In casual conversation, Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley refer to the tragedy simply by a date — 12/14.

That’s the day in 2012 when a gunman killed six adults and 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., where Barden and Hockley live. It’s perhaps inevitable that they would lean on emotion-free shorthand stripped of sorrow and pain, like 9/11.

10 Years After Sandy Hook: A Movement Reborn

Gun-safety advocates are looking beyond Congress to the courts and state legislatures and have expanded their playbook to include things like media campaigns and grassroots violence prevention. There are signs it might be working. Read more:

• Michael Bloomberg and the Gun-Violence Prevention Movement: It’s Complicated
• ‘I Found My Peace': To Save Lives From Violence, This Group Aims to Change Lives
• How a Philanthropic Bet on Violence Intervention Is Winning Public Dollars
• Advice for the Gun-Safety Movement From a Former NRA Lobbyist

Barden, a professional composer and jazz musician, lost the youngest of his three children, 7-year-old Daniel, at Sandy Hook. Hockley, a former marketing executive, buried her son Dylan, 6, and helped her oldest, Jake, 8, make sense of his brother’s death. Within days of the shooting, they joined other Newtown families to start a nonprofit, Sandy Hook Promise, now one of the largest gun-safety groups. Almost overnight, they shed their past lives and became full-time advocates.

12/14 also neatly divides the past and present for the gun-control movement. In the immediate aftermath of Sandy Hook, in keeping with a half-century of almost total futility, the gun-control movement lost a bid on Capitol Hill to advance tighter gun laws. The defeat led to soul-searching and change as advocates looked for lessons in past social movements. Change in Congress, they concluded, would only follow change in the nation.

Today, the movement boasts new voices, new influence, and even a new name — the gun-violence prevention movement. Its playbook features education and culture campaigns, lawsuits against gun dealers and manufacturers, and boycotts and petition drives to bring business into the movement, a range of work where philanthropy — long on the sidelines and often skittish about politics — can find a home.

Most important, the movement is achieving what it couldn’t before. In May, two mass shootings in the span of 10 days — at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., and at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex. — touched off national outrage like what followed Sandy Hook. This time, advocates converted that outrage to action with the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in Congress, the first major new gun law in a generation. Although critics question whether the retooling of the movement amounts to much, advocates contend they are well-positioned for even greater success.

Growing Numbers

If nothing else, the movement’s multitude of groups suggest new strength. Of the five biggest national organizations, Brady is the oldest, with roots in the 1970s. It is named for gun-control champion Jim Brady, the White House press secretary wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt of President Ronald Reagan. March for Our Lives, launched by student survivors of the 2018 high-school shooting in Parkland, Fla., is the newest.

The three others, including Sandy Hook Promise, emerged in response to the Newtown shooting. Gabby Giffords, a former U.S. representative who was shot in the head at a 2011 event, started an organization that today is known as Giffords with her husband, Mark Kelly, now a U.S. senator from Arizona. Billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg established Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million.

Collectively, these groups and their political affiliates raise upwards of $160 million a year, according to a Chronicle analysis of their tax statements. In 2011, the year before Sandy Hook, giving to Brady and its national counterparts barely reached $13 million.

Sandy Hook Promise’s charitable arm raises about $15 million a year, second only to Everytown for Gun Safety’s $27 million. Its sister political affiliate raised another $4 million in 2021. Altogether, the organization has more than 100 employees nationwide.

The group launched in rented space over a nail salon in Newtown. Barden, Hockley, and other Sandy Hook families quickly joined with the Obama administration and gun-control lobbyists to press Congress for change. Still numb with grief, they carried photos of their children, spoke of their loss, and lobbied for a new law that would require a background check of anyone who purchased a firearm. But the bill, like every major piece of gun legislation in the nearly two decades before, failed. Senators had cried with the Sandy Hook parents and comforted them, then voted no, leaving proponents stunned.

