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ADVOCACY INSTITUTE
March 2, 1994
Co-Directors
Michael Pertschuk
Anne Bartley
David Cohen
Office of the First Lady
Kathleen D. Sheekey
Old Executive Office Building
Room 100
Board of Directors
17th Street & Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Patricia Bauman
Helene Brown
Washington, D.C. 20500
Roger Craver
Elise Garcia
Peter Kovler
Terry Lierman
Dear Anne:
Richard Paisner
Leroy Richie
Jack Sheehan
Late last year, the Advocacy Institute - under a grant from the Joyce
Linda Tarr-Whelan
Dr. Reed V. Tuckson
Foundation - convened two broadly diverse groups of persons
Fred Wertheimer
Arthur White
deeply experienced in gun control, issue campaigning, movement
Kenneth Young
building, alliance building, media advocacy, political consulting, and
lobbying. Together, we addressed this question: what strategies are
required to build sufficient political force and momentum to achieve,
over the long term, a "gun-safe society?"
Of course, there are no short cuts, but these brainstorming sessions
produced both strong insights and a broad consensus on key
strategies. These are reflected in the enclosed report, Toward a Gun-
Safe Society: Movement Building Strategies. We hope it will be
useful to you, and we welcome your reactions - and your own
strategic insights.
Pap Sincerely yours,
Mn Peh
Karkleen Kathleen Sheekey
David Cohen
Michael Pertschuk
1730 RHODE ISLAND AVENUE, N.W.
SUITE 600
WASHINGTON, DC 20036-3118
202-659-8475
FAX: (202) 659-8484
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY:
Movement Building Strategies
prepared by
The Advocacy Institute
under a grant from
The Joyce Foundation
February 1994
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
ii
Discussion
1
1)
Movement Building
1
2)
Reframing
5
3)
Separating Concerned Gun Owners from Those Who Profit from Gun
Traffic
6
4)
Building and Assuring Effective Access to the Gun Policy Scientific Data
Base
7
5)
Media Advocacy
9
6)
Alliance Building
11
7)
Infrastructure Development
12
8)
Strategies/Tactics
13
i
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
Executive Summary
On October 28 and November 9, 1993, the Advocacy Institute convened two broadly
diverse groups of health professionals, children's advocates, and others who share a grave
concern over the growth of gun violence in America. The participants brought deep
experience and insight into the processes of national agenda setting, issue campaigning,
movement building, alliance building, media advocacy, and public persuasion. Together,
they addressed the strategies required to support and sustain legislative and other
initiatives necessary to help achieve a gun-safe society.
This report itself is the work of the Advocacy Institute, and does not, in its particulars,
necessarily reflect the views of any or all of the participants. Nevertheless, the report
was informed and shaped by the individual and collective insights and judgments of the
participants. Their salient observations and recommendations address these areas:
1)
Movement Building
Despite the evident surge in both popular and governmental support for more
aggressive handgun control legislation, no truly significant measures to reduce the
threat of gun violence can be enacted without the development of a broadly
based, strategically and tactically focused gun-safe society movement.
2)
Reframing
No such movement can be mobilized or sustained unless its advocates succeed in
broadening and reframing its thrust from crime control to the universal public
health goal of prevention of firearm injury and safety from violence - safe streets,
safe homes, safe schools, safe communities. Advocates must reframe the image of
the gun itself to match the reality, from the source of safety and protection (false)
to the source of aggravated danger and the illusion of security (true). Advocates
must reveal the perceived constitutional right to any gun for any purpose as a
constitutional illusion, and focus on the gun as an anomalous unregulated
hazardous commercial product.
3)
Separating Concerned Gun Owners from Those Who Profit from Gun Traffic
Many people who own guns are deeply concerned about gun violence - including
many NRA members. At the same time, most of those who are concerned about
gun violence respect the traditions of hunters and sportsmen. The configuration
of forces aligned on behalf of gun-safe society policies must include responsible,
concerned gun owners. At the same time, the extreme opposition must be
unmasked as isolated extremists and front groups for those who profit from the
indiscriminate, unregulated design, sale, and promotion of lethal weapons.
ii
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
4)
Building and Assuring Effective Access to the Gun Policy Scientific Data Base
To provide scientific support for both policy development and the reframing of
gun policy as a public health issue requires both accelerated development and
high-impact dissemination of science-based policy and policy-related research.
