GUN BY GUN CO-FOUNDER’S DAD DIED AFTER ‘92 SHOOTING
more personal. In 1992, when he was 10 and living on Staten Island in New York, his father was shot in the back in a botched robbery while on a business trip in San Francisco. He died from his injuries a month later.
Johnstone’s mother, Katina Johnstone, founded New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, a legislative advocacy group. She also helped organize the first Silent March in 1994, during which nearly 40,000 pairs of shoes were placed at the U.S. Capitol — one for every victim of gun violence the previous year. Johnstone’s father’s shoes were among them.
Leading up to the march, the family’s basement was filled with shoes, Ian Johnstone recalled. As a child, he accompanied his mother on trips to Albany to talk to state representatives. She made an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2000, running as a Democrat on Staten Island.
Ian Johnstone said he became frustrated with advocacy as a solution to gun violence. “I came to see it tends to go nowhere,” he said. In his view, there has not been major federal legislation on the issue since the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004.
Heandking,whometasstudents at Binghamton (N.Y.) University, began to mull over other approaches to gun violence in 2013. Johnstone was at the time the chief operating officer of the startup he founded, Blissmo, which delivers organic and healthful products to consumers; King was doing postdoctoral work in physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Johnstone now works for TruBrain, which makes drinks and bars meant to enhance cognitive function. King worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development until last year and is now in the private sector.
“What are the techie solves we could come up with for this?” is how King describes their mindset. The answer: a Kickstarter campaign for gun buybacks.
Gun by Gun, they decided, would be “about getting guns off the street, but also about creating community and giving people a sense of agency,” Johnstone said.
They helped raise money for a gun buyback program in San Francisco,whichgotthemstarted, and have done so in other cities, including Los Angeles.
The duo looked at what the social entrepreneurship organizations Watsi, Kiva and Donors- Choose were doing and discovered that crowdfunding was not as easy as it looked.
“People tend to think you publish a page and then the internet just sends people there and the money starts rolling in,” Johnstone said. “The reality is that it takes a lot of old-school organizing,” like reaching out and asking people for donations directly. He said one of the unwritten rules of crowdfunding is that success hinges on a campaign raising 20 percentto40percentofitsgoal within the first 48 hours.
“You need to kind of manufacture that, find the people who are going to support it early on and get commitments so that you can launch with momentum,” he said.
The Gun by Gun founders said they encountered limitations with crowdfunding platforms such as Indiegogo and Tilt, which is now defunct. They wanted the ability, for instance, to add offline donations into a campaign’s coffers.
They turned to Nationbuilder, a software networking company geared toward political campaigns, through which they designed a custom platform.
Johnstone and King have struggled against the perception that gun buybacks are ineffective. For years, buybacks attracted older gun owners turning over defunct weapons, not the people or guns typically involved in crimes, said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the violence prevention research program and a professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis. Also, there were stories of people selling their guns and using the money to buy better ones.
Buybacks have become more effective, Wintemute said, as organizers have offered bigger financial incentives for newer, higher-powered weapons. At the Los Angeles buyback, for instance, those surrendering assault weapons received $200 gift cards, twice the amount for handguns and revolvers. An Uzi submachine gun and an anti-tank rocket launcher were among the weapons turned in.
Cities are using buybacks as part of broad crime-reduction strategies. In an interview, Garcetti said he saw buybacks as a way to send a positive message.
“It gives us an opportunity to state our cultural values, that we believe guns should not just be lying around unprotected, unwanted,” he said. “That we can trytomakeadentinthenumber of guns on the streets of LA.”
Johnstone compares crowdfunded gun buybacks to volunteering for beach cleanups and at soup kitchens. “Is the beach cleanup going to make a dent in climate change?” Johnstone said. “Probably not. But it’s an opportunity for like-minded people to get together and on a very small scale, make a difference.”
Similarly, there’s a limit to what crowdfunded buybacks can accomplish. They “won’t end gun violence,” he said. “But they can help reduce the likelihood of it in any given community, and they help people feel engaged.”