 “It was polling higher than baseball and ice cream,” Barden remembers. “How does this happen?”

Barden, 58, and Hockley, 52, had joined the gun-control movement to ensure that other families didn’t suffer a similar tragedy. For more than a year, the two buried themselves in an examination of the Sandy Hook shooting. FBI behavioral experts shared their analysis of Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old perpetrator who turned a gun on himself and later was found to have suffered from severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Barden and Hockley also consulted with mental-health authorities and experts in school safety and threat assessment. Criss-crossing the country, they sat in on focus groups with parents, gun owners, and people who didn’t own guns. Hockley met with a firearms expert to learn about the features and lethality of various handguns and rifles, including the AR-15, which Lanza had used.

They also studied past social movements, such as the fight for civil rights and the campaigns against drunk driving and tobacco use. Successful movements, they concluded, make their case in the courts and state legislatures and through research and education, and they try to change attitudes and culture. Gun-control proponents, they decided, were too focused on a single blunt instrument of change: Congress.

A Purge of ‘Gun Control’

The post-Sandy Hook legislative defeat triggered self-examinations throughout the movement. Advocates purged “gun control” from their lexicon, opting for the neutral “gun safety” and, more recently, “gun-violence prevention.” Not coincidentally, gay marriage advocates in the 2000s had dropped “same-sex marriage” in favor of “marriage equality,” which underscored the civil rights at stake in their fight.

The big national groups also turned their attention to state legislatures, just as marriage-equality proponents had done when stymied at the federal level.

Bloomberg, who emerged as a gun-control leader while mayor of New York in the 2000s, made perhaps the most significant changes. He had started Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of city leaders, in 2006. But that organization, while loaded with policy experts and political pros, lacked the grassroots muscle that the NRA flexes, says John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. “They can put out an emergency alert and suddenly the switchboards in state legislatures and Capitol Hill light up like the Fourth of July. While we were politically savvy, we weren’t capable of being noisy.”

A year after Sandy Hook, the mayors’ group morphed into Everytown, a name that echoed Newtown and signaled a new grassroots strategy — that Newtown’s tragedy could happen anywhere and that solutions would come from across America. Most important, Everytown brought under its tent Moms Demand Action, a group started on Facebook the day after Sandy Hook.

“Change will require action by angry Americans outside of Washington, D.C.,” wrote founder Shannon Watts, an Indianapolis mother of five and a former corporate public-relations executive. Within a year, the group had 130,000 members in all 50 states, activists whom Bloomberg’s team saw as a force akin to Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

“That was critical,” says Jeremy Heimans, who advised on the creation of Everytown and serves as CEO of Purpose, which helps build social movements. “It brought in a visible constituency that had passion, energy, and moral authority.”

March for Our Lives, led by the high-school students in Parkland, added a youth activist wing to the movement’s grass roots. It organized hundreds of marches following that 2018 shooting, attracting as many as 2 million protesters. This summer, the group held more than 450 rallies in advance of the congressional votes on the post-Uvalde gun legislation.

Napa Valley Register, ZUMA, Alamy

Sandy Hook Promise ultimately settled on an education program to train middle-school and high-school students to recognize signs that people might hurt themselves or others. Messaging for the movement had shifted to violence prevention, Barden notes, “but not enough work was being done in actual prevention.”

U.S. Department of Justice research indicates that four out of five school shooters reveal their plan to at least one person. Individuals close to Adam Lanza knew he was obsessed with mass murders and had signaled his attack at Sandy Hook.

With child psychologists and threat-assessment experts, Sandy Hook Promise created Say Something, a curriculum to teach the warning signs that individuals pose a threat to others or themselves. It rolled out the formal program in 2015.

Later that year, after Barden gave the training at a middle school and headed to his car, a guidance counselor ran after him. The woman was shaking and had tears in her eyes, Barden remembers. Following the session, a girl had told the counselor of worrisome social-media posts. Authorities discovered that two students had planted a bomb in a school locker. They planned to shoot people as they left the building after the explosion.