5)
Media Advocacy
A sustained, skilled media advocacy campaign at national, state, and community
levels is required to help reshape the media environment so that news coverage of
gun violence understands and continuously supports the framing of gun violence
stories as public health and safety stories.
6)
Alliance Building
With such reframing, there will be great potential for mobilizing new alliances and
coalition building around a gun-safe society policy advocacy agenda, but such
mobilization cannot take place without carefully tailored outreach strategies,
resources, and sustaining support.
7)
Infrastructure Development
To support and sustain all of the above will require the development and financial
support for a movement infrastructure which will facilitate information sharing and
ready access to reliable data by journalists, policy makers, and advocates. Such
movement building will also require strategic and tactical coordination utilizing
new communications technologies, alliance and coalition building, advocacy
training, and technical support.
8)
Strategies/Tactics
A legislative strategy must flow from a coherent, long-term political strategy with
concurrent community, state, and national agendas. Such a strategy must craft
each incremental legislative initiative as a stepping stone to the long term goal of
a gun-safe society. No legislative objective should be pursued that does not add
momentum - as well as incremental gains - toward the long term goal of a gun-
safe society. Legislative initiatives at all levels of government can define and
mobilize the movement, laying the groundwork for future initiatives and providing
opportunities for movement-building media advocacy - as well as enact concrete
gun restraint measures.
iii
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
Discussion
1)
Movement Building
Despite the evident surge in both popular and governmental support for more aggressive
handgun control legislation, no truly significant measures to reduce the threat of gun
violence can be enacted without the development of a broadly based, strategically and
tactically focused political movement.
Strengths and Opportunities. The participants agreed that this is a time of great
opportunity for advocacy to reduce gun violence, and that the building blocks for a strong
gun-safe society movement are in sight. Among the favorable factors identified:
Heightened public awareness and concern about violence, and a new sense of
public urgency in seeking governmental responses to violence.
Heightened public awareness of the role of guns in aggravating the toll of death
and debilitation from violence - not just crime - and corresponding broad public
support for more aggressive gun control measures.
The success of the Brady Bill provided a taste of the possibilities for significant
gun control legislation and served to accelerate - rather than retard - momentum
for stronger measures.
Since no significant legislative campaign can succeed without both "inside" and
"outside" support, this Administration's openness and potential leadership in
exploring ways to address gun violence (as exemplified by the Joint Department of
Justice/Department of Health and Human Services inter-agency task force), as
well as the emergence of tested leadership in Congress, presents a window of
opportunity.
Handgun Control, Inc., The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence - experienced and
gun control lobbies - as well as strategic resource centers such as the Centers for
Disease Control National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the Earl
Warren Legal Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, The Violence
Policy Center, The Trauma Foundation and Pacific Violence Center, The Berkeley
Media Studies Group, the HELP Network of Concerned Professionals, among
others - represent building blocks toward a movement and movement
infrastructure.
Many and diverse individuals and organizations are poised to take up advocacy
against gun violence, or to raise the epidemic of gun violence to the top of their
advocacy priorities - groups ranging from the Coalition for America's Children
and the Children's Defense Fund to the NAACP, and the American Bar
Page 1
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
Association; the AFL-CIO; large and small retailers; mayors and law enforcement
officials and their organizations; the American Public Health Association, the
American Academy of Pediatrics, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Many other interest groups are potential recruits to a well-framed, well-structured
movement which is prepared to nurture and sustain their involvement: churches,
civic associations, parent and teacher organizations and youth leaders themselves;
alcohol and other substance abuse control advocates; the entertainment industry
(with the added incentive of doing penance for violent programming); the
marketers of security systems and devices; at-risk government agencies such as the
Post Office; businesses at risk both in the workplace and in vulnerable consumer
outlets; and the travel, tourism, and insurance industries.
