Like paid soldiers looking ahead to the next war, many of marriage’s decorated officers are privately entertaining offers from the leaders of any number of leftist causes: the environment, inequality, immigration. If you can achieve that, the thinking goes, why not try this? Some have vowed to stick with the marriage-equality cause, taking the fight overseas, where anti-marriage forces are already setting up shop, in Eastern Europe and in parts of the developing world. But guns have a special salience now, after Newtown, after South Carolina, and veterans of the marriage movement see familiar terrain in guns — so familiar that they feel optimistic about being able to guide Americans to a similarly radical culture shift down the line. Like marriage a decade ago, the gun debate as it’s waged in public feels hopelessly entrenched.
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But watching the incremental, state by state progress on marriage that accrued over many years has given anti-gun-violence activists a different template, or a battle plan, for a way forward — although Silk says this new coalescence on guns is still embryonic, reminding him of the early days, back in 2004, when Massachusetts passed the first same-sex-marriage law. But “We have more momentum than this issue has had in decades,” agrees Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “I do think you can make the strong case that this is the next big issue.” Gross, in fact, is so tight with Marc Solomon at Freedom to Marry and so frequently seeks his counsel “that I don’t even know his title.” (He’s National Campaign Director.) “We spend a lot of time professionally and over dinner where we have an opportunity to learn from each other. But given the success of the marriage movement,” Gross says, “I’m inclined to do a lot of listening.”
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Second, stop trying to fight a court battle over “rights and benefits” and stop waging the war on the national level. Instead, go to the statehouses and make the change state by state.
Now similar tacks are being taken on guns. Instead of fighting the NRA in the public sphere and participating in a national debate on the Second Amendment and the constitutional rights of gun owners, activists are taking the battle to the states with ballot initiatives, especially on background checks, a gun-protection measure which 92 percent of Americans (including 92 percent of gun owners and 86 percent of Republicans) support. Since the Newtown shootings, six states — Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, New York, Oregon, and Washington — have expanded background checks to all gun sales, including those purchased online and at gun shows.
But the most dramatic shift in the gun movement has — as in the marriage movement — one of messaging. Instead of following every mass shooting with anguished cries of outrage, and barrages of data on deaths, rounds of ammo, and millions of guns sold — together with an implicit disregard of and condescension toward the firmly held allegiances of gun owners (how could they?) — gun activists are taking a much more incremental, practical approach with a message that goes to the heart, not the head.
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The old paradigm, says Gross, who has a background in advertising, was “keeping certain guns away from all people.” (Assault rifles, for example.) The new one, which focuses on background checks, is about “keeping all guns away from certain people.” (People with criminal records, domestic abusers, the mentally ill.) Every American, no matter how they feel about the Second Amendment, can get behind that. “It’s that notion of common values, common goals: We all want to be safer."
When Zach Silk thinks about how to articulate the values of the renovated gun movement, he uses the same words that the gun advocates use: “Community. Safety. Responsibility. Protecting my family.” In this redefining, he hopes to make a point. “Protection” isn’t an individual matter (a canard in any case, because having a gun in the house makes you exponentially less safe) in which individual patriarchs safeguard individual offspring. “Protection” is a communitarian thing, in which the safety of one’s own children depends on the safe habits of one’s neighbors.
