88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
It still exists—and it’s starting to work. 
By Leon Neyfakh
Michael Bloomberg, former New York City mayor, attends the Allen and Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 9, 2015, in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
The two weeks that followed the Orlando nightclub massacre seemed to give advocates of stricter gun laws reason for hope. First, Democratic lawmakers in the Senate staged a dramatic filibuster, demanding that a set of bills aimed at keeping guns away from dangerous people be brought to the floor. A week later, Democratic members of the House held a 25-hour sit-in on the floor of that chamber, a public protest that shattered the norms of congressional procedure and suggested a new civil rights movement—one aimed at ending gun violence—was in the making.
LEON NEYFAKH
Leon Neyfakh is a Slate staff writer.
For those who want to see legislative movement on the gun issue, it was natural to feel excited by these events in the moment. But it’s now just as easy to feel deflated by their failure to produce any real change. The measures proposed in the Senate were rejected in a vote that was as perfunctory as it was inevitable. The House, meanwhile, adjourned for its Fourth of July recess after Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed the sit-in as a “publicity stunt.” Ryan has since indicated the House will vote on a bill, but it's likely to be one that gun control advocates consider all but meaningless.
In the end, the twin spectacles that shook Capitol Hill in the aftermath of Orlando have served as a reminder of just how little has changed since the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. For the second time since Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and six adults, members of Congress responded to a mass murder by trying to improve, modestly, America’s gun laws, and for the second time, they have been soundly defeated.
This outcome might be less disappointing were it not for the fact that the last time the gun debate reached such a fever pitch, one of America’s richest and most powerful men stood before the nation and promised that progress was coming. Where has he been in the intervening years, and what has become of his optimism?
In the spring of 2014, Michael Bloomberg, then three months removed from his final term as mayor of New York City, declared his intention to wrest control of gun policy away from the National Rifle Association. He would do so by setting aside $50 million of his personal fortune to create an ambitious new advocacy organization called Everytown for Gun Safety. For the first time since the NRA became a force for hardline gun policies in the late 1970s, the group would have a formidable, well-funded opponent—one that would systematically work against the NRA’s longstanding efforts to intimidate lawmakers into supporting its absolutist agenda. “We’ve got to make them afraid of us,” Bloomberg told the New York Times.
More than two years after Everytown’s launch, in the wake of the worst mass shooting in modern American history, it’s fair to wonder what Bloomberg and the organization he started have been up to—and what they have to show for their efforts. With this latest act of violence, and the latest squelching of reform in Congress, it’s easy to assume Everytown has been a failure, and to worry about what that means for the future of the gun debate. In fact, Bloomberg’s organization is at the center of what can legitimately be called a new American gun control movement—one that experts say has already begun to demonstrate, in the years since Newtown, that the NRA is not the invincible force many assume it to be.
There are reasons why Everytown’s efforts have not received wider notice. The group’s agenda is aggressively moderate, even cautious, and it has adopted an unapologetically incrementalist strategy in which racking up small victories at the state level is prioritized over waging unwinnable wars in Congress. Like other gun reform groups, Everytown has also made a point of describing its mission as “gun violence prevention,” not gun control, a term that has come to be seen as politically radioactive.
The leaders of Everytown believe this slow and steady approach is the only way to defeat their entrenched foes in the gun lobby. Not everyone agrees it’s enough. Everytown’s strategy—and the dominance it enjoys on account of its resources, its national network of members, and its media profile—has created tensions with groups that should be its natural allies. Members of some state-based organizations have felt bulldozed by Bloomberg’s big machine, while some veterans of the cause,who remember a time when it was still acceptable to question the individual right to bear arms, worry that Everytown’s politically restrained platform has curtailed the ambitions of the broader gun control movement.
But the victories Bloomberg’s group has secured in the past two years, while seemingly modest, should encourage and intrigue anyone who has despaired at the unbreakable grip the gun lobby has had over American lawmakers. The organization may only be taking incremental steps thus far, but they may be the first steps on a path that leads to eventual change.
“There was a period in the 2000s, when the gun reform movement was in the doldrums,” said Duke University political scientist Kristin Goss. “But all these mass shootings, along with new resources that have come into the movement from Michael Bloomberg and others, really have led to a resurgence.”
Goss noted that her 2006 book was called Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America.
“I would not say that movement is missing anymore,” she said.
