What Hillary Clinton did this Democratic primary would have been unthinkable a few years ago: she made dealing with gun violence a central issue of her campaign.

Instead of posing with guns and trying to reassure gun owners that she loved hunting and supported the second amendment, as she and other Democratic presidential candidates had done before, she came out swinging against the country’s entire gun industry, blaming them directly for the violence America sees.

Clinton held multiple campaign events on gun violence. It wasn’t just family members from Sandy Hook and other high-profile mass shootings who were brought onstage. Clinton held events with black mothers whose children were victims of police violence and gun violence, including gang violence. African Americans are the majority of the country’s gun murder victims, but their stories are often relegated to the margins or the backdrop of the gun debate, even though more than 50,000 black men have been murdered with guns over the past decade. Clinton put the grief of black mothers front and center.

Clinton’s focus on the majority of America’s gun violence victims, and her willingness to embrace gun violence prevention as a winning issue for Democrats, not a dangerous third-rail, have already changed the conversation.

But when it comes to Clinton’s actual policy platform for addressing gun violence, she hasn’t changed much. Her platform is the same old gun control platform from the 1990s: background checks, a ban on assault weapons, the idea of using aggressive lawsuits against the gun industry to pressure for reforms that can’t be passed in Congress. Her set of solutions to gun violence has barely shifted in 20 years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton talks families of victims of gun violence as she campaigned in Connecticut ahead of the presidential primary. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

But what we understand about preventing gun violence has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Slowly, out of the spotlight of Washington politics, states and cities have tested gun violence prevention strategies, and found some that have made a real difference. Gun violence researchers have published key studies, pushing our knowledge forward in an area that’s still hobbled by a lack of data and political battles over researcher funding. Gun control groups have begun to acknowledge that there are successful ways to reduce US shootings without changing anything about gun regulations or gun laws. Local gun dealers and gun rights supporters have begun to step up to tackle the two-thirds of America’s gun deaths that are gun suicides – and trying to find ways to reduce the most deadly toll of guns without infringing on gun rights.

‘Shut the fuck up’ about guns

Hillary has led the way for Democrats to re-engage with the politics of guns in America. After a passionate public response to the Democratic 26-hour sit-in for a vote on gun bills this week, gun control may now be a breakout issue for Democrats campaigning all over the country.

The sit-in was an extraordinary political moment, one that’s likely to dramatically increase the importance of gun control as an issue for a large group of Democratic politicians, as well as to reshape the broader stalemate between Republicans and Democrats.

What the sit-in did not do was reshape the broader trajectory of the gun control fight. Democrats have been fighting for background checks on all gun sales on and off for 27 years. They still haven’t finished the job. What changed last night was simply that Democrats, after years of dodging the gun issue, may have fully come back on the playing field.

Obama’s administration wouldn’t touch the gun debate during his first term as president. When Obama’s then-attorney general Eric Holder mentioned the assault weapons ban, Obama’s chief of staff sent him a clear message: “Shut the fuck up” about guns.

America's gun problem is so much bigger than mass shootings Read more

“A decade ago, many of the principal obstacles in the fight for stronger gun laws were in the leadership of the Democratic party,” said Arkadi Gerney, a longtime gun control advocate and gun policy expert at the Center for American Progress. “There was occasional lip-service, but the elite consensus among DC insider Democrats was that gun control was a political loser and the NRA was too powerful to fight.”

Now Democrats have decided that taking on the NRA is a great way to energize their base. But it’s one thing to try to win elections by stoking Democratic voters’ anger about Republicans blocking laws to reduce gun violence. It’s another thing to actually move the needle on the number of people dying.

A cycle of mistrust

What wins elections for Democrats isn’t necessarily what saves lives. If Democrats are serious about the latter, too, they can’t just re-litigate the sometimes dubious policies of the 1990s. And they can’t pretend that all progress on reducing gun violence in America is being blocked by Republicans and the NRA.

It’s not. There are ways to save lives that have nothing to do with regulating guns. All that’s holding them back is lack of public attention and a little bit of money.

We’ve been fiercely debating gun violence, police violence, and criminal justice reform as if these are three completely separate problems. In fact, community advocates on the ground often see them as deeply interconnected problems – a vicious cycle of mistrust that makes everyone less safe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama wiped a tear as he spoke at the White House on reducing gun violence in January 2016. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Researchers have found that most urban gun violence is driven by very small networks of extremely high-risk men – and that focusing prevention efforts on those men can reduce gang-related violence by a third or more. There’s clear evidence that the best way to reduce violence is to zero in on the places and the people most at risk of contributing to violence – not whole “bad” neighborhoods, not whole generations of young black men in hoodies, but particular addresses, particular street corners, the one or two percent of high-risk young men who are actually driving the violence and putting everyone around them in danger. Researchers and community advocates have been exploring ways that reducing gun violence might require reckoning with racially biased policing – and how restoring the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of black community members may help break the cycle of retaliatory shootings.

After Sandy Hook, as the Obama administration was launching a new national platform on gun violence prevention, a group of black ministers came to Washington to push the White House to focus more on the gun deaths of black men. They asked the White House to include funding for successful targeted urban violence prevention strategies in the national platform.



“What was said to us by the White House was, there’s really no support nationally to address the issue of urban violence,” Rev Charles Harrison, a pastor from Indianapolis said. “The support was to address the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas – schools where white kids were killed.”

The reluctance to talk about black men as the majority of America’s gun violence victims is beginning to change. So is the huge gap between the national policy debate and what’s working in cities like Boston and New Orleans.

In the tumultuous days since the Orlando shooting, there is an urgency in the debate, which speaks of a new momentum. There are lessons for proponents and opponents of guns, the gun industry, politicians and the media.

Outrage is important. Outrage is the beginning. But outrage won’t get us far enough. To move forward, it will take discipline, political compromise, and a relentless focus on what actually works to save lives.