While campaigners have for years championed background checks and other centrist demands, a new left wing to the movement is calling for bolder policies

After years of careful centrist messaging, many gun control advocates say they are ready for the movement to develop a more aggressive left flank, one that argues not just for moderate gun laws, but that guns themselves are the problem.

When a gunman opened fire on a crowd of thousands from his Las Vegas hotel room Sunday, he was using guns and ammunition that appear to have been purchased legally. The Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 people and wounded almost 500, had no serious criminal record, and a local gun store said he had passed a background check before buying some of his guns.

Requiring background checks on every gun sale – rather than just some, as current federal law requires – has been the major policy goal of most American gun control groups in recent years, part of the movement’s strategy of studious moderation in a country where civilians own an estimated 300m guns.

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“I think the public is far ahead on this issue, when it comes to bolder policy initiatives, than the politicians are,” said Igor Volsky, a founder of Guns Down, a nascent group that is trying to stake out a bolder position. “What I want to hear from them is that we need fewer guns.”

The gun control movement’s years of pushing for compromise solutions “have moved this debate further and further to the right”, Volsky said. “By asking for half a loaf and not the full loaf, they are really starting at a real point of weakness.

“Nobody saw any red flags. Nobody thought anything was wrong with him,” Volsky said of Paddock. “It’s not enough to just limit the kind of people who own guns. You have to go after the guns themselves. Guns are the problem.”

Volsky, a 31-year-old progressive activist at the Center for American Progress, built his Twitter following in 2015 with an incisive critique of the “thoughts and prayers” politicians offer after mass shootings – pairing those messages with a record of each politician’s campaign donations from the National Rifle Association, America’s gun rights powerhouse.

With Guns Down, Volsky wants to put a discussion on gun licensing and registration back on the table, not just improved background checks. He endorses full-throated support for the assault weapons ban, a controversial and not particularly effective policy that many gun control groups have quietly distanced themselves from in recent years.

Volsky does not say Americans should have no guns, simply that they should have “fewer guns”, and that guns should be much harder to obtain. Certain kinds of guns, like military-style “assault weapons”, which were banned from 1994 to 2004, “should be banned entirely from the civilian market”, he wrote.

It would not be accurate to call his approach radical, Volsky said. “It may be radical here in DC, where politicians are afraid to cross certain lines. In America nationwide, I don’t think ideas like, ‘If you need a license to drive a car, you should have a license to purchase a gun’ are radical at all.”

Centrist gun control leaders say they are welcoming Volsky’s new effort with open arms.



“I think it’s a very good sign,” said Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. “Every movement has to have a left and right flank. That’s a sign of a healthy movement.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gays Against Guns activists demonstrate in New York last month. Photograph: Pacific Press / Barcroft Images

One gun control advocate compared the current gun control movement to a debate over animal rights led only by the Humane Society, with no People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) as a more radical and confrontational left flank. Watts drew a parallel to healthcare: “You don’t hear Obamacare people saying, ‘Don’t talk about single-payer [universal healthcare],’” she said.

“I think it’s important for a movement like this to have a lot of different voices and approaches,” said Kris Brown, the co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of America’s oldest major gun control groups.

For most kinds of negotiations, staking out a more extreme position is a useful tactic in negotiating towards an agreement that meets in the middle, said Kristin Goss, a Duke University political scientist who wrote a book on the history of American gun control activism. But she said that might not hold true for gun control in America.

“With this one, when you’re talking about regulating individual behavior as opposed to carving up a pie, I really came to believe that taking extreme positions, all that does is alert the other side … [and] empower the opposition, because people feel like they’re going to be harmed,” she said.

“We’re kind of hardwired against regulating individual behavior in this country, and it has to be done carefully and slowly and consensually.”

But Watts, the Moms Demand Action founder, said she was not concerned that an explicitly anti-gun message would alienate gun owners or further empower the National Rifle Association, which consistently warns its members that Democratic politicians and gun control groups want to take their guns away.

“The NRA finds a way to make everything play into their message,” Watts said. “I don’t feel that way, and they call me a gun grabber all the time.”

“There are people who feel the way Igor feels in America,” she added. “I think there is room for all different views in this country. If the NRA wants to use that against the movement, it isn’t as though they aren’t doing that already.”

Volsky first immersed himself in the gun debate as a journalist and editor for ThinkProgress, a leftwing news site, covering the 2012 mass shooting in Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and then Congress’s complete rejection of any new gun control laws. He is now the deputy director of the Center for American Progress action fund, a prominent progressive thinktank and advocacy organization.



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Guns Down, founded in August 2016, is currently housed within Resource Impact, a not-for-profit group that incubates emerging social justice projects. Resource Impact works closely with the Raben Group, a progressive lobbying and strategy firm. Guns Down is applying for not-for-profit status, he said.

“I am not afraid I will alienate gun owners,” Volsky said. In a survey his group has conducted, he found that “gun-owning households support many of our proposals”.

Guns Down is not the only gun control group to begin to stake out a more aggressive messaging campaign on gun policy. After the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando shooting last year, Ladd Everitt, a longtime gun control advocate at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, left that group to become the director of One Pulse for America, a new group founded by the actor George Takei that is centered on a Facebook group organizing daily actions to support gun control.

“To me it’s all about intensity. I think we’ve had a failed strategy for 40 years of being polite and very apologetic about our advocacy,” Everitt said. “I no longer see the argument to go moderate. I don’t know what we could possibly get from that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A gun control rally in Washington DC in 2016. Photograph: Patsy Lynch/Rex/Shutterstock

When it was founded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, America’s contemporary gun control movement was much more radical, pushing for sweeping policies, including strict limitations on civilian ownership of handguns. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many gun control advocates used the campaign against big tobacco as the model for their movement, seeing guns as a public health threat that needed to be aggressively curtailed, if not eliminated completely.

Today, gun control advocates have embraced a very different analogy: the successful public health effort to reduce traffic fatalities by making cars, and highways, safer. Nobody tried to ban cars, or limit their use. They just tried to make driving safer.

Arkadi Gerney, who led the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and later worked on gun policy at the Center for American Progress, said he believed that more Americans would be comfortable with this “compatibilist” approach, but that most would also support the argument that “the wide proliferation of guns is simply not compatible with American culture, that the product is inherently dangerous”.



Gerney, who was previously a colleague of Volsky’s at the Center for American Progress, but is not involved with Guns Down, said he saw in his approach something like a return to the earlier strategy of treating guns more like cigarettes than like cars.

“It’s an interesting development – and an important development,” he said.