* * *
Everytown for Gun Safety was established through a formal alliance between two pre-existing entities: a quasi-think tank called Mayors Against Illegal Guns that Bloomberg had started in 2006, and a grass-roots organization founded after Newtown called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which boasted a membership of more than 100,000 women around the country. (Disclosure: Everytown provided seed money for the Trace, a nonprofit news site covering gun issues, with which Slate has partnered.)
A key part of Everytown’s plan is to prove to politicians who want to vote for gun safety laws that they no longer need to fear the NRA. Of course, the deep-pocketed gun rights group can still be expected to pour resources into removing lawmakers from office in retaliation for their disobedience. But now there is money on the other side of the issue too, money that can give candidates cover to support gun law reforms by protecting them from NRA-funded attacks. Everytown also wants lawmakers who stand in the way of reforms—including Democrats—to know that doing so now comes with consequences.
“Being for gun control has been viewed as a career killer,” said Mark Glaze, who served as executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and briefly, Everytown. “Starting in the ’90s, this mythology that gun control was a third rail calcified and it’s taken a long time to overcome.”
Everytown wants to shatter that mythology, according to Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action. To that end, she said, “We are supporting people who do the right things and going up against those who don’t.”
Watts sees a long struggle ahead. “This is not going to happen overnight,” she said. “The NRA built up its empire over 30 years. ... It’ll be several election cycles before lawmakers understand, Oh, if I do the right thing, it’s going to be OK, I can keep my job.”
The first big test of Everytown’s political power came with the 2014 midterm elections, which took place just a few months after the organization formally opened its doors. Everytown’s priorities included a ballot initiative in Washington state calling for an expansion of background checks to include nearly all gun purchases. Thanks in part to the $3.5 million dollars Everytown invested in promoting the initiative, itpassed by a wide margin.
Another battleground in 2014 was Colorado, where the gun lobby had spent aggressively to recall two Democrats who voted the previous year to support background checks for private gun sales and a limit of 15 rounds for ammunition magazines. The midterms saw both seats go back to Democrats who supported gun control, including one who had worked for Bloomberg as a coordinator at Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
Perhaps the best illustration of Everytown’s influence can be found in Oregon, where gun control advocates had fought two unsuccessful campaigns for expanded background checks before Everytown threw its weight into the 2014 race and helped elect three Democrats who supported gun violence prevention. Thanks to those victories, which gave Democrats a majority in the Oregon Statehouse, background check legislation passed in 2015, mandating criminal and mental health background checks for all gun sales, including private transfers. (A subsequent recall effort against the Everytown-supported lawmakers who sponsored the bill quickly sputtered.)
Since the midterms, the movement has notched further victories that Everytown believes are proof of concept for its measured approach. In 2015, nine states enacted laws making it more difficult for people with domestic violence records to purchase guns. According to Everytown’s year-in-review report, dozens of gun lobby-approved bills in state legislatures around the country—some that would have made it legal to carry concealed weapons without a permit, some that would have forced colleges to allow guns on campus, and some that would have allowed guns inside K–12 public schools—were defeated. This spring, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal enraged the gun lobby when he vetoed a campus carry bill, despite his record as a Republican NRA loyalist who, in 2014, backed a piece of so-called “guns everywhere” legislation that the NRA praised as “the most comprehensive pro-gun reform bill in state history.”
“Two months before the governor vetoed guns on campus, he said he supported it,” said Watts. “Then we put in 10,000 calls and 10,000 emails in to his office. We ran ads, we showed up, and he vetoed that bill.”
Such victories must be viewed in context. Last October, Maine made it legal to carry concealed weapons without a permit despite an advertising assault from Everytown. The following month, the organization spent $2 million in a failed attempt to help Democrats win a majority in the Virginia State Senate—a defeat that was compounded this past January when Everytown’s onetime ally, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, came out in favor of an NRA-approved bill that expanded the rights of concealed-carry permit holders. More broadly, as the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has reported, there were roughly as many states that weakened their gun laws in the two years after Newtown as strengthened them.
Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the former head of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, says that to dwell on that fact is to forget what the landscape for gun control laws looked like throughout most of the 2000s.
“I think to many observers, it looks like a signal of failure—like, wow, the Newtown shooting happened, and there are just as many states that are weakening gun laws as there are states that are strengthening gun laws,” Gerney said. “But I think the right thing to compare it to is what was happening in the 10 years before Newtown. If it’s basically a 50–50 fight at the state level now, it was a bloodbath, legislatively, in the decade or two decades before, when the count of weaker gun laws versus stronger gun laws was 9 to 1, or 10 to 1, or 20 to 1.”
