How You Can Build a Future with Fewer Guns

With this book I aim to establish a bold long-term objective for the gun control movement that will actually solve the crisis we face. That goal? Moving us toward a world with fewer guns and embracing the kind of policies that go after the guns themselves—policies that have successfully reduced gun deaths in other parts of the world.

I understand that this cannot be achieved in a day, a week, or a month—but that’s exactly the point. I want us to break out of the habit of focusing on what is practically possible today and instead establish a clear goal for the future. Let’s think beyond a set of policies and ask ourselves: What does winning on this issue actually look like? What kind of country do we want to build together?

To me, and to a majority of Americans, winning is a future with significantly fewer guns in circulation, in which guns are significantly harder to get and gun owners have to meet high training standards.

Like any social movement, achieving such a bold goal will require a lot of hard work, a lot of organizing and determination.

Most important, it will require a diverse movement with many different people and various strategies, approaches, campaigns, and methodologies—litigation, legislation, public education, direct action, electoral work, state-based work, and group organizing.

The different voices in the movement won’t always agree and they may not even share all of the goals laid out in these pages. Gun violence has a different impact in different communities. To be successful, the various groups will have to work in a coordinated fashion to help each other succeed, but much more important than the success of any individual campaign or strategy is the ability of the movement as a whole to stay on track toward its ultimate goal. No one person, no one approach, no one strategy, no one victory is going to be able to deliver on the goal all by itself. That’s just not how social movements work, and it’s not how political change actually happens.

In this chapter, I envision a way to reach the goal of fewer guns in safer communities. It explains the role I play in that movement and the role I think you can play as well.

Because movements are complex organisms with many moving parts and pieces, when I first co-founded Guns Down America in the aftermath of the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, I did so because I thought I could add something the movement was missing.

In 2016, we had organizations that focused on crafting the policy we needed to help reduce gun violence. The Center for American Progress, where I’ve spent most of my career, is one example. We also had organizations that focused on driving policy and advocacy in the states, and others that played the insider game in Washington, DC, lobbying members of Congress to pass legislation like universal background checks and organizing campaigns to fight measures the NRA promoted. We even had voices that acted as NRA watchdogs, reporting on the ways it was recruiting members and building closer ties to gun manufacturers and dealers.

However, there was no group that was actively working to reclaim the narrative from the gun lobby, to set out a bold goal for the movement and work day and night to insert it into our national conversation. In other words, we had no equivalent of PETA or Greenpeace, two organizations that are unapologetically bold in both tactics and asks.

In my view, these kind of groups play a critical role in any social movement. They broaden the public conversation about the issue from piecemeal incremental changes to big bold goals and, in the process, provide the space for other voices—that play different roles—within the movement to cut deals, pass bills, and seek changes that will be stronger and bolder than if the conversation had remained limited.

The gun rights side of the debate and its players do function this way. While the NRA is the largest and most influential gun lobby in the nation, it is far from the most radical. Smaller groups, like the Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, operate in the NRA’s shadow, but they all play a critical role in pushing the NRA to stay true to the movement’s “guns everywhere and for everyone” goals.

Here is a perfect example.

Back in 2013, in the aftermath of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left twenty-six people dead, including twenty children, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle believed that the horror of dead first-graders would force the country to tighten its loose gun laws and at least require almost all individuals buying a gun to pass an instant background check. An overwhelming majority of Americans supported such reform, and a bipartisan duo of fairly conservative senators, Joe Manchin and Patrick Toomey, began working on legislative language that could pass a Republican-controlled Congress.

Initially, lawmakers from both parties were very optimistic. Staffers on Capitol Hill even told me conservative members would privately assure their more progressive colleagues that they could see themselves voting for such a measure. Even the NRA came to the table. It began offering guidance about the language and provisions it could potentially live with—maybe not actively support or endorse, but at least tolerate.

But then everything changed.

More radical gun rights organizations, like the Gun Owners of America, got wind of the NRA’s tacit support and sprang into action. They began sending out fund-raising letters characterizing the powerful lobby as a sellout that had gone soft, each proclaiming itself the one true defender of gun rights.

Never one to be outflanked, the NRA pulled back its conversations with lawmakers on the Hill and turned against the Manchin-Toomey background-check bill. It argued that lawmakers should address problems in the existing background-check system and do more to encourage states to send records into it, insisted the proposed legislation would lead to a national gun registry and pave the way for firearm confiscation. The Senate ultimately defeated the measure in a vote of 54–46.¹ It needed 60 votes to advance.

In a movement dedicated to expanding gun ownership and defeating any restrictions on guns, the furthest right wing of the movement plays a critical role: it keeps the gun rights movement true to its goals by staking out an uncompromising position—no gun regulations, no way—and successfully pulling the NRA toward it.

The gun violence prevention movement has no equivalent dynamic and, as a result, we lack the clear and bold goal that the other side possesses and the grassroots energy and excitement to achieve it. We have failed to tap into the values, energy, and excitement of the American people and have been unable to invite people to stay with the work over the long term.

I established Guns Down America to help provide a hopeful, bigger vision for those of us working to reduce gun violence. We are not interested in talking about piecemeal solutions—universal background checks, closing loopholes in existing laws, and so on. We’re trying to articulate a clear, unified goal of building a future with fewer guns and developing a strategy for getting us there.

It is a goal I hope the rest of the movement will adopt. But we are a diverse movement; so long as we coordinate our efforts and support each other, we will all be able to move in the same direction together. Not everyone may agree with our goal, but we don’t need everyone. We just need enough people to join our cause and help us push forward; enough lawmakers from relatively progressive states, like Massachusetts or New York, where some of the reforms I propose are already a reality, to champion these policies on the national stage; and enough bold leaders with national ambitions to stake out a strong goal, build popular support among people who have had enough of the mass shootings, suicides, and everyday gun violence that are ravaging our communities, and thus pull our national conversation toward real reforms. We’ve seen similar shifts in the health care debate, the minimum wage and economic inequality debate, the LGBT equality debate; it’s time to apply the same approach to the gun debate.

You are probably asking, okay, Igor, what’s your strategy? What can each of us do to reach that goal—especially in the face of such well-funded opposition and lawmakers who continue to ignore the will of their constituents in order to advance their political careers? I am asked this question everywhere I go, and if I’m being honest, I say that there is no easy, simple answer. If there were, we would have solved this problem a long time ago.

Nevertheless, there is also no reason to get discouraged. Social movements of the past have accomplished big things, but only if they had a clear goal and an accessible strategy that other people could understand and find a way to contribute to.