People gather at the National Cathedral on Thursday to remember gun violence victims. Gun control battle moves to Main St.

President Barack Obama responded to last December’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre by calling for the nation to end its indifference toward gun violence, but one year and one failed Senate vote later, Washington’s major players in the gun control push have beat a public retreat.

The fight has moved from Capitol Hill to Main Street.


Out is an immediate public push for legislation in Congress, with all the accompanying flashy public events. In is a series of local events across the country and painstakingly building a political infrastructure able to compete with the National Rifle Association.

( PHOTOS: Newtown school shooting remembered)

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which organized a successful campaign this summer to pressure Starbucks into banning guns from its cafes, is preparing a similar effort aimed at McDonald’s, founder Shannon Watts told POLITICO.

It’s part of the larger political shift from gun control advocacy groups , and a recognition that, like much of Obama’s second-term agenda, gun control is buried under the reality of a divided Congress.

Saturday’s anniversary wasn’t a big political moment in D.C. The Newtown families asked the White House and major gun control organizations not to make a big political production out of Saturday’s anniversary, preferring to maintain it as a solemn remembrance.

( PHOTOS: Politicians with guns)

Obama, for instance, marked the massacre’s anniversary not with a visit to Connecticut or even Saturday’s National Cathedral memorial service but with a private moment of silence at the White House.

“There’s no question that Congress failed to do the right thing,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday. “And in the end, there’s a limit on what a president can do. Other actions require congressional movement.”

News of the nation’s latest school shooting, which left a Colorado shooter dead and a classmate in critical condition on Friday, didn’t come as a great shock. The White House released a perfunctory statement saying Obama was briefed about the situation and that federal officials remain in touch with their local law enforcement counterparts.

Gun control advocates say they’ve learned the political lessons from the Newtown shooting, where the Senate waited four months to vote on background check legislation. Not only did they lose momentum and give the NRA a chance to rally its supporters, but the 20 years of inaction on gun control meant lawmakers were not well-versed on the issue.

“The infrastructure just wasn’t there to turn it around quickly — the knowledge wasn’t there among Hill staff, among members of Congress who hadn’t voted on it for a decade,” said Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, the director of social policy and politics at Third Way, a centrist think tank. “Now all of us know a heck of a lot more about this. We won’t need to take so much time to figure that out. If there is a tragedy that specifically involves one of the policies we’re talking about, were going to see more swift action.”

( Also on POLITICO: Colorado high school shooting)

Last year when Obama returned to Washington after speaking at the Newtown memorial service , Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, was the first gun control activist to get a White House meeting. That was in part because he was the only game in town.

Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s Americans for Responsible Solutions, the Sandy Hook Promise and Moms Demand Action have all formed this year. The post-Obama campaign nonprofit Organizing for Action launched in January with gun violence prevention as one of its four main policy areas.

OFA solicited its members recently to host Newtown anniversary vigils but said it was not using the date to make a policy push; volunteers were simply “coming together in their communities in remembrance of the tragic events in Newtown a year ago,” a spokesman said.

The low-key events were meant to keep activists engaged and lawmakers from forgetting the issue. They are also planning for the midterm elections while doing the macabre job of preparing a response for what they see as the inevitability of the next mass shooting while at the same time making the fight as much cultural as political.

( Flashback: Obama visits Sandy Hook memorial service)

“I hope there’s not a next time, but if there is, we’ve laid the groundwork; we’ve got momentum across the country,” said Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Democrats’ gun violence task force.

On the forefront of this effort is Shannon Watts, a spunky Indiana woman and political neophyte who started Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America as a Facebook group after the Newtown massacre. Now Watts, a mother and stepmother of five, is the head of an organization vying to become the MADD of gun control.

Watts hopes to make background checks a women’s issue the same way abortion rights are — something candidates, particularly Democrats, are forced to forcefully support. The McDonald’s campaign, coming off the successful Starbucks effort, won’t be the last.

“There are more white whales out there,” she said in an interview at a Capitol Hill Starbucks.

McDonald’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Watts spoke shortly after a brief meeting with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who urged the Moms activists to press moderate Republicans to demand a House vote. Democrats, she said, are all already on board.

“There needs to be more calling out of people, in the districts of people who seem to be sympathetic, especially Republicans, because for Democrats, it’s a settled thing,” she said at the seven-minute meeting and photo-op in the Capitol.

Watts wasn’t buying any hope of a gun control bill in 2014. “I continue to believe that this is not the Congress to get much done,” she said afterward.

Forty-six senators and 242 House members have scored “A” ratings from the NRA, and when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) sought to use his “A”rating to carry an expanded background checks bill, it was met with heavy opposition and fell five votes short of the 60 needed to move in the Senate.

Manchin, who led the background checks measure with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), wasn’t doing interviews related to the anniversary or attending any memorial events.

One area of potential common ground is more funding for mental health issues and restrictions. Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday revealed $100 million in mental health funding from the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services.

But mental health-only legislation won’t draw support from gun control advocates for fear it will allow background checks opponents to color themselves as doing something on guns.

“It’s just subterfuge, let’s talk about this so we don’t have to talk about that,” Pelosi said. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t want to do some good things about mental health. We have to be discerning about what it is we’re doing.”

NRA officials declined repeated requests to comment, but its lobbying arm recently accused the White House and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg of trying to make political hay out of the Newtown anniversary.

“Obama and Bloomberg are pulling out the stops, knowing that support for gun control — which rose in the days after Sandy Hook — is waning,” read a post on the the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action website. “Not only was the Obama gun control agenda defeated in the Senate last spring, a new CNN poll shows that support for gun control has dropped by six points since January, and a majority of Americans now oppose stricter gun laws.”

As far as momentum in Washington goes, the NRA is correct.

Vice President Joe Biden and his top aides long ago ceased participating in regular gun control strategy sessions with gun control activists.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who appeared by Biden’s side at a series of gun control meetings, has moved on. Holder met with law enforcement officials recently for an hour, and gun issues — including the reauthorization of the Undetectable Firearms Act — were mentioned only briefly at the meeting’s tail end, according to meeting participants.

“Gun safety remains a high priority for the attorney general, and we continue to take common sense measures to reduce gun violence,” a Holder aide said.

If gun control groups can change the makeup of Congress, it’s going to be a heavy lift. Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns group ran TV ads in Arkansas in blasting Sen. Mark Pryor after the Democrat voted against the background checks bill. But asked if the group would hit Pryor again in next year’s campaign against House Republican Tom Cotton, who would be the same or worse for the cause, the group’s executive director, Mark Glaze, demurred.

“There’s plenty of time between now and the midterm, and I think a lot will depend on where legislation is and where they are on the issue as the election approaches,” he said. “The mayor will make that decision.”

The group recently hired Bruce Cohen, a longtime aide to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

But gun control advocates need bipartisan support, said Erickson Hatalsky of Third Way.

“Continuing to push it or to use it as a hammer on folks who voted the wrong way is to make it more of a partisan issue, when what we need to do is to broaden the gun safety side,” she said.