This month marks ten years since we launched Everytown for Gun Safety with an article in The New York Times. Within the first few paragraphs, the reporter outlined the daunting obstacles we faced:
“The considerable advantages that gun rights advocates enjoy — in intensity, organization and political clout — will not be easy to overcome.”
In other words, don’t get your hopes up. But ten years later, the gun lobby’s former “advantages” are now Everytown’s greatest strengths:
Intensity: We currently have nearly 11 million supporters — 2.5 times bigger than the NRA’s entire membership.
Political Clout: Over 250 Everytown volunteers have been elected to office. Forty percent of these wins have been in state legislatures, one of the key arenas in which we take on — and consistently beat — the gun lobby.
Another 14,000 candidates have sought and received our Gun Sense Candidate Distinction since we launched the program in 2018.
Organization: After the Sandy Hook School mass shooting in 2012, Congress failed to pass a background check bill. Following this failure, we systematically built an organization of top-notch policy experts, communicators, litigators, organizers, and lobbyists. And together with our staff, partners, and supporters, we finished the job that Congress left undone: Earlier this month, the Biden-Harris Administration issued a regulation that largely closed the background check loophole.
As I noted in The Washington Post, “This rule is the definition of common sense: If you’re selling firearms at a gun show or online for profit, you are engaged in the business of dealing guns and need to run a background check — period.”
None of this progress would have been possible without the unwavering dedication of our supporters. Ten years on, we still have a lot to do — but now we have the size and strength to overcome the biggest obstacles.