There are important leaders in urban communities who view reducing firearm
violence as integral to the solution to urban violence - Jesse Jackson among them.
The victims of gun violence, and the networks of family and friends of victims
(such as Detroit's Save our Sons and Daughters), serve as authentic voices within
their communities and serve as a potential nucleus of gun-safe society advocates
with an intensity of commitment that can match that of the most ardent NRA
members.
A growing group of philanthropic funders are ready to support the development
of needed policy-oriented research, public education campaigns, and infrastructure
development.
The national focus on health care reform provides an opportunity to spotlight the
mountainous economic costs of gun-related injuries.
The NRA has lost some of its mythic power over lawmakers.
Unlike the tobacco or alcohol industries, gun manufacturers are neither
conglomerates nor linchpins of the national economy, so that business (and pro
bono lawyer/lobbyist) mobilization for gun restraint legislation is less inhibited by
interlocking dependencies.
Many aspiring national movements are retarded by the absence of media
attention, which is a necessary prerequisite for national agenda-setting. But gun
violence is relentlessly newsworthy. Perhaps even more encouraging is that the
media have become increasingly aware and focused on the role of gun availability
in the acceleration of gun violence.
Constitutional law experts are virtually unified and increasingly vocal in teaching
that the Second Amendment was not intended to, and does not, restrict the ability
of the federal or state governments to restrain and regulate the private possession
of guns.
Page 2
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
Weaknesses and Threats. Despite these notable strengths and opportunities, there are
formidable weaknesses, obstacles, and threats to the emergence of a strong, coherent,
national movement for a gun-safe society, among them:
No gun control organization, or coalition of organizations, yet begins to match the
fiscal and organizational resources, the grassroots recruitment and networking, the
political strategy, and, above all, the focused intensity and threat conveyed by the
NRA and its allies to legislators.
Current gun control efforts are fragmentary, uncoordinated. There is no common
long-term vision or consensus on policy goals - e.g., there is ongoing conflict
between those who want guns regulated and those who want to ban guns
(especially handguns) altogether. Gun control leaders and lobbies offer different,
often contradictory framings, widely varying visions and goals, and disparate
legislative agendas.
The lack of such common vision and strategy reflects the complex and intractable
causes of gun violence - cf. the relatively clear, simple, and uniform goals of the
tobacco control movement.
There exists only limited connection and communication between national gun
control lobbies and community-based organizations. While there are effective
leaders and spokespersons, the gun control lobbies lack strategic depth and
organizational breadth.
Economically disadvantaged communities, racial and ethnic urban minority
communities - the communities most affected by gun violence - have not been
successfully drawn into campaigns to reduce gun violence, even though there are
vigorous organized activists in these communities. Indeed, some leadership within
such communities views efforts to control the epidemic of gun violence as a
diversion from the root causes of violence. And there are those who see limiting
access to firearms as designed to disarm urban populations, leaving guns only in
the hands of their oppressors.
The intermediary institutions needed to help incubate and sustain a national
movement - strategic resource centers, information clearinghouses,
communications networks - remain either unformed or grossly underfinanced.
Some have promoted gun control laws solely, or essentially, as crime control
measures, which plays to the NRA's strongest argument - that gun control will not
wrest the guns from the hands of hardened criminals. Thus proponents of gun
safety measures have lost control over the terms and symbols of the debate.
Though there is, indeed, ample media coverage of gun violence, most coverage is
still framed in terms of crime and individual violence, not as a product of gun
ubiquity.
Page 3
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
Despite the broadening of the advocacy base, especially to the law enforcement
community, gun control advocacy is still largely viewed by the media and public as
a "liberal" initiative. For too many citizens, to support restrictions on firearms is
still to be soft on crime.
As the perception of violence surges, more and more threatened citizens view gun
ownership as vital to their personal safety, especially in the absence of pervasive
and effective violence prevention and law enforcement.