Barden and Hockley were stunned. “It was like, Holy shit, what we’re doing works,” she says.

‘I Became Enraged’

One of Sandy Hook Promise’s earliest backers was venture capitalist Ron Conway. By chance, he and his wife, Gayle, had scheduled a holiday party at their San Francisco home the day of the Newtown shooting. Gabby Giffords, a friend of the Conways, was there and led a moment of silence.

“Lightning struck me” in that moment, Conway says. “I became enraged.” He announced to the hundreds of tech-industry leaders attending that they had to act, and he quickly organized a conference call. Conway later flew to Newtown to meet with Sandy Hook families and wrote checks to help them with expenses. He gave $100,000 to Sandy Hook Promise, the first of what became many contributions to gun-control efforts.

Before Sandy Hook, the advocacy groups sustained themselves largely on direct-mail donations. “There was no philanthropy,” says Josh Horwitz, who joined a gun-control group out of law school in 1989 and is now co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Among the few donors early on were Bloomberg, tech entrepreneur David Bohnett, and the Joyce and California Wellness foundations.

Today the roll call is longer. It includes new-wealth billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve and Connie Ballmer, Judy Faulkner, and Nick Hanauer; old-line foundations like Ford, Kresge, and MacArthur; health-care providers Kaiser Permanente and Northwell; and corporations like Levi Strauss and Toms shoe company. Toms founder Blake Mycoskie described its $5 million commitment in 2018 as its first foray into political advocacy. “If we have this much power as business leaders, we have to use it,” Mycoski said.

Some donors, like Conway, are motivated by outrage following a mass shooting. The Hope and Heal Fund, a collaborative of about a dozen California grant makers, launched following a 2015 attack on a San Bernardino social-service agency that left 14 dead. But the expansion of the movement’s strategies offers avenues of work — education, communications, research, and litigation — that philanthropy can comfortably support without wading into politics.

The Fund for a Safer Future, a donor collaborative created by the Joyce Foundation in 2011, offers such options. “We were very deliberate in making room for everyone,” says Joyce president Ellen Alberding. The collaborative, she adds, gave donors an opportunity to contribute who didn’t have staff or expertise and “who didn’t necessarily want to have a public face on the issue.”

Collectively, philanthropies and individuals in the fund have contributed more than $150 million through the collaborative or on their own. Membership is expected to grow to nearly 40 by year’s end, with eight donors joining since the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings.

Outside the fund, Arnold Ventures, the philanthropy of John and Laura Arnold, is investing heavily in gun-violence research, an extension of its work on criminal justice. It established the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research in 2018. With contributions from Wells Fargo, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and a few others, it has poured $22 million into more than 50 projects. “Decision makers and policy makers have little rigorous research to base their answers on,” says Asheley Van Ness, director of criminal justice for Arnold Ventures.

Findings from one recent Arnold-backed study echo research on risk of the second-hand smoke that helped fuel the anti-tobacco campaign: Stanford researchers found that people living with handgun owners are more than twice as likely to die by homicide as those in gun-free homes.

Kaiser Permanente, which began supporting violence-prevention work in 2018 after the Parkland shooting, recently opened its Center for Gun Violence Research and Education, announcing $1.3 million in grants. “We definitely see a radical awakening of philanthropy” in the health-care and medical industries, says David Grossman, a Kaiser executive. Investments are small, “but it’s a start.”

Amy Sussman, Getty Images

Grant makers also aim to change narratives and attitudes about guns through news and culture. The Trace, a nonprofit news venture covering gun-related issues, launched in 2015 with seed money from Everytown and Joyce. Its backers now include more than 35 grant makers and philanthropists. The Kendeda Fund, the philanthropy of Atlanta philanthropist Diana Blank, got into violence-prevention grant making after Sandy Hook. Among other things, the grant maker supports journalism, movies, and podcasts that explore America’s relationship with guns. It has funded nearly a dozen films, including When Claude Got Shot, winner of a 2022 Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.

