Their Cold, Dead Hands: Is the Only Solution to America’s Gun Problem at the Local Level?

Questioned in 2002 about her greatest accomplishment, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously answered “Tony Blair and the New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”

One wonders if Wayne LaPierre—who finally stepped down this year as CEO and executive president of the National Rifle Association, a position he had held since 1991—might not have had a similar moment of satisfaction watching Vice President Harris’s recent discussion with Oprah Winfrey, in which the Democratic nominee for president proudly identified as a gun owner and laughingly proclaimed that, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”

Harris’s media blitz celebrating her ownership of a Glock handgun and LaPierre’s defenestration from the NRA are indicative of the broader shifts that have transformed the landscape of US gun culture over the course of the 21st century.

Harris is representative of changing demographics of gun ownership in the US, shifts that were accelerated by the unprecedented spike in gun purchases that occurred in 2020 and 2021. More Democrats, women, and non-white Americans are buying firearms than ever before, and most of them are buying handguns for the purpose of self-defense.

LaPierre, conversely, was until recently the country’s most recognizable figurehead for the white, conservative and male demographics that are still predominant among US gun owners, despite recent shifts. His ouster and the attendant diminishment of the NRA as a force in US politics were accomplished immediately by LaPierre’s baroque penchant for graft, but inevitably by pressure from both sides of the political spectrum. On the right, extremist “no compromise” activists have rejected the NRA’s institutionalism; on the left, social movements that have emerged in the wake of high profile mass shootings, bolstered by big-money donors like Mike Bloomberg, have been outraising and outspending the NRA in recent election cycles.

But it seems unlikely that this newfound political muscle will produce significant national victories for the gun regulation movement. When Oprah gave her the chance to talk about her support for gun regulation, Harris spent most of her time affirming support for an assault weapons ban (though she walked back her prior support for a mandatory buyback). Her focus on assault rifles reflects voters’ understandable anxieties about the horrific and highly publicized mass shootings that have been perpetrated with these weapons.

Such a ban, however, faces considerable political headwinds, and would be of minimal utility in the fight against our gun violence epidemic. A national ban on the sale of new AR-15s would leave an estimated 44 million AR-15s in circulation. Even if all such rifles were taken off the street tomorrow, relative to handguns, rifles are used in a tiny fraction of gun homicides (to say nothing of gun suicides, which account for the majority of gun deaths annually).

This is not to say that Americans should be untroubled by the easy availability of assault rifles in our country. Recent studies suggest that fears of political violence played an outsized role in motivating first time gun buyers during the pandemic, and that Americans, especially conservatives, are increasingly open to the necessity of political violence. With Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric and election denialism coloring the attitudes of tens of millions of Americans ahead of a closely contested election, it is not unreasonable to wonder how the widespread ownership of weapons of war by private citizens would shape the outcome of a potential constitutional crisis.

If such apocalyptic questions haunt our national gun culture, at the local level, the communities that have been hit the hardest by our gun violence epidemic are taking meaningful action despite the gridlock of our national gun politics. Organizations like New Jersey’s Paterson Healing Collective, Chicago’s Southwest Organizing Project, and Oakland’s Youth Alive! are intervening directly with the networks of young people at highest risk for being gun violence victims and perpetrators, and engaging in broader initiatives to serve the needs of the working class communities they serve. The impact of their work has been startling, and is at least partly to thank for the significant decrease in gun homicide numbers seen since the spike experienced during the height of the pandemic.

Such work will continue to face considerable challenges. The United States today is a country of 333 million people and nearly 500 million privately owned firearms. That reality has been shaped by decades of acquiescence to the firearms industry by federal lawmakers, a posture that Democrats like Harris seem unlikely to change. As we look for leadership in the struggle against gun violence, we would do well to look away from political elites and towards the communities most impacted by their failures.