People who feel immediately threatened by gun violence are more likely to
respond by seeking personal protection through guns or other security systems
than by enlisting in a problematic gun control campaign.
There remains a dearth of sound scientific data, and the absence of systematic
dissemination of such data as do exist in formats designed to inform the media
and establish the scientific basis for gun policy initiatives.
While generally supportive of measures to restrict access to guns, the public
remains unconvinced of the efficacy of such measures in reducing either crime or
gun violence. This lack of conviction leads inevitably to fatalism or numbness in
confronting gun violence which, in turn, leaches away the conviction and intensity
essential to an effective political movement. Such skepticism is reinforced by the
patent lack of effectiveness of existing gun control laws and regulations, including
the assumption that the Brady Bill will have little effect.
The NRA has succeeded in promoting the constitutional myth that gun possession
is an unrestricted right, thereby undermining the legitimacy of initiatives to restrict
guns and further enervating potential citizen activism for measures to reduce the
epidemic of gun violence.
Page 4
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
2)
Reframing
No such movement can be mobilized or sustained unless its advocates succeed in
broadening and reframing its thrust from crime control to the universal public health goal
of prevention of firearm injury and safety from violence - safe streets, safe homes, safe
schools, safe communities. Advocates must reframe the image of the gun itself to reflect
the dangerous reality, rather than the false illusion of security. Advocates must reveal
the perceived constitutional right to any gun for any purpose as a constitutional
misunderstanding, and focus on the gun as a quixotically unregulated consumer product,
the source of proliferating death and maiming.
Guns, not criminals, must be the focus of public debate: guns in the home, prey to
curious children; guns handy in sudden anger, perhaps inflamed by alcohol; guns in the
hands of school children, in the hands of depressed, suicidal, and mentally unstable
persons; guns in the hands of persons under the influence of alcohol and other drugs.
Crime control cannot be ignored - just the opposite. But restricting access to guns
cannot stand only as a crime control measure; it's simply not credible in the absence of
other measures that promise the security which people seek in guns.
The problem definition of gun violence must shift:
from crime control to public health and safety (which encompasses but is far
broader than crime control);
from guns as an issue of crime to guns as an issue of women, children, family,
business, labor, and crime.
from gun control to reducing gun violence;
from gun violence as a problem of young, mostly black, inner-city criminals to gun
violence as a universal affliction of our society;
from gun violence equating with criminal violence to gun violence equating with
suicide and alcohol-induced gun use and criminal violence;
from the right to bear arms to the right to be safe and secure from guns;
from guns as a symbol of strength and security to guns as symbolic of weakness
and fear;
from firearms regulation as politically left/soft on crime to firearms regulation as
centrist/tough - an integral part of comprehensive crime control measures.
from guns as an American birthright to guns as an insanely unregulated and
unconstrained marketed consumer product.
Page 5
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
3)
Separating Concerned Gun Owners from Those Who Profit from Gun Traffic
Many people who own guns are deeply concerned about gun violence - including many
NRA members. At the same time, most of those who are concerned about gun violence
respect the traditions of hunters and sportsmen. The configuration of forces aligned on
behalf of gun-safe society policies must include responsible, concerned gun owners. At
the same time, the extreme opposition must be unmasked as isolated extremists and front
groups for those who profit from the indiscriminate, unregulated design, sale, and
promotion of lethal weapons.
There are delicate ethical as well as strategic issues here. The NRA contains thousands
of moderate sportsmen and citizens who are rationally - if misguidedly - arming for their
safe defense. They must not be scorned or marginalized. Yet certain essential truths
need to be highlighted: much of the financial support of the NRA comes from the $8
billion* industry that profits from the unregulated proliferation of guns - so to that
extent the NRA needs to be exposed as an industry "front."
Again, NRA policies and tactics are heavily influenced by staff and board members who
are rightly labeled - and must be seen as - outer-fringe ideologues.
The symbolism of unrestrained gun bearing - and those who advocate it - needs to be
transformed from the defense of a right and a tradition to the reckless and ruthless
defense of gun violence - a constitutionally unrecognized and illegitimate threat to
society, killing our children and making our streets unsafe.
