowing with “thoughts and prayers” for the shooting victims, their survivors, and the first responders who rushed to the scene.
I remember slamming my fist down on my desk in anger. My heart rate quickened. I felt a familiar wave of rage rise up inside of me.
It was a feeling I first experienced when I was six years old, briefly living in Israel with my family. We lived in the country for two years in the early 1990s before finally immigrating to the United States. I was sitting at Hanukkah dinner hosted by an Orthodox Jewish family. Israeli Jews would often host olim (new immigrants to Israel) on high holidays to help acclimate new immigrants to the country and its traditions. Everyone was exchanging gifts. I received a few small things, but then the patriarch of the Orthodox family told me that my stepfather had gotten me a brand-new red bicycle. I couldn’t believe it! We had left the Soviet Union just a year ago and had been living in a group house with other Soviet Jewish families. My parents had opened a café, but even at my young age, I knew that money was tight. I could never imagine asking for anything flashy, much less something as expensive as a new bike. And here, they had gone out of their way to get me one!
The rest of the dinner became a blur. All I could think about was the bike and riding it all around our little neighborhood. I knew my ever protective mom wouldn’t let me get too far by myself, but all I really wanted was to feel the wind against my face. As soon as we left the dinner, I asked my stepdad about the bike. He smiled down at me, rubbed my head, and said, “Oh no, that guy was just kidding.” My heart dropped. I felt a mixture of disappointment, sadness, and anger—anger at the man at that dinner table for filling me with false hope, tricking me, and making me feel like a fool. I somehow felt bad for ever believing I would get a bike in the first place. That experience woke something inside of me, and I would come to recognize the same feelings anytime someone tried to pull the wool over my eyes. I loathed the disappointment of that day, and I still feel rage on behalf of people who experience something similar.
I thought about that bike as I tracked “thoughts and prayers” from the same members of Congress who had voted against legislative measures to prevent gun violence in the aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They were exploiting a tragic moment to fool their constituents into believing they cared enough to do something to prevent public mass shootings, despite knowing full well that they would not.
Almost instinctively, I started to send angry tweets at members of Congress tweeting their thoughts and prayers. I began with the ones I recognized as opponents of the background-check bill that failed after the Newtown shooting. I did this over and over again. I told these lawmakers that when they had a chance to prevent such carnage and vote for a measure that would at least make incidents of gun violence less likely, they failed. Instead they chose to demonize the measure, misrepresent it, outright lie about it, and lead an orchestrated campaign to defeat it. They did all this not because they were representing the interests of their constituents; to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of their voters support universal background checks.2 They did it because they were afraid of the political influence and clout of the gun industry and its energized supporters, and because they were being paid by that gun lobby to represent the interests of gun manufacturers for whom any restrictions represent a loss of sales. These tweets felt raw and emotional. Before long, I had responded to every member I could identify as an opponent of gun reform.
About an hour into this tweetstorm, I decided I needed to calm down and blow off some steam. I took a break and walked to a Cross-Fit class across the street, letting my mind and body work through all of the anger. Before I left, I noticed some people on Twitter cautioning me against discussing policy so soon after a mass shooting. I remember thinking, Those guys should notify me when it’s “appropriate” to discuss solutions. The country never gets around to a genuine conversation about policy. Instead, we engage in a short, divisive debate that generates no real change.
At the end of gym class, I considered going straight home, but my curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to see if more lawmakers were tweeting out their “thoughts and prayers” and how my tweets calling them out were being received. I ran back to my office on the second floor, drenched in sweat, as I remember, and woke my computer back up by tapping on the mouse repeatedly. As the screen came back to life, I could see the Members of Congress column scrolling feverishly; they were still at it, pretending to care. My tweets, meanwhile, had taken off—big time. While some insisted that I was “politicizing” a shooting, many more cheered me on and told their followers to follow me. This support sparked an idea. I realized that many people shared my frustration with congressional inaction on gun control and that they, too, blamed special interests and our broken campaign finance rules for the problem. What if there was a way to accentuate that feeling and show how that money shaped lawmakers’ behavior?
A colleague directed me to Open Secrets, a site that tracks political contributions. I clicked over to the NRA and saw pages and pages of giving. Before long, I had set up a new process for tweeting out at the “thoughts and prayers” members of Congress. Whenever a member of Congress who opposed gun control would tweet that he or she was praying for the victims of the shooting, I would methodically add up how much that person received from the NRA on a scrap piece of paper and tweet that total, with a message along the lines of, “Rep. Long received $10,000 from @NRA, so he’ll only think and pray about gun violence; he won’t actually do anything to stop it.”
When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted, “The senseless loss of innocent life in #SanBernardino defies explanation,” I reminded him that he had taken more than $900,000 from the NRA in his last election.3 I did the same thing to Paul Ryan’s condolence tweet, informing my followers that he, too, had taken money from the NRA to keep the victims in his “thoughts and prayers.”4
Those tweets became even more popular, logging hundreds of retweets and likes within minutes. To me, the dollar amounts represented not only the money the NRA spent on behalf of a lawmaker or against the lawmaker’s opponent, but also the power of the lobby to motivate its members to make calls, send letters, and do physical lobbying in the lawmaker’s offices. My follower count began to grow exponentially. I had started the day at approximately twelve thousand followers. By eight or nine that night, I was gaining about ten new followers a minute. My friends and colleagues began emailing me, saying they were seeing what I was doing and urging me to keep going. Someone from Twitter reached out to suggest that I tag the names of the lawmakers I was shaming in my tweets so that they would feel the impact in their mentions.