By Leon Neyfakh
Michael Bloomberg, former New York City mayor, attends the Allen and Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 9, 2015, in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
The two weeks that followed the Orlando nightclub massacre seemed to give advocates of stricter gun laws reason for hope. First, Democratic lawmakers in the Senate staged a dramatic filibuster, demanding that a set of bills aimed at keeping guns away from dangerous people be brought to the floor. A week later, Democratic members of the House held a 25-hour sit-in on the floor of that chamber, a public protest that shattered the norms of congressional procedure and suggested a new civil rights movement—one aimed at ending gun violence—was in the making.
LEON NEYFAKHLeon Neyfakh is a Slate staff writer.
For those who want to see legislative movement on the gun issue, it was natural to feel excited by these events in the moment. But it’s now just as easy to feel deflated by their failure to produce any real change. The measures proposed in the Senate were rejected in a vote that was as perfunctory as it was inevitable. The House, meanwhile, adjourned for its Fourth of July recess after Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed the sit-in as a “publicity stunt.” Ryan has since indicated the House will vote on a bill, but it's likely to be one that gun control advocates consider all but meaningless.
In the end, the twin spectacles that shook Capitol Hill in the aftermath of Orlando have served as a reminder of just how little has changed since the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. For the second time since Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and six adults, members of Congress responded to a mass murder by trying to improve, modestly, America’s gun laws, and for the second time, they have been soundly defeated.
This outcome might be less disappointing were it not for the fact that the last time the gun debate reached such a fever pitch, one of America’s richest and most powerful men stood before the nation and promised that progress was coming. Where has he been in the intervening years, and what has become of his optimism?
In the spring of 2014, Michael Bloomberg, then three months removed from his final term as mayor of New York City, declared his intention to wrest control of gun policy away from the National Rifle Association. He would do so by setting aside $50 million of his personal fortune to create an ambitious new advocacy organization called Everytown for Gun Safety. For the first time since the NRA became a force for hardline gun policies in the late 1970s, the group would have a formidable, well-funded opponent—one that would systematically work against the NRA’s longstanding efforts to intimidate lawmakers into supporting its absolutist agenda. “We’ve got to make them afraid of us,” Bloomberg told the New York Times.
More than two years after Everytown’s launch, in the wake of the worst mass shooting in modern American history, it’s fair to wonder what Bloomberg and the organization he started have been up to—and what they have to show for their efforts. With this latest act of violence, and the latest squelching of reform in Congress, it’s easy to assume Everytown has been a failure, and to worry about what that means for the future of the gun debate. In fact, Bloomberg’s organization is at the center of what can legitimately be called a new American gun control movement—one that experts say has already begun to demonstrate, in the years since Newtown, that the NRA is not the invincible force many assume it to be.
There are reasons why Everytown’s efforts have not received wider notice. The group’s agenda is aggressively moderate, even cautious, and it has adopted an unapologetically incrementalist strategy in which racking up small victories at the state level is prioritized over waging unwinnable wars in Congress. Like other gun reform groups, Everytown has also made a point of describing its mission as “gun violence prevention,” not gun control, a term that has come to be seen as politically radioactive.
The leaders of Everytown believe this slow and steady approach is the only way to defeat their entrenched foes in the gun lobby. Not everyone agrees it’s enough. Everytown’s strategy—and the dominance it enjoys on account of its resources, its national network of members, and its media profile—has created tensions with groups that should be its natural allies. Members of some state-based organizations have felt bulldozed by Bloomberg’s big machine, while some veterans of the cause,who remember a time when it was still acceptable to question the individual right to bear arms, worry that Everytown’s politically restrained platform has curtailed the ambitions of the broader gun control movement.
But the victories Bloomberg’s group has secured in the past two years, while seemingly modest, should encourage and intrigue anyone who has despaired at the unbreakable grip the gun lobby has had over American lawmakers. The organization may only be taking incremental steps thus far, but they may be the first steps on a path that leads to eventual change.
“There was a period in the 2000s, when the gun reform movement was in the doldrums,” said Duke University political scientist Kristin Goss. “But all these mass shootings, along with new resources that have come into the movement from Michael Bloomberg and others, really have led to a resurgence.”
Goss noted that her 2006 book was called Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America.
“I would not say that movement is missing anymore,” she said.
