States move on gun control

President Obama, speaking Sunday evening from the Oval Office about the “new normal” of domestic terror threats, made what must have seemed like an obvious point to most: securing the homeland will require making it hard for home-grown terrorists to get their hands on guns.

Yet, less than two days after San Bernardino, Congress again shot down efforts to keep guns away from dangerous people — including suspects on the terror watch list. That’s the power of the gun lobby in America today.

{mosads}The known fact that many politicians pay blind obeisance to the NRA no longer surprises anyone. But let’s not let their serial failure to make us safer obscure another fact: gun safety measures are being enacted at a record pace, all across the country, by state legislators.

This may come as a surprise to some who have swallowed the line cast by the NRA and conservatives: anyone promoting commonsense reform of gun laws is somehow un-American. But the legislative record, and new polling, tell another story about what the world outside of Washington thinks about guns.

Since the massacre of children at Newtown, 39 state legislatures have passed at least 117 measures making gun laws tougher, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the nonpartisan group that tracks laws on the issue. That includes gun-friendly states like Colorado, which adopted a universal background check requirement and banned high-capacity magazines of the kind used by the killers in San Bernardino. State law enforcement leaders say the new law has blocked hundreds if not thousands of prohibited gun buyers, even as law-abiding Coloradans bought record numbers of guns with no problem.

At the same time, NRA-inspired efforts to weaken gun laws by forcing unwilling universities to allow guns on campus, or destroying state background check systems, have been defeated in many states.

There’s much more we can do, including barring terror suspects from buying guns and explosives and making sure all buyers pass an instant criminal background check – something more than 80 percent of gun owners and 73 percent of NRA owners support, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey. But we can’t get those common-sense measures – or much of anything – done in Congress when the leadership is on the payroll of a gun lobby that pays them to just say no.

Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for example, has raked in nearly a million dollars from the NRA alone. Does anyone believe he’ll do anything but call his caucus into formation behind Wayne LaPierre when the next shooter strikes?

State legislators, on the other hand, are ready to go. In October, the State Innovation Exchange, or SiX, hosted nearly 300 legislators from all 50 states to discuss the state of the country. Many attendees told us they’ve had enough of the NRA and its extortion of transactional lawmakers and are ready to have a real debate on gun safety in their own state houses. Many have already done so and won.

In 2015 alone, legislatures in North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado rejected NRA-led efforts to roll back life-saving background checks. In West Virginia, Missouri, Utah and Montana legislators defeated measures that would have eliminated any training or permitting requirements for those who want to carry concealed, loaded guns in public places.

These states aren’t liberal bastions, which explains why a former president of the NRA, in an internal memo, called the gun lobby’s efforts this year in Florida (which let a raft of extreme NRA bills die a quiet death) “a huge train wreck.” 

Actually, the train is on the right track, and it’s barely left the station. Next year, lawmakers will work to enact a full spectrum of laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and the seriously mentally ill. Other measures will protect more women and children from gun-related domestic abuse, and require safe storage of guns to prevent the tragedy of unintentional shootings and accidents, which too often have killed innocent kids playing with unsecured firearms that too many parents have failed to teach are not toys.

Big majorities of Americans — by which we mean Democrats, Republicans and Independents with no financial stake in boosting gun sales — believe we should take these steps because they’ll save lives, and because they won’t take a single gun out of the hands of a single law-abiding firearm owner.

Many states have made laws like marriage equality and a living wage possible while members of Congress sat on their hands. Now they’re ready to take on the gun lobby – and the gun violence that kills nearly 90 Americans every day and stains our national honor.

Let’s get past our fixation with the congressional train wreck and look to the states for real change.

Rathod is executive director of the State Innovation Exchange, an organization that serves as a resource center for state legislators to pass progressive policy across the country. Glaze is a consultant and former executive director of Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention group in the United States.