After the massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut in 2012, gun control movements were small and heavily spent by the National Rifle Association. Parents looking for an exit for sadness and anger gathered on Facebook, where they formed their own group, MomsDemandAction, to promote stricter gun control.
Since then, the most important and most famous donor to date has been billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. 2013, his mayor’s initiative merge Moms Demand Action has created Everytown for Gun Safety. This is where the gun control movement is closest to the NRA counterweight. That year, the group spent $ 36.5 million, compared to $ 4.7 million the previous year.
Giffords, initiated by former Congressman Gabrielle Giffords, who claimed six lives in a 2013 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, and 2018 school shootings in Parkland, Florida.
Early moves have merged into a more formidable one, as recent developments in the safe trade of bipartisan guns at Capitol Hill show. It has gone from being considered a defeat-guaranteed issue for the Democrats to being organized by candidates, especially at the state level. However, gun control was considered particularly divisive, and many major philanthropists and large foundations have long been seen as unmanageable as well as polarized. I have hesitated to jump into the problem.
However, large donors are starting to move away from bystanders as gun sales and gun deaths increase, and the number of mass shootings continues to grow, including last month’s attacks in Buffalo and Yuvarde, Texas. ..
“Since Buffalo, I’ve talked to dozens of large funders struggling to quickly find out where they can play a role in the current crisis of gun violence.” Said David Brotherton, Vice-Chair of the Fund for a Safer Future, the largest national donor. He is a program officer at the Kenda Foundation, a charitable activity in Atlanta, working jointly to prevent gun violence. “This is a snowball now.”
In addition to the moment of crisis, people were trying to make progress where the potential political fever was lower. More and more funders have attempted to tackle gun violence through the lenses of politically undivided public health, through community intervention, and as a matter of racial equality. Famous philanthropists, including Steve and Connie Ballmer of Ballmer Group, John and Laura Arnold of Arnold Ventures, have begun to subsidize tens of millions of dollars on various aspects of gun violence prevention.
The gun control movement is more funded than it was ten years ago, but still not surpassing the NRA. Despite recent legal objections and battles in the conference room, the NRA is a powerful organization and guns. We have been successful for many years in blocking legal efforts to limit sales. ..
It remains to be seen how a bipartisan arrangement for a narrow set of gun safety measures, agreed by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats and approved by President Biden, will pass through an evenly divided Senate. I do not understand.
Money is only part of the equation. More donors will help the gun control movement spend on lobbying, research, organizing, and donating to politicians who support the cause. But matching the strength and discipline of the political activity of those who support gun rights is not just about who spends more.
Gun rights are a particularly vibrant issue for many Republican voters, especially in Primary, where Republicans use messages about guns more than Democrats have for most of this year. It’s much more likely to excite your base. Now their pitch.
“Attacking this gun is a much heavier lift than anyone thinks, as it inherits the entire Republican identity and spirit,” said Ryan Bassie, a former executive at gun company Kimber, now an industry critic. Said.
Former NRA regional politics director Richard Feldman said the gun control movement may be more organized and funded than before, but the politics in question still strongly support gun rights. Stated.
“Everyone has an opinion about guns, but in November it will be a decisive issue for gun owners,” Feldman said.
It was the strength of that emotion that helped keep the donor away. Liz Dunning, vice president of development for the gun control group Brady, was engaged in philanthropic work with educational nonprofits before switching to gun control. “I know what it looks like when a really big philanthropist engages, and it looks different,” she said.
What if Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the Ford Foundation come together and say, “We don’t live this way anymore, we use the resources we have now to make a difference.” ?? I asked her mother, Danning. I was shot and killed.
However, it has been an activity for 10 years since Sandy Hook laid the foundation for change. And not only in the mass shootings that are attracting attention, but also in domestic violence and suicide, the rapid increase in gun violence is steadily joining the role of small donors and volunteers.