USA Today, December 29, 1993, p. 1.
Page 6
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
4)
Building and Assuring Effective Access to the Gun Policy Scientific Data Base
To provide scientific support for both policy development and the reframing of gun
policy as a public health issue requires both accelerated development and high-impact
dissemination of policy and policy-related research.
Among the research needs identified are:
"Social math," the presentation of basic research data in a form which gives
content to, and supports framing strategies such as: the universality of gun
violence in all communities; and the medical toll of gun violence, e.g. mandatory
reporting by emergency rooms of gunshots as a source of injury/death.
Searching out and evaluating promising policies, techniques, interventions, and
opportunities to reduce gun violence (such as the use of electronic devices to
detect concealed handguns) to advance and replicate successes, to learn from
failures.
Comparative studies between other countries and the U.S., such as those which
show equivalent crime rates, but death rates from guns dramatically lower outside
the U.S.
Election studies and data, including polling data, which can dispel the myth of the
NRA political threat.
Polling and focus group formative research in support of strategic development
and message framing, including the test of such issue frames as the pursuit of a
"gun-safe society" and of guns as anomalous "unregulated consumer products."
Studies/report cards comparing gun violence policies in vanguard and regressive
jurisdictions.
Legal research and model briefs which show the fallacious nature of Second
Amendment rhetoric.
Case studies of successful community mobilization efforts in support of gun-safe
society policies.
Equally critical is the need for the systematic dissemination of comprehensive and
reliable data to journalists, policy makers, and policy advocates. The following tasks
demand high priority:
The identification and evaluation of the state of existing gun policy and policy
related research.
Page 7
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
The identification of critical gaps in such research and the development of a
priority research agenda.
The development of a gun science resource center and consortium of gun policy
researchers, with the capacity to inform actively and provide ready access to
journalists, policy makers, and advocates.
Such a center and consortium could provide a broad range of information services,
including:
1)
Developing, organizing, and maintaining an electronically accessible
gun policy and policy-related research data base.
2)
A system producing periodic gun policy research information alerts
and updates to key journalists.
3)
A system for making consortium and other gun policy researchers
available and readily accessible to journalists.
4)
Training and technical support for researchers to assist them in the
effective dissemination to the media of their research findings and
the policy implications of such findings.
Page 8
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
5)
Media Advocacy
A sustained, skilled media advocacy campaign at national, state, and community levels is
required to help reshape the media environment so that news coverage of gun violence
continuously supports the framing of gun violence stories as public health and safety
stories.
Well-trained and up-to-date informed media advocates throughout the country must
undertake a variety of media initiatives, directed at national, state, and local mass media.
They must:
Develop ongoing relationships and, on a regular basis, alert (and remind)
columnists and journalists on crime, education, family, and health beats of the role
of gun availability in breaking gun violence stories.
Develop localized stories on policy and policy-related research designed to gain
the optimum exposure and understanding of the policy implications of such
research.
Visit editorial boards, develop and disseminate editorial memoranda on gun issues,
develop and place op-ed articles and letters to the editor.
Develop credible community spokespersons, authentic voices - such as police
chief/hunter, gun victim/school teacher, youth sports hero, military combat hero,
musicians credible to teenagers.
Design and utilize limited paid advertising to frame the message, especially if such
advertising can itself be made newsworthy and stimulate "free" news media
coverage.
Promote investigative reporting on the NRA, especially stories which expose its
gun industry funding base, its cruder lobbying and campaign spending strategies,
its internal dissent, the ties of its leadership to extremist political groups, its
bullying tactics in response to internal dissent, its distortions of research data, and
its misrepresentations.
Promote investigative stories zeroing in on the profitability, aggressive marketing
practices, and corporate irresponsibility of gun manufacturers and sellers.
Create or dramatize newsworthy events, such as Congresswoman Pat Schroeder's
night in an emergency ward, that can help frame gun violence as a public health
issue.