* * *
Everytown for Gun Safety was established through a formal alliance between two pre-existing entities: a quasi-think tank called Mayors Against Illegal Guns that Bloomberg had started in 2006, and a grass-roots organization founded after Newtown called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which boasted a membership of more than 100,000 women around the country. (Disclosure: Everytown provided seed money for the Trace, a nonprofit news site covering gun issues, with which Slate has partnered.)
A key part of Everytown’s plan is to prove to politicians who want to vote for gun safety laws that they no longer need to fear the NRA. Of course, the deep-pocketed gun rights group can still be expected to pour resources into removing lawmakers from office in retaliation for their disobedience. But now there is money on the other side of the issue too, money that can give candidates cover to support gun law reforms by protecting them from NRA-funded attacks. Everytown also wants lawmakers who stand in the way of reforms—including Democrats—to know that doing so now comes with consequences.
“Being for gun control has been viewed as a career killer,” said Mark Glaze, who served as executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and briefly, Everytown. “Starting in the ’90s, this mythology that gun control was a third rail calcified and it’s taken a long time to overcome.”
Everytown wants to shatter that mythology, according to Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action. To that end, she said, “We are supporting people who do the right things and going up against those who don’t.”
Watts sees a long struggle ahead. “This is not going to happen overnight,” she said. “The NRA built up its empire over 30 years. ... It’ll be several election cycles before lawmakers understand, Oh, if I do the right thing, it’s going to be OK, I can keep my job.”
The first big test of Everytown’s political power came with the 2014 midterm elections, which took place just a few months after the organization formally opened its doors. Everytown’s priorities included a ballot initiative in Washington state calling for an expansion of background checks to include nearly all gun purchases. Thanks in part to the $3.5 million dollars Everytown invested in promoting the initiative, itpassed by a wide margin.
Another battleground in 2014 was Colorado, where the gun lobby had spent aggressively to recall two Democrats who voted the previous year to support background checks for private gun sales and a limit of 15 rounds for ammunition magazines. The midterms saw both seats go back to Democrats who supported gun control, including one who had worked for Bloomberg as a coordinator at Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
Perhaps the best illustration of Everytown’s influence can be found in Oregon, where gun control advocates had fought two unsuccessful campaigns for expanded background checks before Everytown threw its weight into the 2014 race and helped elect three Democrats who supported gun violence prevention. Thanks to those victories, which gave Democrats a majority in the Oregon Statehouse, background check legislation passed in 2015, mandating criminal and mental health background checks for all gun sales, including private transfers. (A subsequent recall effort against the Everytown-supported lawmakers who sponsored the bill quickly sputtered.)
Since the midterms, the movement has notched further victories that Everytown believes are proof of concept for its measured approach. In 2015, nine states enacted laws making it more difficult for people with domestic violence records to purchase guns. According to Everytown’s year-in-review report, dozens of gun lobby-approved bills in state legislatures around the country—some that would have made it legal to carry concealed weapons without a permit, some that would have forced colleges to allow guns on campus, and some that would have allowed guns inside K–12 public schools—were defeated. This spring, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal enraged the gun lobby when he vetoed a campus carry bill, despite his record as a Republican NRA loyalist who, in 2014, backed a piece of so-called “guns everywhere” legislation that the NRA praised as “the most comprehensive pro-gun reform bill in state history.”
“Two months before the governor vetoed guns on campus, he said he supported it,” said Watts. “Then we put in 10,000 calls and 10,000 emails in to his office. We ran ads, we showed up, and he vetoed that bill.”
Such victories must be viewed in context. Last October, Maine made it legal to carry concealed weapons without a permit despite an advertising assault from Everytown. The following month, the organization spent $2 million in a failed attempt to help Democrats win a majority in the Virginia State Senate—a defeat that was compounded this past January when Everytown’s onetime ally, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, came out in favor of an NRA-approved bill that expanded the rights of concealed-carry permit holders. More broadly, as the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has reported, there were roughly as many states that weakened their gun laws in the two years after Newtown as strengthened them.
Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the former head of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, says that to dwell on that fact is to forget what the landscape for gun control laws looked like throughout most of the 2000s.
“I think to many observers, it looks like a signal of failure—like, wow, the Newtown shooting happened, and there are just as many states that are weakening gun laws as there are states that are strengthening gun laws,” Gerney said. “But I think the right thing to compare it to is what was happening in the 10 years before Newtown. If it’s basically a 50–50 fight at the state level now, it was a bloodbath, legislatively, in the decade or two decades before, when the count of weaker gun laws versus stronger gun laws was 9 to 1, or 10 to 1, or 20 to 1.”