According to laws tracked by Group Giftords, 48 states and the District of Columbia have passed more than 466 gun laws since the Sandy Hook shootings in December 2012. This includes 22 states that have closed federal loopholes that have exempted unlicensed sellers from conducting background checks on some or all firearm buyers.
“Parliament can be a curtain razor or a finale, and I think the truth is the finale here,” said politics in Washington before the bipartisan gun safety agreement was announced. When asked about his will, John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for gun safety, said. “But looking at the state-by-state behavior that it happened on a bipartisan basis, it shows a fairly significant change in political calculations.”
The face of the gun control movement in the 1980s was James Brady, a White House spokesman who was seriously injured and permanently injured when he was shot dead in an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In 1994, Congress passed a ban on offensive weapons. After the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in the same year, many Democrats began to see it as a matter of losing guns.
“In the 90’s there were all these centrists who thought guns were the third rail. You can’t do anything about it. You can’t talk about it. New Town Since then, the consensus has changed, “said Alex Vario, head of advocacy for gun violence prevention policies at the American Progress Center.
The emergence of online organizations has helped narrow the NRA’s funding advantage. “The ease and rise of online portals made a big difference. At that time, we had to use direct mail. This is a very expensive way to raise money,” Johns Hopkins said. Josh Howitz, co-director of the Gun Violence Solutions Center, said.
However NRA still outperforms spending According to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan research group tracking money in politics, the record $ 15.8 million in Washington lobbying gun violence prevention group in 2021 is a 5 to 1 coefficient.
Sheila Krumholz, Executive Director of OpenSecrets, said: “The gap is definitely closing.”
According to 2019 tax records, the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund has raised a record $ 80.7 million in donations and grants. That year, Bloomberg announced a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was also the most generous philanthropist ever. His overall donation surged from $ 767 million in the previous year to $ 3.3 billion. At the end of 2019, Bloomberg donated an additional $ 35 million for the following year, according to the group.
Without a large donation from Mr. Bloomberg, the action fund would raise just $ 20.3 million in 2020, leaving a $ 32 million deficit. A Bloomberg spokesman declined to comment on the timing of the donation to Everytown. Whether it was related to an individual tax bill, presidential candidacy, or anything else, the organization’s spending was ultimately unaffected. Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting at Ohio State University’s nonprofit organization, said the change underscores the potential impact of overcounting to one beneficiary.
“Given that I’m dependent on one donor, the big open question for me is what are the plans for the future,” said Mittendorf. “Are there any efforts to diversify revenue sources?”
That means more people will invest real money to prevent gun violence.
Donors associated with the effective altruist movement seeking to find the most cost-effective strategies to save or improve lives include mosquito nets to protect against malaria and vaccines to prevent childhood illness. We believe that gun control is more expensive than the intervention of.
Brady’s Danning pointed out the fear between the politics of this issue and the foundation for tackling something they consider to be polarized. “In a conversation with a small foundation, I’ve heard from program managers and others that” this is not one of our strategic priorities. ” “Investing in the prevention of gun violence strains us,” she said.
“I’ve received calls from a major donor, a new donor I’ve never heard of,” she added, since the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde.
Emerson Collective, an organization of Laurene Powell Jobs, began donating to gun violence prevention groups 10 years ago, especially through the non-profit Chicago CRED. Emerson donates $ 25 million annually to the group to work directly with young people in the city who are at risk of shooting and shooting.
This year, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie announced a grant of over $ 20 million to a group working to reduce gun violence in the community. ..
Billionaires John and Laura Arnold’s charity division, Arnold Ventures, began working to prevent gun violence in 2018, the year of shooting in Parkland. We have given a $ 20 million gift to initiate a national joint research for gun violence research to obtain data to form good policies. In 2020, Arnold Ventures began working on a community violence reduction strategy with an additional $ 5 million. This month, the group announced a new request for proposal for additional research grants.
“We need to do more,” Walter Katz, vice president of criminal justice at The Ventures, said in an interview. “There is a lot of work to avoid.”
