This spring, millions of demonstrators are fulminating against lenient U.S. gun policies. Between this weekend’s March for Our Lives protest organized by #NeverAgain student leaders over their spring break and school walkouts memorializing victims of the Parkland and Columbine shootings and countless sit-ins, teach-ins, and die-ins, this is one of the most extraordinary periods of gun-control activism in modern U.S. history.
But such protests are neither the first — nor necessarily the largest — demonstrations against guns.
If gun-safety advocates want to turn this media-lit moment into concrete change, what matters most is how demonstrators organize after they set down their posters and head back to school. For while it’s unlikely that a hyper-polarized U.S. Congress will suddenly unify to enact tougher gun laws in the near term, that’s not how change happens.
The U.S. Constitution was specifically designed to prevent sudden sweeping federal changes, vesting most powers in the states instead. Leaders of today’s successful movements like tobacco control, LGBTQ marriage equality, and drunk-driving reduction, as well as gun rights, recognize how change happens in the United States and have shrewdly pushed to first revamp policies and shift social norms across all 50 states.
It’s tedious and expensive, and it takes decades to win at local levels. But it works. Grant makers, nonprofit leaders, and everyday advocates can apply this important lesson to advance causes that matter to them — and it’s especially useful for newly emerging movements like #NeverAgain and #MeToo.
Facing History
As #NeverAgain student leaders mobilize for more common-sense gun measures, they would do well to brush up on social-movement history.
The last major nationwide push for gun control was the Million Mom March Across America, mounted 18 years ago in May on Mother’s Day. The movement was sparked by Donna Dees-Thomases, a working mother enraged by the Jewish day care shooting in Granada Hills, Calif., and Columbine High School massacre of 1999.
The protest was a huge success: The Million Mom March galvanized an estimated 750,000 demonstrators on the National Mall and hundreds of thousands more in satellite marches nationwide. Celebrities such as Rosie O’Donnell championed the cause, and policy makers vowed to work across partisan divides to push for more stringent gun laws.
The National Rifle Association, however, branded the march a flop.
While some states such as California, Colorado, and New York enacted tougher gun laws in the wake of the march, no major new national legislation resulted. Instead, Congress allowed the 10-year assault-weapons ban to expire in 2004. And the majority of U.S. states went on to enact looser gun policies, such as open carry.
Why did one of the largest and most successful civil demonstrations for gun control in United States history ultimately fizzle?
The most important reason the gun-rights movement has dominated nationally for the past two decades is its membership. NRA members are organized, mobilized, and highly motivated to show up, speak out, and vote to defend Second Amendment freedoms. This did not occur at random: The NRA has purposefully and systemically invested in building up its grass-roots base, bootstrapping an army of gun-rights advocates and growing it to nearly 5 million members over the past three decades.
The gun-control movement did mostly the opposite.
After the Million Mom March, its grass-roots chapters folded into the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the leading gun-control group in 2000. But instead of nurturing and amplifying the grass-roots base, the Brady Campaign largely let them fade, and its number of supporters hovered around 500,000 — one-tenth the size of the NRA’s membership.
Today the gun-control movement looks wholly different.
Since Everytown for Gun Safety’s inception in 2014 with the merger of Shannon Watt’s Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Everytown counts more than 4 million supporters.
Other groups have recently launched, including Sandy Hook Promise, which works directly with schools to prevent mass shootings like the one in Newtown that took the lives of 26 students and educators in 2012; shooting survivor and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords founded Americans for Responsible Solutions and a super PAC to support candidates who promise to back common-sense gun restrictions.
Working together with established groups like the Brady Campaign, these new gun-control groups and their millions of collective supporters pose a sizable threat to the NRA. For the first time in U.S. history, the gun-control movement is fighting fire with fire.
But bigger membership numbers alone will not propel a movement to success. To win, #NeverAgain student leaders can apply proven strategies that have worked for other causes. Here are several key lessons:
Turn grass-roots gold.
To understand how the successful tobacco-control movement has driven down U.S. smoking rates to their lowest levels in modern American history — 6 percent for young people and 15 percent for adults — take a look at its grass roots. They explain how this phenomenal societal shift occurred and resulted in such huge public-health gains — no other recent social-change campaign has saved more lives or prevented more disease than tobacco control.
The movement’s roots trace back to the 1970s, when local community activists passed the first smoking bans in states like Arizona and Minnesota, soon amplified by Berkeley-based Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights.
Then in 1995, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids launched to provide comprehensive pushback against the powerful tobacco-industry lobby on the national stage. A coalition that included voluntary groups like the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Medical Association, and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids bolstered grass-roots state-based coalitions and capitalized on the vast networks of its supporting organizations.
Backed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids worked closely with the grant maker’s SmokeLess States effort, which made grants to 48 statewide coalitions and two regional ones to work with community-based groups to raise awareness, educate, and drive policy change.
One key campaign strategy was advocating to raise state and federal excise taxes on tobacco products, because a surefire way to prevent kids from smoking was to raise the per-pack price.
While the money from Johnson was instrumental to tobacco control’s success — the foundation alone poured more than $700 million into the movement over a decade — it was the memberships of the major health organizations associated with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, working along with grass-roots groups such as Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights and SmokeLess States coalitions, that made change happen on the ground. They turned their grass roots gold.
Membership trumps money
Speaking of gold: When trying to explain how the NRA has grown so powerful, politicos like to paint the gun-rights group as a stooge of the gun industry, arguing that gun manufacturer contributions drive results. But firearm makers fund only a portion of the NRA’s estimated $250 million budget. And besides, money’s not where the NRA derives its power. It’s the grass-roots base, not its corporate coffers, that supercharges its legislative agenda.