Before I knew it, my work caught the attention of cable news producers. I closed the day with an emotional appearance on MSNBC, which featured my tweets, and over the next several days, I continued the Twitter action, as some lawmakers introduced gun-reform measures and the majority of our elected officials voted them down.
One of the beauties of democracy is accessibility. If you want to understand a pressing public issue, you can. If, after you learn about it, you want to change how the government responds to it, there are processes through which you can do that as well. You can educate yourself about the issue and then add value to the discussion in a way that attracts other people to contribute. You can tweet, you can organize your friends and neighbors, you can attend meetings with decision makers, and you can vote. The list goes on. My decision to start tweeting was rooted in raw emotion. I used the only tool I had—my Twitter account. My message resonated because I was meeting people where they were. I was tapping into public frustration about congressional inaction to reduce gun violence by quantifying the inaction. I was adding data to people’s emotion.
I didn’t shut up after San Bernardino. Tragically, I had many more opportunities to tap into this frustration and expose hypocrisy in our modern-day public square. Just a little over six months after those first tweets, a gunman stormed into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and killed forty-nine people.
I woke up to the news that Sunday morning and spent the next eight hours at my kitchen table, glued to Twitter, which was again overflowing with “thoughts and prayers.” I started tweeting out at lawmakers again. This time, I could Google my old tweets from San Bernardino to avoid recalculating the total contribution number. I remember that feeling awful and incredibly depressing.
By then, I had eighty thousand Twitter followers. Shaming lawmakers and corporations who do business with the NRA is pretty popular. I appeared on numerous TV shows and even earned several shout-outs from Kim Kardashian, Mindy Kaling, John Legend, and other celebrities from outside of the political arena.
From my anger and the Twitter platform, an opportunity was born. I recognized that Americans responded to my simple argument: special interest money and influence are undermining our safety and taking our lives. And as I learned more about the gun-safety movement, I recognized that my approach and skill set as an advocate could add value to the existing voices calling for change. I was very moved by the persistence, strength, and expertise of those who had dedicated their professional lives to reducing gun violence, including organizations like the Brady Campaign, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Giffords, as well as my strategic and creative colleagues from the Center for American Progress, particularly Chelsea Parsons, Tim Daly, and Arkadi Gerney. In the weeks following my tweets, they served as my orientation leaders to the broader movement, teaching me everything I needed to know about its policy and advocacy. Through their tutelage, I recognized that the movement lacked advocates and organizations that called for reforms that might not be politically viable yet but could make real change in the future as people’s outrage builds. We needed to develop a bold message promulgated by voices that could go toe-to-toe with the NRA and work like hell to weaken it. My tweets also convinced me that Americans were ahead of their risk-averse political leaders on the gun issue and were ready to get behind solutions and advocacy campaigns that focused on significantly limiting the availability of guns.
Out of that realization, I co-founded Guns Down America. We formed around the same ideas that drove my tweets: holding people in power—in politics and business—accountable for flooding our communities with guns and being complicit in the deaths of thousands of Americans every single year. There are many voices in this fight; Guns Down America is the first dedicated to the singular mission of building a world with fewer guns.
I continue to tweet NRA contribution amounts after every single publicized mass shooting. The tweets are no longer as popular as they were in 2015, and many people have begun taking similar digital actions. To me, that is a sign of success, a small building block for our ultimate goal of building communities with fewer guns. As more people shame lawmakers for taking NRA contributions and attribute their votes against gun-safety legislation to those contributions and the political power they represent, the less likely we are to support them or to believe their phony arguments.
One other piece of progress came about as a result of that initial tweetstorm: the death of the “It’s too soon to talk about solutions” argument. When I first started working on the gun issue, that claim was bandied around by Democrats and Republicans alike, as folks sought to soften the blow of inaction by postponing the conversation about policy to another day. After the tweetstorm, that argument has been confined to the echo chamber of the gun lobby. Today, Democratic lawmakers insert policy into the public conversation within minutes of a shooting. And they should. We always talk about tightening or changing laws in the aftermath of a terrorist incident. Why not have that conversation if the weapon used to inflict that terror is a gun? It took legislators less than a week to introduce a bill that penalizes airlines for recklessly transporting pets after a woman was forced to put her dog (in a TSA-approved carrier) in an overhead luggage bin, where the animal suffocated. Do dogs really matter more than humans to certain lawmakers?
During the summer of 2018, I was sitting in a swanky New York bar that was once a movie theater, meeting an acquaintance who works in conservative media. The man grew up in England, and although he politically identifies as right of center and, I suspect, would quibble with parts of this book, he admitted that he could not understand Americans’ fascination with firearms. “Why are Americans so obsessed with guns?” he asked me. I had been thinking about this question for years, but nobody had forced me to answer it so directly before.
“I think guns have been central to American history, from the colonial era on. Early Americans used firearms to dominate the people and the land; they used their firearms to win independence,” I said. “So firearms have always had a place in our folklore.” “But more recently,” I continued, “the gun lobby and the gun industry imbued gun ownership with a political meaning and identity that they manipulated to gain political power and sell more guns.”
My friend nodded along respectfully. As I sat there thinking about my answer, I realized that my argument for fewer guns was rooted in a far more conservative interpretation of the Second Amendment and the intents of the men who wrote it than my friend’s audience would ever accept today. The eighteenth-century authors of the Second Amendment sought to build a new country with fewer guns. In the pages that follow, I describe why and how they failed so miserably.