A Strategy for Building a World with Fewer Guns

In this book I propose a clear goal for the gun control movement: fewer guns. One way to reach that goal is by weakening the NRA financially in order to significantly hamper its ability to buy off “thoughts and prayers” lawmakers, intimidate politicians, and block legislative progress. As the NRA continues to bleed resources, lawmakers will be more willing to introduce the bold reforms outlined in the Compact and will be more likely to vote for them, too.

Guns Down America kept this strategy front of mind in the fall of 2017 when the NRA began marketing a new insurance policy called Carry Guard. The program, aimed at the NRA’s mostly white membership, provided insurance coverage to those who shoot someone with a gun. It offered up to $250,000 in immediate payments for criminal defense, “cleanup costs,” a replacement firearm, bail, bonds, and psychological support. The policies, which ranged in cost from $14 to $49 a month, were administered by Lockton Affinity and insured by Chubb, two of the world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance companies.

The NRA’s marketing of the policies was particularly grotesque. Its ads warned members that they faced a violent threat around every corner and needed not only a gun, but also an insurance policy to protect them when they, as they would inevitably have to, discharged their weapons against—you guessed it!—a black or brown criminal. The policies played on the same racist stereotypes the NRA’s leaders spouted on a regular basis and the racial tensions it exploited in order to grow its membership.

Worse, Carry Guard could also be seen as an expansion of the deadly stand-your-ground laws the NRA had promoted throughout the country, laws that disproportionately harm communities of color by letting whites shoot blacks and claim self-defense. My friend the policy analyst Chelsea Parsons had studied these laws and found that they not only lead to an increase in state homicide rates, but also have a racially disparate impact. She found that more than 35 percent of shootings involving a white person with a gun and a black victim are found to be justified under the law, but less than 4 percent of cases involving a black shooter and white victim were categorized in the same way.1

Carry Guard was not only morally reprehensible and conducive to a higher rate of gun deaths, but it was also making a lot of money for the NRA. We talked about launching a public education campaign against the insurers who were offering the policies. Our ask of them was simple: break ties with the NRA and stop contributing to gun violence among underserved communities.

The campaign fed into our larger goal of building a future of fewer guns. The NRA profited from selling these insurance products, profits that would be turned into political donations that would push lawmakers to embrace “guns everywhere and for everyone.” Furthermore, it was consistent with our strategy of weakening the gun lobby by undermining its relationships with large American corporations.

As we began drafting the letters to the CEOs of both insurers, we also commissioned research to learn more about the product and company management, seeking an entry point into the corporate leadership.

We needed partners in this effort, particularly those who represented members of the African American community, which stood to suffer disproportionately from the NRA’s new product.

I immediately contacted Rashad Robinson of Color of Change, an online organization with over a million members that pressures corporations to “create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America.”

In 2011, Color of Change successfully forced over one hundred large corporations to break ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative association that, among many other unjust policies, drafted and helped pass legislation to suppress the black vote. Color of Change had found success in pushing companies to change in the past, and I understood that its wisdom and guidance would prove essential to our campaign. The organization agreed to partner with us, and as we drafted our letter to Chubb and Lockton, it wrote its own, educating the two insurers about the dangers of their business arrangement and announcing a public campaign to expose it.

Having sent those letters, I embarked on another mission: getting Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, to serve as the public face of our campaign. When I first learned of the Carry Guard policy, Martin’s tragic killing popped into my head. The unarmed seventeen-year-old was shot and killed while visiting relatives in Florida, the first state to enact a stand-your-ground law. What if Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, had had Carry Guard insurance? Providing him with financial assistance as Martin’s family grieved the loss of a son, it could only have promoted his “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality. Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon on grounds of self-defense. Even his lawyers did not seek immunity under the state’s stand-your-ground law, but the judge in the case referenced the law when he instructed the jury that Zimmerman had had no duty to retreat and could use deadly force if he felt it was necessary to defend himself.

Someone on our team had a connection to the Trayvon Martin Foundation, which the family established in the aftermath of his death, and Fulton agreed to participate and serve as the spokesperson for the push. She recorded an emotional video message calling on the insurance companies behind the NRA’s Carry Guard to drop the program, which could have provided up to $1.5 million to Zimmerman.

“Tell the two insurance companies, Chubb and Lockton Affinity, who created NRA Carry Guard, that you know who they are,” Fulton said in our ad. “Tell them … that if they keep offering murder insurance … they’ll never get your business. Tell them they should be ashamed to do the bidding of the gun lobby.”

The ad ended with two powerful sentences that give me chills every time I watch the spot. “My name is Sybrina Fulton, and my son’s name was Trayvon Martin,” Fulton says, looking directly into the camera. “I’m an American, and it’s time to put the guns down.”

We sent the ad to our email list and Color of Change sent it to theirs. We blasted it through social media, previewed it to the press, and offered people a way to plug in, urging them to sign our petition demanding that Chubb and Lockton end the relationship.

The campaign took off.

We earned tons of national and local press coverage and garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Even the NRA took note, characterizing our campaign as “stupid.” Soon, Everytown for Gun Safety got involved. Regulators in New York began investigating the business arrangement behind the product. Ultimately they banned the program from the state and imposed a $7 million fine on Lockton and one of $1.3 million on Chubb. Other states are considering doing the same.

We later found out that, just weeks after we launched our campaign, Chubb quietly told the NRA that it would not be renewing its contract with the lobby. Lockton soon followed suit, pulling out of the effort in the aftermath of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, right after we hired an airplane to fly over its headquarters urging it to drop the program. We alerted the press about the maneuver to make sure more people saw it. The idea of flying the airplane came after several billboard companies around Lockton headquarters prevented us from purchasing billboard space calling out Lockton by name. We had hoped to publicly shame the company in its own community and build support among its employees, who could advocate for our cause from the inside. Turned out, the flyover worked just as well.

The Carry Guard effort became one of Guns Down America’s most successful corporate campaigns. In the summer of 2018, the NRA filed court papers claiming it was in grave financial jeopardy and could soon “be unable to exist.” Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, also warned New York banks and other major corporations about doing business with the gun lobby and urged other governors to do the same. The lobby publicly claimed that this move, combined with the loss it was feeling from the end of the Carry Guard program, was taking a financial toll.

Bleeding the NRA dry will require more successful campaigns. An organization that takes in $160 to $415 million every single year will not change after losing corporate sponsorships. (Technically, only $30 million is earmarked for lobbying.) But corporations throughout the country are starting to realize that doing business with the NRA and supporting gunmakers and guns is toxic; it could tarnish a company’s most valuable asset, its brand. They simply do not want to be associated with firearms. They fear the possibility that they could be held liable for helping a shooter easily access a gun—particularly in the court of public opinion.

In the summer of 2018, after Trump allowed blueprints for 3-D-printed guns to be posted online for anybody to download and print using a 3-D printer, corporations took voluntary action to ensure that their technology could not be used in such a way. Sculpteo, a major 3-D printing company, banned firearm printing. Another, Materialise, is developing technology to prevent the production of guns.2 Even tech giants like Facebook have blocked individuals from posting 3-D gun blueprints on their social media platforms.3

The overwhelming majority of Americans reject the NRA’s “guns everywhere” agenda and its practice of hijacking our democracy by buying off politicians. At least twenty-eight companies have broken ties with the NRA since the shooting in Parkland, Florida, and, given where public opinion is headed, corporations will not want to be associated with the gun lobby for long. Especially if we continue to pressure them.