For proof, compare the gun lobby with the tobacco industry: Big Tobacco dwarfs the firearm industry by U.S. sales, and tobacco lobbyists historically wielded tremendous power in Congress and statehouses. Yet anti-tobacco advocates significantly undercut the tobacco industry, restricting its ability to market and profit in the United States while slashing smoking rates. It proves that social changemakers can face a powerful industry opponent and win. It’s a classic David vs. Goliath matchup — only it takes thousands of Davids.
Instead of admonishing policy makers for taking NRA money, as #NeverAgain students were doing early on, aspiring gun-control movement leaders should focus on matching — and surpassing — NRA membership in both volume and intensity.
Break from business as usual.
While traditional social-change efforts pit social activists against corporate wrongdoing, businesses often are the battlegrounds upon which social-change campaigns are waged. Recent decisions by Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart to raise the age to 21 for gun purchases and to stop selling assault weapons are recent examples of how companies can change policies more quickly than government can — and help pave the way for democratic action.
Shifting business policy was a primary strategy pursued by single-sex marriage advocates.
In California, LGBTQ advocates first pushed in the 1970s to pass domestic-partnership laws allowing municipalities to open up health plans to city employees’ same-sex partners. These policies were then adopted across the film, banking, and computer-technology industries. So by the time the California Supreme Court ruled in 2008 to remove its gay-marriage ban, the majority of working Californians were already employed by companies that recognized same-sex partners. What was once a fringe concern had become mainstream — “normalized “in the routine course of doing business.
Business also played a critical part in tobacco control’s success.
Airline-industry workers advocated for smoking bans on domestic flights in the 1980s; later restaurants, bars, and even some casinos followed suit. More recently, CVS quit selling tobacco products in 2014, opting instead to focus on its health, wellness, and beauty business. While it suffered a $2 billion drop in sales in the short-term, it has more than rebounded through expanded specialty pharmaceutical sales and opening Minute Clinics. This corporate policy shift helped contribute to reducing smoking rates by removing impulse-purchase temptations — a common reason people light up.
Change hearts and policy.
Just changing the rules of the game isn’t enough; to succeed, advocates must win in the court of public opinion.
A key reason smoking is less frequent, unfashionable, and unwelcomed in most places across the United States today is because tobacco-control advocates deliberately and systemically set out to undermine smoking’s sex appeal. They recognized that their fiercest enemies were society’s beloved tobacco brands — the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel — which hooked smokers not only with a nicotine fix but also by making smoking seem sexy and alluring. Just watch an episode of Mad Men to recall how enticing — and ubiquitous — smoking once was.
To flip social norms, savvy tobacco-control messages like the one in the Truth Initiative’s #CATmageddon persuaded younger generations to reject cigarettes not by saying “don’t smoke” but rather through hilarious, impossible-to-not-watch videos that showcase how secondhand smoke harms pets; the spots contain a powerful punchline: “Smoking = No Cats = No Cat Videos.”
These and other edgy advertising campaigns such as the Center for Disease Control’s disturbing “Tips From Former Smokers” helped create a new environment in which smoking is today banned in most public places in the United States. They established a new normal.
Like tobacco controllers, gun-rights proponents have also changed hearts, shrewdly tying gun rights to the fundamental American value of freedom — and inspiring people to protect their Second Amendment rights and defend hearth and home. These messages are shared across myriad platforms — from NRA TV, social-media sites, and the NRA magazine to numerous offline outlets: gun shows, shooting events, and more.
Given the permissive gun-purchasing policies and open-carry allowances enacted in most states, firearms today are everywhere — just like cigarettes were a couple of decades ago.
Ironically, the gun-control movement already has U.S. public sentiment on its side. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows 97 percent of voters support “common sense” gun-control policies like universal background checks, and more than two-thirds support banning assault weapons like the AR-15 semiautomatic rifles used in Parkland, Columbine, and other massacres.
The opportunity for #NeverAgain students and established gun-control-movement leaders will be to translate this widespread but tacit public support into active turnout in policy-change campaigns and electoral races in 2018 and beyond.
Grant makers can supercharge this push by directing support to those groups with the most robust and active grass roots — which aren’t necessarily the organizations with elite connections on Capitol Hill.
Change is possible.
The most successful movements of modern times span a remarkable range of issues — from tobacco control and LGBTQ marriage to gun rights and more. The fact that U.S. society got to a place that celebrates gay weddings and bans smoking in public, and at the same time allows guns to be easily purchased and carried openly in most states, shows that truly any change is possible these days. It also shows that no one political party or set of religious values dominates the U.S. social-change landscape. God isn’t favoring one party over another. And if multiple Gods are involved, there clearly isn’t a consensus.
The corollary: Change does not happen by chance. Since no one party or faith group always wins, the key to why some movements succeed and others falter has to do with how they are organized. Winning movements nurture grass-roots energy and channel it into concrete change — like catching lightening in a bottle.
The challenge for #NeverAgain and the growing cadre of gun-control groups will be to plow ahead after the marches and the walkouts subside and do the yeoman’s work of organizing and mobilizing in all 50 states through old-fashioned boots-on-the ground policy and norm-change campaigns. And the more resources that foundations and individuals can direct to turn those grass roots gold, the better chance they will have to beat the NRA at its own game.
Leslie Crutchfield is author of the forthcoming “How Change Happens: Why Some Movements Succeed While Others Don’t” and executive director of the Global Social Enterprise Initiative at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She is also co-author of “Forces for Good” and “Do More Than Give.”
