Each new mass shooting in America feels like a recurring civic nightmare: Before California, there was Colorado. And before that, Oregon, so nothing is changing. But that’s not true, gun control advocates say. Beneath that horrific sameness, a change is afoot.

Consider Oregon, they say.

Three years ago, following the massacre of children at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, several states including Oregon tried to enact their own gun controls instead of waiting on the US Congress, which failed to pass a widely supported background checks bill. Connecticut, New York, Delaware and Colorado passed laws requiring universal background checks for gun purchases – but nationally, states passed as many laws weakening their gun laws as strengthening them two years out from Sandy Hook. And Oregon seemed stuck.

Then in May this year – more than two years later – background checks passed in Oregon. Something changed, but how?

“People think it’s impossible. It’s not,” said Penny Okamoto, executive director of a group called Ceasefire Oregon. “There is a path.”



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She and other gun control advocates have developed a three-step approach to effecting change, and in many places, it seems to be working. “In the three years since Sandy Hook, 39 states have enacted 117 laws that strengthen gun violence prevention,” said Allison Anderman, a staff attorney for the national Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The big change – the most effective law – is the requirement of universal background checks, and 18 states have adopted it. Oregon was the most recent.



The first of three steps toward that change, Okamoto said, was a grassroots effort. Just as mass shootings are symbols used to terrorize populations, they can also be used to galvanize. “Sandy Hook was the turning point for us,” she said. “People got really angry.”

During the grassroots phase, she said, her group and others “gained a lot of legislative experience”, which looked a lot like failure. During the two years in which Oregon’s state government seemed stalled, gun control advocates were learning what doesn’t work. Their failures were repeated and public, she said, but: “We got a lot of branding.”

Local grassroots efforts had limits, though, Okamoto said. So the second step required outside help. “When the big groups came in, they brought the muscle that we didn’t have,” she said. She reeled off a list of large national gun control groups – the Brady Center, Everytown for Gun Safety, the Center for American Progress – who swooped in with budgets for political lobbying. “They were our answer to the NRA,” she said, referring to the National Rifle Association. “That put us on equal footing, politically.”

In 2014 during Oregon’s midterm elections, the NRA poured cash into the coffers of pro-gun candidates, and a coalition of opponents poured money into the campaigns of anti-gun candidates. According to Everytown, which is backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, it alone funneled $600,000 into the state. The NRA made phone calls, sent mail, urged its members to contact their legislators. In the meantime Everytown bought ads on television and online.

That’s when the effort in Oregon reached its third step. “If you ask people about ‘gun control’, they might say they don’t like it. But if you ask people about specifics, like assault rifles or background checks, they’re overwhelmingly for it. People want change,” Okamoto said. “So we put the vote in their hands.”

It’s simple to vote in Oregon, which holds all elections by mail. When residents apply for drivers’ licenses they are automatically registered to vote, and about three weeks before an election they receive a ballot in the mail. They fill it out at home and send it back. “It’s so easy,” Okamoto said.

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By focusing on gun control, activists had essentially turned the election into a referendum on guns. When the dust – and the dollars – settled, two new Democratic candidates won seats in the state senate, and tipped the balance in favor of gun control. By May of this year Governor Kate Brown signed Senate bill 941, requiring background checks for all sales. It was the first major gun control law passed in Oregon in almost a decade and a half.

“Last year Oregon got a D+ on our annual state gun law scorecard,” Allison Anderman, the Law Center attorney, said. This year’s scores have not been released yet, she said, but “Oregon’s score is significantly higher.”

Tim Daly, the director for gun campaigns at the Center for American Progress, said Oregon offers a template for other states. “That is replicable for sure,” he said. “With tragedies like the most recent mass shooting in San Bernardino, we expect that same intense level of interest and momentum to bring change to other states as well.”



His colleague Chelsea Parsons, though, warned that people on both sides of the gun issue – for and against – tend to feel hopeless or entrenched, in light of headlines about infamous mass shootings. “The bigger threat is more interpersonal violence that becomes fatal because of easy access to guns,” she said. The good news, she said, is that in the past three years 18 states have adopted laws to protect victims of domestic abuse from gun violence.

“Momentum is clearly on our side,” Daly said.



Each of the gun control advocates said a federal law is dramatically preferable because of what Anderman called the “iron pipeline”, the movement of weapons across state lines, from states with looser gun laws to those with tighter restrictions. And over time, some gun laws in some states haven’t stuck. In Colorado, for example, sweeping gun reforms passed after mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and Sandy Hook ended in an NRA-led recall of the legislators who spearheaded them, and partial repeal of those laws. But the state-by-state change – requiring slower, calculated steps – is change nonetheless.

“Over 90% of the general population wants universal background checks,” she said, echoing the findings of a poll by Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “Eighty-three percent of gun owners want it, and 70% of NRA members want it. The American public is ready.”