“We believe there’s social power in the creative arts,” says David Brotherton, a Kendeda adviser.

Guns, Suicide, and Race

The movement also has broadened to focus on all forms of gun violence. Mass shootings (those that involve at least four deaths) account for just 1 percent of firearm fatalities. Suicide alone made up more than half of the nearly 49,000 gun deaths in 2021 and increased 8 percent over 2020 — the largest jump since 1968.

Embracing the view of experts that gun violence is a public-health crisis, advocates say they now study the root causes and potential remedies of gun suicides, unintentional shootings of children, and weapons-related domestic violence. “The DNA on those are different,” says Liz Dunning, Brady’s vice president for development.

Many efforts aim to change individual behavior, not laws. Brady, with the Ad Council and backing from Kaiser Permanente, runs a public-education campaign to encourage safe storage of guns as a way to deter suicide and accidental shootings. The Jed Foundation, which advises high-school and college suicide-prevention programs, is expanding education and awareness programs to promote safe gun storage.

Limiting access to firearms is increasingly critical to Jed’s mission, says CEO John MacPhee, although the organization picks its political fights carefully. “I think the battle is not going to be won through laws. It’s going to be family by family. Depending on the position you choose, you may lose the ability as an honest broker to engage with the community.”

Perhaps most significantly, the movement has begun to address urban violence — what many describe as a blind spot for its predominantly white leaders. For years, data has made clear that gun homicides are concentrated in Black and brown neighborhoods hobbled by disinvestment, poverty, and high crime. “Yet many people in the movement chose to look away,” says Amber Goodwin, a former Giffords official. “To many of us, it seemed they did not care about Black people dying every single day as much as they did what was happening in the suburbs.”

Goodwin left Giffords in 2016 to start the Community Justice Action Fund, which aims to bring more attention and funding to grassroots violence-prevention organizations led by people of color.

Leigh Vogel, Getty Images for Giffords Law Center

Last year, she handed the reins to Greg Jackson, a Black survivor of gun violence. Jackson threw himself into advocacy after he was randomly shot while walking to his home in downtown Washington, D.C., in April 2013 — four days after the post-Sandy Hook defeat of universal background checks. The work, however, proved discouraging. “All I saw were events and advocacy groups talking about solutions to address mass shootings,” he says. There weren’t other people of color from high-crime neighborhoods at the table.

Movement veterans credit Goodwin and Jackson for bringing attention and private and government funding to grassroots organizations trying to stop violence in their communities. The Biden White House has revamped grant programs at several federal agencies to make such groups eligible for more than $14 billion in funding, according to the Community Justice Action Fund.

Biden’s enthusiasm is a sign of how the landscape has changed, advocates say. He led the Obama administration’s legislative response to Sandy Hook, and his staff brushed aside efforts to include measures to address violence in Black and brown communities, according to advocates and press accounts. “A young statistician said, ‘Listen, we don’t bring it up on purpose; it doesn’t poll well,’” says Teny Gross, head of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago and a 30-year veteran of violence-intervention work.

Foundations also have embraced grassroots anti-violence strategies as part of investments in racial equity following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. Others believe gun violence is impeding their progress on education, community revitalization, work-force development, and other core areas of work. A group of more than 50 Chicago foundations and philanthropists have put roughly $110 million into community-based violence interventions in the city since 2017.

A New Law at Last

The gun-violence law passed this summer reflects the movement’s decade-long evolution. It includes incentive funding for states to pass and enforce state “red-flag” laws, through which courts can limit access to firearms for people who may be a danger to themselves or others. Advocacy groups paved the way with work in state capitals; 19 states and the District of Columbia already have similar laws, most passed since Sandy Hook. Capitol Hill lawmakers backing the provision cited philanthropy-funded research documenting the effectiveness of a California law that took effect in 2016.