Page 9
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
Initiate and promote stories contrasting the stringent, safety-based regulation of
other hazardous consumer products with the unregulated and unrestrained design,
manufacture, marketing, advertising, and sale of guns and bullets.
Encourage entertainment producers and writers to offer programs and stories
modeling non-gun, non-violent conflict resolution or demonstrating the inherent
dangers of gun possession.
Page 10
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
6)
Alliance Building
With such reframing, there will be great potential for mobilizing new alliances and
building coalitions around a gun-safe society policy advocacy agenda, but such
mobilization cannot take place without carefully tailored outreach strategies, resources,
and sustaining support.
As we have seen (in Strengths and Opportunities, above), there are new constituencies and
organizations ready to be integrated into a coherent national gun-safe society movement
- and others potentially reachable.
Some, such as the Coalition for America's Children, have already placed arresting the
epidemic of gun violence high on their policy agendas. But such groups lack both
internal staff resources and external technical support - including the strategic counseling
and training, and readily adaptable campaign materials needed to translate interest into
focused activity.
Others must be actively recruited, with policy agendas, supporting data and messages
crafted to appeal to special constituencies. For example, it is possible to recruit
sportsmen and hunters to support policies which restrict access to guns - the small NRA
dissenters group, the American Firearms Association, so attests. But the recruiting
messages for hunters - and the identity of the best messengers - will necessarily be far
different from those required to convince urban minorities that giving up their guns will
not simply invite armed racism by police.
Business groups will need to see convincing data on the economic costs of gun violence
in the workplace. Professional sports enterprises might be mobilized by creative analysis
of the impact of threatened gun violence on game attendance and the risk to athletes -
and an affirmative appeal to the use of sports heroes as role models. The imagination of
youth groups in the Southwest might be fired by the recruitment of their role models,
e.g., "real cowboys don't carry guns." Groups focused on the advocacy of policies
designed to prevent alcohol problems should be provided with compelling evidence of the
nexus of alcohol, guns, and violent death.
Low-income and minority communities pose special challenges for alliance building.
Some see guns as a crucial line of defense - not solely against criminals but against
police, whom they may also perceive as a threat. Others see the focus on guns as a
diversion from core issues breeding violence, such as the lack of adequate economic
development and jobs. To build successful alliances in these communities will require
willingness to embrace a broad agenda addressing gun policy along with the underlying
issues that give rise to violence.
In all these cases, the potential for recruitment will be lost without the presence of a
resourceful movement infrastructure to develop recruitment strategies and sustaining
technical assistance.
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TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
7)
Infrastructure Development
To support and sustain all of the above will require the development of - and financial
support for - a movement infrastructure which will facilitate information sharing, ready
access to reliable data by journalists, policy makers, and advocates, and the development
and dissemination of campaign materials. Such movement building will also require
strategic and tactical coordination utilizing the new communications technologies, alliance
and coalition building, advocacy training, and technical support.
Such infrastructure must include, in addition to the strengthening of "front-line" lobbying
organizations:
a national interactive communications system or systems readily accessible to
community-based advocates - to facilitate data sharing and access, strategic
exchanges, networking and alliance building, media advocacy, and lobbying;
coordination of strategic and tactical development and guidance;
technical assistance, including support and training in alliance building and
organizing, media advocacy training and guidance;
a systematic, readily accessible, coordinated system for tracking gun industry and
gun lobby organizations, strategies, and tactics, and for the study, development,
and teaching of effective counter-strategies and tactics.
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TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
8)
Strategies/Tactics
A legislative strategy must flow from a coherent, long-term political strategy with
concurrent community, state, and national agendas. Such a strategy must craft each
incremental legislative initiative as a stepping stone to the long term goal of a gun-safe
society. No legislative objective should be pursued that does not add momentum - as
well as incremental gains - toward the long term goal of a gun-safe society. Legislative
initiatives at all levels of government can define and mobilize the movement, laying the
groundwork for future initiatives and providing opportunities for movement-building
media advocacy - as well as enact concrete gun restraint measures.
Several strategic concepts may help to flesh out this general framework, though they are
by no means comprehensive:
1.
