‘Pro-Gun Forces Push Back” was in the headline of an article last week about testimony before the Senate Education Committee regarding the gun-free zone amendment to Senate Bill 357. Surveys and polls going back for more than a decade demonstrate that only a small percentage of gun owners “push back” against any regulation of guns in America. Yet this small faction gets to be called “pro-gun.”
These are the push-back activists who were able to gut the Brady Act of 1993 and kick-start the current era of gun ownership policy that makes less and less sense. The rest of the pro-gun citizenry disagrees with many of their victories, gets painted with the push-back brush, and is overlooked in such headlines. We know the country needs different gun ownership policies, but we often aren’t sure what they should be. We may disagree on options, but we know the present circumstances have cornered our country in unsafe territory.
One hundred million pro-gun Americans own at least one gun and from 50 to 75 percent of them want sensible change like background checks for all gun sales. An untold number of pro-gun Americans don’t currently own a gun, but also want sensible change. That’s me. Taken together, we are an enormous group, and we need to get a better grip on our numbers and our clout.
The Push-Back Minority has taken over the pro-gun voice and we need to take it back. They have sustained their coup so far, in part, by depriving the nation of information. Local, state and federal laws have increasingly blocked the collection of data, starting with the Dickey Amendment of 1996. It effectively ended any federally funded research about gun safety. There is no data base, vote or referendum that would allow the Sensible Change Majority even to gauge its numbers.
We increasingly have signs of the potential strength of our majority. There were enough of us in Florida to support the Parkland students in convincing the state legislature and governor to pass the first sensible gun legislation in 20 years, despite the opposition of the “all-powerful” minority. There have been enough of us to sponsor 20,400 pieces of gun-related legislation following mass shooting events in the past 25 years, and to pass 3,000 of them into state law.
The Push-Back Minority wants to prevent any public, nationwide expression of our numbers. They don’t want that information out in the open. That’s why the minority is spreading the message that more than 500 March For Our Lives events scheduled this Saturday around the country are “anti-gun,” “gun-ban” marches including those in Concord, Portsmouth and Nashua. They want us to think that no self-respecting pro-gun citizen would attend because they are scared we might get a national estimate of our numbers.
They are wrong about the march. There is no good reason for pro-gun citizens in the Sensible Change Majority to stay away. Participation doesn’t mean any of us are abandoning pro-gun convictions. It doesn’t mean we are abetting extremists who would force onerous gun bans on the nation. It means we have stopped being quiet about the reasonable changes we could agree on and have started to put the collective weight of our majority behind those changes. This is entirely consistent with the mission of the march.
The mission statement also articulates the intent to put pressure on legislators that can’t be ignored. This is critical for two reasons. Despite its size, the Sensible Change Majority has been easy to ignore. We rarely register our opinions at all, even in the wake of a mass killing. The Senate Education Committee received 200 emails against the recent gun-free zone amendment to HB 357 and only 32 supporting it, by report of its chair. The mission of the march is to reverse those numbers.
More importantly, the mission of the march is to start a pressure for change that won’t let up. Florida legislators from both parties visited Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 48 hours after the mass killings when it was still a police investigation site. In later interviews, they described the effect of seeing bloodstains on classroom floors, abandoned books, lesson plans about how laws are passed in the legislature, and backpacks scattered about in the chaos of turned-over furniture and broken glass. They shared how the experience affected them and their support for the subsequent legislation.
On one hand, the changes wrought by those legislators have been critical. On the other hand, everybody needs to break this pattern of acting after another killing. We need to push out ahead and stay there until we see a decline of deaths from mass killings and gun violence. Our Sensible Change Majority may not be able to stop the next mass killing, but we can make our voices louder than the Push-Back Minority, and re-define what “pro-gun” means.
Pro-gun owners who want sensible change can join the march in good conscience. If we start on Saturday and don’t let up, then future headlines might read, “A New Pro-Gun Voice: Sensible Gun Owners Out Push the Push-Back.”
(David Coursin lives in Northwood.)