Al Drago, The New York Times, Redux

The new law also included more than $2 billion for school safety and mental-health programs as well as $250 million for community-violence intervention. A few weeks later, the president announced a new anti-crime plan that includes the $5 billion for violence intervention that he originally sought in his defeated Build Back Better plan.

Advocates believe they have stronger support than ever. More than seven in 10 Americans surveyed in August — including half of Republicans — said guns laws should be stricter. “The truth is that Americans of all political stripes see an urgent need for gun-safety reforms,” wrote GOP pollster Robert Jones recently in The Hill. The new bipartisan advocacy group 97percent, whose leaders include former Brady and National Rifle Association executives, is promoting universal background checks, which at least one poll shows are favored by 97 percent of Americans.

Advocates worry that momentum could stall. Not nearly enough dollars are flowing even now, some say. Funding comes in fits and starts, often spiking with the election season and then falling off, making it hard to budget and retain staff.

Brady remains largely funded by small-gift donors. Beginning about three years ago, development chief Dunning approached grant makers focused on children. She found many still were wary of the politics surrounding violence prevention. That changed after the Uvalde elementary-school shooting, she says, when news media highlighted the statistic that firearms in 2020 became the number-one cause of death for children. “The conversation has changed materially,” Dunning says. Still, it’s unclear whether grant makers will incorporate violence prevention into their strategic priorities and not simply react to a crisis.

To be sure, advocates lack the clout or resources of, say, the environmental movement. Or the gun-rights movement, which, despite the scandal and internal turmoil weakening the NRA, remains formidable.

Many conservatives and gun-rights activists dismiss the idea that there is even a movement behind the push for more gun laws. They point to increasing gun sales and a growing number of states that have relaxed gun ownership laws and embraced a right to carry firearms. The U.S. Supreme Court solidified that right in a decision this summer striking down New York’s law that required individuals to show special cause to get a permit to carry concealed guns. Experts believe the decision could be used to reverse the violence-prevention movement’s gains at the state level.

Even some liberals contend that the movement is a Potemkin village. It shares little in common with the civil-rights or marriage-equality movements, says Micah Sifry, an author and former editor at The Nation who writes about movements, democracy, and organizing. Those were fueled by mass participation and direct action such as civil disobedience. Violence-prevention advocates, by contrast, are a sophisticated, professional, and well-financed lobby whose biggest patron, Michael Bloomberg, is a billionaire and former Republican. They are not empowering people but simply borrowing their power at the ballot box.

“There’s no mass participation in the gun-violence movement,” says Sifry, who’s skeptical about claims of the size of Everytown marches. Philanthropy can help fuel movements, as it did with marriage equality, but its support can persuade advocates to skip the hard work of organizing and building community.

“What funders want to see is numbers,” he says. “They want to see press clippings. They want to see legislation.”

Prevention Culture

Barden and Hockley are now regulars on Capitol Hill. They were invited behind closed doors when Democrats and Republicans negotiated this summer’s new gun law. They helped write some of its language and wrangle the votes that led to passage.

In Sandy Hook Promise’s nearly 10 years, more than 18 million people have participated in its programs, which have expanded to include educators and parents. The organization says its training has led to crisis interventions that have prevented more than 360 suicides and 11 school shootings. Two public-service advertisements created with the firm BBDO won Emmy Awards.

Ultimately, Sandy Hook Promise aims to create a lasting violence-prevention culture within the schools. The loose model is again the movement against drunk driving. MADD planted the idea of designated drivers in high schools, Hockley says, and it became commonplace as teenagers carried it with them into college and adulthood.

Students get it, she adds. Weary of active-shooter drills spent hunkered in classrooms, one group of kids in Oklahoma decided to add a Say Something exercise to each school-required training. “When these kids are continually exposed to this curriculum and to these ideals, it becomes part of who they are,” Hockley says.

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.