It is important that the gun-safe society movement set a long-term goal which is
realistic, yet ambitious and significant - and capable of mobilizing broad and
intense long-term support. Such a goal might be:
the virtual elimination of handguns in the home or concealed
on the person, except for a controlled, limited number of
licensed owners who demonstrate both need and competency.
2.
A legislative agenda that addresses the epidemic of gun violence - at local, state,
and national levels - must be part of a broader policy and legislative framework
that addresses public concerns and the need for crime control along with social
legislation that addresses the root causes of violence and crime.
3.
It is important to develop a political strategy in support of the legislative strategy
that consistently challenges pro-NRA candidates' campaign funding and other ties
to the NRA, and that provides support for candidates willing to take a strong
stand against gun violence. A handbook for political consultants providing
guidance to candidates on how to address gun violence issues and respond to
NRA attacks would be useful.
4.
A gun-safe society constitutional and product liability litigation strategy should
support and complement the legislative strategy, for example by developing and
pursuing test cases that challenge the NRA's claims for the reach of the Second
Amendment.
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TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
Finally, there exist both an immediate opportunity and an immediate threat that should
be addressed now:
The Opportunity: the Clinton Administration's Violence Task Force, co-chaired by HHS
and Justice, is a potential launching pad not only for specific gun control measures but
for the building of a true national movement. All those concerned about gun violence
should seek to guide the task force and the Administration to a set of sound and far-
reaching proposals grounded in the prevention-oriented public health vision of a gun-safe
society.
The Threat: The NRA has succeeded in gaining the passage in many states of
preemptive state legislation which bars cities and counties from enacting innovative, or
vanguard gun control ordinances. The potential role of cities and states as laboratories
and incubators is highly promising; challenging the denial by remote state capitals of the
right of cities and counties to secure the safety of their citizens is a soundly conservative
principle. Resisting and overturning such preemptive legislation is not only a priority
legislative objective, but has the potential for mobilizing broad support.
Page 14
TOWARD A GUN-SAFE SOCIETY: Movement Building Strategies
GUN VIOLENCE MEETING PARTICIPANTS
October 28 and November 9, 1993
Rebecca Archer
Wendy Schaetzel Lesko
Intern
Activism 2000
Advocacy Institute
Green Lewis
Douglas Bailey
Director of Community Services
Chairman
AFL-CIO
American Political Network, Inc.
Andrew McGuire
Susan Bales
Executive Director
Director of Children's Programs
The Trauma Foundation
Benton Foundation
Zoe Mikva
Kathy Bonk
Director of Development
Co-Director
The Advocacy Institute
Communications Consortium
Mark MacCarthy
David Bositis
Vice President, Government Affairs
Joint Center on Political and Economic Studies
Capital Cities - ABC Inc.
David Cohen
Vicki Otten
Co-Director
Legislative Assistant
Advocacy Institute
Office of Senator Simon
Laurie Duker
Michael Pertschuk
Senior Fellow, Children's Safety Network
Co-Director
National Center for Education for Maternal and
Advocacy Institute
Child Health
Manny Rouvelas
Charles G. Ehrlich, Esq.
Preston, Gates, Ellis & Rouvelas, Meeds
Pettit & Martin
Founder, Legal Community Against Violence
Kathleen Sheekey
Co-Director
Veronica Johnson
Advocacy Institute
Assistant to Co-Directors
Advocacy Institute
Shoshanna Sofaer
Department of Health Care Sciences
Susan Kaplan
George Washington University
Chief Counsel, Subcommittee on the
Constitution
Josh Sugarmann
Senate Judiciary Committee
Executive Director
Violence Policy Center
Larry Kirkman
Executive Director
Linda Tarr-Whelan
The Benton Foundation
Executive Director
Center for Policy Alternatives
Erna Koch
Legal Fellow
Larry Wallack, Ph.D.
Center for Policy Alternatives
President
Berkeley Media Studies Group
Deborah Leff
President
Judy Weitz
The Joyce Foundation
formerly Executive Director of Kids Count