Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Money doesn’t buy zeal for gun regulations
After the massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, the gun control movement was small and badly outspent by the National Rifle Association. Parents seeking an outlet for their grief and rage congregated on Facebook, where they formed their own group, Moms Demand Action, to push for stricter gun laws.
By far, the most significant and bestknown donor in the years since has been Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire and former New York City mayor. In 2013, his mayors’ initiative merged with Moms Demand Action to create Everytown for Gun Safety, the closest thing that the gun control movement has to a counterweight to the NRA. That year, the group spent $36.5 million, compared with $4.7 million the year before.
More groups sprang up, including Giffords, started in 2013 by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was nearly killed in a mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that claimed the lives of six people, and the March for Our Lives, founded by survivors of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
As recent progress on a bipartisan gun safety deal on Capitol Hill illustrates, the nascent movement has coalesced into something more formidable. It went from being considered a guaranteed-to-lose issue for Democrats to something candidates organize around, especially on the state level. But because gun control was viewed as particularly divisive, many major philanthropists and big foundations have been reluctant to dive into an issue long seen as not just polarized but intractable.
Yet, as gun sales and gun deaths have risen in tandem and the number of mass shootings continues to increase, including the attacks last month in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, big donors have begun to move off the sidelines.
“Since Buffalo, I have spoken to a dozen large funders who are quickly scrambling to figure out where they can play a role in the current gun violence crisis,” said David Brotherton, vice chair of the Fund for a Safer Future, the largest national donor collaborative working on gun violence prevention, and a program officer at the Atlanta philanthropy the Kendeda Fund. “This is snowballing right now.”
In addition to moments of crisis, people were trying to make progress where the potential political heat was lower. More and more funders have tried tackling gun violence through the less politically divisive lens of public health, through community intervention and as a matter of racial equity. Big-name philanthropists including Steve and Connie Ballmer of the Ballmer Group and John and Laura Arnold of Arnold Ventures have begun to make tens of millions of dollars in grants on different aspects of gun violence prevention.
The gun control movement is better funded than it was a decade ago, but it still is not outspending the NRA. Even with recent legal challenges and boardroom battles, the NRA remains a powerful organization with years of success in blocking legislative efforts to restrict gun sales.
It remains to be seen how the bipartisan deal for a narrow set of gun safety measures, an agreement reached by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats and endorsed by President Joe Biden, will move through the evenly divided Senate.
Money is also only part of the equation. More donors will help the gun control movement spend on lobbying, research and organizing, and on donations to political candidates who support the cause. But matching the intensity and discipline of gun rights supporters’ political activism is not just about who spends more.
Gun rights are an especially galvanizing issue for many Republican voters, particularly in primaries, and Republicans have been far more likely to use messaging about guns to excite their base than Democrats have for the bulk of this year, although some are increasingly working gun safety into their pitches now.
“It is a much heavier lift than everybody thinks because in attacking this gun thing, you’re taking on the entire identity and ethos of the GOP,” said Ryan Busse, a former executive at gun company Kimber who is now an industry critic.
Richard Feldman, a former NRA regional political director, said the gun control movement might be better organized and funded than in the past but the politics of the issue still largely favored gun rights.
“Everyone has an opinion about guns, but come November, it’s the determining issue for gun owners,” Feldman said.
It is that strength of feeling that helped keep donors away. Liz Dunning, vice president of development at the gun control group Brady, worked in education nonprofits and philanthropy before switching to gun control. “I know what it looks like when the really big philanthropic players engage, and it looks different from this,” she said.
“What would happen if Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the Ford Foundation came together and said, ‘We’re not going to live this way anymore, and we’re going to tap the resources that we have right now to make a difference’?” asked Dunning, whose mother was shot and killed.
But the decade of activism since Sandy Hook has laid the groundwork for change.
And the grinding increase in gun violence, not just in high-profile mass shootings but also in domestic violence and suicides, has steadily added to the ranks of small donors and the rolls of volunteers.
Laurene Powell Jobs’ organization, the Emerson Collective, began giving to gun violence prevention groups a decade ago, most notably through the nonprofit Chicago CRED. Emerson gives $25 million annually to the group, which does outreach directly to young people in the city who are at risk of shooting or being shot.
This year, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie, announced more than $20 million in grants to groups working to reduce community gun violence.
Arnold Ventures, the philanthropic arm of billionaires John and Laura Arnold, started working on gun violence prevention in 2018, the year of the shooting in Parkland. It made a $20 million gift to start the National Collaborative for Gun Violence Research to try to get data to shape good policy. In 2020, Arnold Ventures also started working on community violence reduction strategies with an additional $5 million. This month, the group released a new request for proposals for additional research grants.
“So much more needs to be done,” Walter Katz, vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, said in an interview. “There’s so much work to go around.”