Carusone is out to permanently change the conversation on guns. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Pia Carusone

When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded by a gunman in 2011, it was her top aide, Pia Carusone, who kept her stunned office running through her long recovery.

Now Carusone is back at Giffords’s side with a radically different mandate — to permanently change the conversation on guns in the United States.


Carusone is currently the executive director of Americans for Responsible Solutions, the group founded by Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly.

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The group — along with other pro-gun control groups like Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the Brady Campaign and Sandy Hook Promise — lobbied hard on the background checks bill that ultimately failed to clear the Senate in April.

But their ambitions go far beyond any single bill.

“Our long-term existence in this is not just to pass the background checks bill,” Carusone told POLITICO. “It’s to create an environment where people can talk about gun issues in a more sensible way.”

People, she said, “can be gun owners and think that there are things we can do to make our community safer.”

Operating out of a loft-style space in D.C.’s Penn Quarter that’s more befitting of a hip tech startup than a political group, Americans for Responsible Solutions has grown by leaps and bounds.

The group — which launched in earnest after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., — has already posted a staggering $11 million fundraising haul in its first four months of existence. Its quarterly report in May showed it had a membership of nearly 366,000 and about 53,500 donors.

Carusone’s journey to Capitol Hill started on Howard Dean’s campaign. She bounced around New England that cycle — working for a handful of campaigns, including John Kerry’s general election presidential bid.

A few years later, she wound up looking for work on Capitol Hill as a chief of staff — and really wanted to work for a freshman. She and Giffords had a similar outlook on how a congressional office should be run.

“We talked a lot in that first meeting about running an office like a small business,” Carusone said. “Every person that walks in the door is a customer who should always be right, who should always be happy.”

After Giffords left Congress to focus on her recovery, Carusone joined the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security as assistant secretary for public affairs. When Giffords and Kelly decided to launch Americans for Responsible Solutions, it wasn’t an easy career decision for Carusone to jump to a super PAC.

“It was a big job at DHS that I had spent a long time getting,” she said. “It takes a long time to get those types of appointments.”

Carusone finds the work with Americans for Responsible Solutions rewarding and sees the ultimate challenge as figuring out how to change the political calculus in Washington on the issue of gun control.

“There’s not arguments about background checks happening” among Americans at large, Carusone said. It’s only in Congress where they’re controversial.

“It’s kind of a fun puzzle to be figured out,” she said. “I think it will be sorted out. It’s a stale argument here on the Hill. I think that’s going to be different, and we’re going to be part of changing that.”