Finally, we have an answer from Everytown and Moms Demand Action on a policy question — albeit one delivered somewhat indirectly.

As I noted a while back, the outfit has been reluctant to outline its desired reforms:

Strangely, representatives from the group were accommodating of my inquiries right up until the point at which I asked for specifics: namely, for the group’s position on “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, both of which the leaders of MAIG and MDA wanted to ban last year. Rebecca Morgan, a Mom who Demands Action, who contacted me on Twitter to tell me that she “volunteers” her time to “work on common sense gun safety legislation such as: bg checks which 74% of NRA members support” ran away when I asked for more detail. “Sorry, Charles,” Morgan wrote. “Juggling helping kids w/ homework & cooking dinner & talking to u. Gotta go or I’m going to burn dinner etc.” My subsequent attempts to engage have yielded nothing but silence. Why? Erika Soto Lamb, Everytown’s communications director, also clammed up when I asked her a simple policy question: “Does Everytown have a position on an ‘assault weapons’ ban or a limitation on the size of magazines?” Dodging the issue completely, Lamb curtly referred me to the group’s website — which is notably silent on those topics. I pushed again, and received no response. Only on my third attempt did I get anything remotely approximating an answer, accompanied by the instruction that I must quote the reply in full.


That full answer is here. In it, the outfit refuses to endorse a ban on certain magazines or on “assault weapons.”

This week, however, the two groups put out a questionnaire for prospective politicians to answer. It’s mostly the usual repetitive and dishonest stuff: There are a number of questions about background checks, all of which pretend that conscious public policy decisions are “loopholes”; there’s some standard-fare pablum: “Do you agree: we can both do more to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people and protect the rights of responsible, law-abiding people?”; and there are some statistics that are badly lacking in context. But question eight should raise some eyebrows. It asks:

In many mass shootings, including the 2011 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, AZ, bystanders have been able to subdue perpetrators of mass shootings when the shooters stop to reload. Research from Virginia showed that the federal limit on high-capacity magazines in effect from 1994 to 2004 led to a 50% reduction in criminals being armed with high-capacity magazines— and when the law expired, the share of crime guns with such magazines doubled. Several states have enacted limits on the size of ammunition magazines. Do you support limits on the capacity of ammunition magazines?


There is, of course, no reference to this on either outfit’s website.