We Will Win

I know a secret the gun lobby does not want you to know: the demographic trends taking place in our country today will make it far harder for the NRA and gun extremists to continue hijacking our democracy and stalling progress toward gun reform in the future.

As of 2016, just 32 percent of American households owned firearms. In the 1970s, that number hovered around 50 percent. Gun ownership is falling fast as the United States continues to urbanize and Americans are turning to other forms of recreation.¹ Non-gun-owning households make up the overwhelming majority of American citizens and—if they organize around this issue—they can put it to rest for good by electing politicians who will enact the provisions included in the Compact and build a future with fewer guns and fewer gun deaths.

The people are already ahead of the politicians on this issue. In the summer of 2018, Guns Down America commissioned a poll to figure out where Americans stood on the bold ideas we advocate. It turns out that 59 percent of Americans back building a future with fewer guns—even without any prominent lawmakers publicly campaigning for it! Americans have long been on the right side of this issue, but we have lacked political leaders willing to transform these beliefs into reality.

Our poll found that overwhelming majorities of Democrats and Republicans support the policy solutions this book puts forward:

•  79 percent favor a voluntary government buyback program

•  78 percent support banning assault weapons

•  89 percent believe a license should be required to purchase a handgun

Support will only continue to grow as the country grapples with a growing number of mass shootings. Americans throughout the country will continue to rise up against the gun lobby and the politicians who support it. The fight for marriage equality taught us that the gap between public opinion and political leadership can remain wide for only so long. Politicians are risk-averse, but they respond to organized public pressure. When they are confronted by their voters or when they see an opportunity, triggered by an event or whatever else, to close that gap, they do.

The new energy surrounding the student activists from Parkland, Florida, is just such an opportunity. The Parkland students transformed their grief into energy, into forward-looking action. As a result, in the five months following the shooting, governors in twenty-six states signed fifty-five bills aimed at reducing gun violence; fifteen of the governors were Republicans. These reforms included laws preventing domestic abusers from obtaining firearms, banning bump stocks, tightening state-based concealed-carry requirements, and increasing funding for community-based crime intervention programs. Over the same period, advocates defeated forty-four NRA-backed bills.²

The Parkland students spoke with authenticity and raw emotion. They had spent their school lives practicing active-shooter drills and had just witnessed seventeen of their fellow classmates and school staff gunned down with an assault weapon. They had no use for the caution or talking points that lawmakers often use when discussing guns. You didn’t hear a lot about the Second Amendment or responsible gun owners. Little of that NRA-based framing entered the conversation in the weeks immediately following the Parkland shooting.

That’s why their message resonated. It was real, unrehearsed, and urgent. They were marching for their lives.

They had a problem with the fact that a student was easily able to obtain a weapon of war, walk into their school, and shoot thirty-four of their classmates and teachers in six minutes—despite numerous warnings to authorities that he threatened to do so. He was able to do that because the NRA had spent millions of dollars buying off politicians to ensure that restrictions on such weapons could never become law. Guns and their accessibility were precisely the problem, and the students actively confronted their lawmakers about it without any of the expected niceties.

I cheered wildly as I watched the CNN town hall from Parkland, Florida, in the week following the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting. On the stage, seated across from the most vocal student Parkland survivors were Representative Ted Deutch and Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio had taken some $10,000 from the NRA. The audience and the students challenged Rubio to explain why weapons designed for the battlefield could be legally purchased in most states in America. He fumbled, stumbled, and then threw out some talking point about how it would be difficult to design a law that bans “assault weapons” without going after broader classes of semiautomatic firearms. “Then ban them all,” the crowd yelled.

Americans, I realized, have long favored the goal of fewer guns and safer communities. They just haven’t had leaders with the courage to support it. The months after the Parkland shooting felt different because the students had infused the issue and the movement with a new hopeful energy not bound by immediate political realities or vote counts. They gave us hope because they defined winning as taking our country back from the gun lobby. They had our complete attention.

All of us must play our part and lean into whatever we’re good at, whatever value we bring to the table, to help build a future with fewer guns. For some of us, that may be following gun violence prevention groups on social media, calling members of Congress, confronting them during a campaign stop or a town hall event, organizing a rally or a die-in at a public place (or, better yet, at all of the members’ district offices!), or educating our friends and neighbors about the consequences of our horrific gun laws.

Our action should not be confined to the federal government. Most gun laws are made on the state level, and those lawmakers rarely find themselves the targets of focused advocacy. Call their offices, stage actions at the state capitol, bombard their Facebook and Twitter pages with your demand. If it embarrasses them for acting like NRA puppets, then all the better.

Each one of us is a change agent. Change will come through a million small actions. It’s up to us to take them.