Around 2 a.m. on Aug. 22, a Thursday, a 26-year-old man got into a verbal dispute with staff at McCary's Bar and Grill, the same Columbia, South Carolina, sports bar he had recently been barred from. Then he pulled out a pistol and began firing indiscriminately, leaving two men dead and two others hospitalized. The shooting came the day after a 19-year-old was arrested over the recent killing of two teens in a Columbia suburb. The following Sunday, a man walked into morning services at the Centro Cristiano de Columbia church, on a wooded lot in the city's northeast side, demanded money, and shot a parishioner.

Within weeks, Columbia's City Council unanimously passed new local gun control ordinances that prohibit guns near schools and make it easier for police to confiscate weapons from potentially dangerous residents. The new laws represented the city's latest attempt to curb local gun violence, but they also amounted to a controversial political maneuver: South Carolina, along with 44 other states, has state laws in place, known as preemption laws, that limit cities' ability to enact their own gun control measures. Yet many cities throughout the country continue to pass gun reforms, determined to take action against a ceaseless bloody national epidemic.

Stephen Benjamin, the mayor of Columbia and a gun owner like much of the City Council, says it always drives him crazy when, after some mass shooting, he hears, "If a good guy with a gun" had been there casualties would have been prevented. "We just recognized that it was time for the good guys with guns to pass some good policies, and that's what we've done."

The tactic of preemption, which essentially co-opts the power of American legal hierarchy, was first broadly utilized by tobacco corporations, who lobbied for the laws in the 1960s and '70s as a way to avoid local regulations and protect profits. But more recently the National Rifle Association picked up where Big Tobacco left off, embracing the laws as a central survival strategy. "These laws are vital," a recent post from the organization's lobbying arm declared, "as they prevent localities from enacting an incomprehensible patchwork of local ordinances."

The laws vary by language and degree: In five states, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota and Mississippi, local officials found to be in violation can be personally sued; in Kentucky they can also face criminal penalties. Gun control advocates point out that the five states without preemption laws – Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York – also have the country's lowest rates of gun death .

"Gun activists will tell you it's about having a statewide system and making sure that individuals aren't subject to a patchwork of laws," says Allison Anderman, a senior counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "But that's just smoke and mirrors. It's just another effort by the gun lobby to prevent gun reform, and in particular it prevents communities from being able to legislate in ways that they think are the most impactful."

But while in recent years state legislatures have passed increasingly restrictive preemption laws, many cities have pressed forward with their own efforts anyway. Lincoln, Nebraska, in October passed an ordinance mandating gun owners keep firearms locked and out of sight in vehicles; on Nov. 1, St. Louis passed a bill requiring licensed gun dealers to notify police when a prospective buyer fails a federal background check. Supporters hailed the measure, the first law of its kind, as a historic moment for gun reform. "Cities all across America are having to step up and enact their own gun laws because the states are failing us," said Lewis Reed, president of St. Louis' Board of Aldermen.

The dissonance often leads to court battles: On Dec. 23, dozens of Florida municipalities, including Miami Beach and Tallahassee, filed a legal challenge to the state's 2011 preemption law ‒ the same week that a judge in Ohio denied a similar challenge from Cleveland and Akron to that state's new preemption law. Additional challenges from Columbus and Cincinnati, the site of a 2018 bank shooting, remain pending. "Increasingly, through the power of the NRA's influence, this democracy is being taken away," Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley declared last summer , when the city announced its lawsuit.

Ultimately, argues Anderman, the country's epidemic of gun violence will never adequately be addressed without uniform laws: Chicago, for example, has strict gun measures but is still deluged by guns from neighboring Indiana, where laws are looser. "Until we have strong comprehensive laws at the federal level, we're always going to be behind the eight ball," she says.

Yet cities, she argues, can still play a critical role, even despite the preemption laws. Local governments tend to be more nimble and innovative than their state counterparts, she argues, including on gun control, and can even serve as broader policy drivers. In California, for example, gun laws first passed by cities, like bans of cheaply made handguns, or "junk guns," that proliferated across the state in the mid-1990s, were later adopted statewide.

Benjamin, the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, is unrelenting. In December 2017, two months after the Las Vegas massacre, in which the shooter used a bump stock to facilitate rapid-fire murder, his city was the first in the country to ban the attachment. Columbia has passed various other measures since, including a prohibition on "ghost guns" ‒ homemade firearms that don't have serial numbers ‒ and another that incentivizes reporting of stolen weapons.

"It's common-sense stuff," he says, and necessary when elected leaders, removed from their constituents in state and national capitals, refuse to act despite a crisis that claims tens of thousands of American lives annually. "There's this incredible unwillingness among policymakers on the federal and state level to actually do something," he says. "Mayors have to do something."

