GAINESVILLE, VA. — Mike and Tammie Howard can often hear gunshots from the woods near their house on the western edge of Washington D.C.’s sprawling suburbs. Mike Howard can even hear them from time to time at Kettle Run High School, where he coaches volleyball.

So a political ad in Northern Virginia about the distance stray bullets travel before you can even hear the crack of the shot struck a chord with them. It’s the type of ad voters in Texas should expect to see soon as gun violence prevention groups gear up to spend big in the state next year after winning major victories in Virginia on Tuesday.

“That hits home,” said Mike Howard, who used to coach teams in South Florida that played against Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed in 2018, including the athletics director who Howard knew personally.

The ad, filled with images of empty playgrounds and bullets on football fields, was for John Bell, a Democrat who vowed in it, “I’m not afraid of the NRA, especially when it comes to keeping our kids safe.”

Bell this week flipped a state Senate district just a few miles from the National Rifle Association’s national headquarters by campaigning hard on gun violence prevention.

His ad was one of several funded by gun safety groups, who spent nearly $3 million taking on the NRA on its home turf.

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Guns emerged as a top issue for voters in Virginia, a state still reeling from a mass shooting earlier this year — especially for voters in the suburbs like those around D.C. and Richmond, who helped Democrats claim control of the state legislature for the first time in 26 years.

“We sent a message to the NRA in their own backyard,” said former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who launched a gun violence prevention group after she was shot at a rally in Tucson in 2011. “We are turning the page on an era where legislators cashed gun lobby checks while communities lived in fear of shootings.”

Next on Giffords’ list is Texas, where the group has had recent success helping Democrats. The group spent more than $1 million on TV ads in Houston in 2018, supporting U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Democrat who unseated longtime Republican Congressman John Culberson. The ads went after Culberson for taking money from the NRA and voting for weaker gun laws.

Groups like Giffords have “targets up and down the ballot in Texas in 2020,” said Peter Ambler, the group’s executive director. They include everything from the U.S. Senate race to congressional seats and state House districts — especially in the suburbs.

“Texas is going to be a big priority of ours,” Ambler said.

Virginia is often seen as a bellwether in national politics, but it has some key similarities to Texas. Both states have gun-friendly cultures challenged by rapidly expanding suburbs, where voters are more likely to support gun control measures.

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Both states have also been racked by gun violence. A gunman killed 12 people at a Virginia Beach municipal building in May. Texas, meanwhile, is still reeling from mass shootings in El Paso and Midland-Odessa in August that left 29 people dead.

Polling also establishes that voters in both states are more open to new gun laws than the Republicans running the state house. Guns were the top issue for Virginians just a month ahead of this week’s elections, with overwhelming majorities favoring expanding background checks and “red flag” laws allowing authorities to take weapons away from someone deemed a danger, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.

There’s some evidence voters in Texas feel the same. A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll this month found the majority of Texas voters support stricter gun laws, and the vast majority — including most Republicans — favor requiring background checks for all gun purchases. A Quinnipiac University poll last month found 89 percent of Texas voters support background checks for all gun buyers.

“Advocates in Virginia have pushed this issue to the forefront,” said Don Mark, a Democratic consultant in Richmond. “It’s a huge shift in this politics, and it’s really driven by suburban voters.”

Bell’s was one of two suburban districts Democrats picked up campaigning on gun safety. The party picked up at least five new state House seats, as well, and now controls the entire state government for the first time in a generation.

Many of the races were heavily funded by gun violence prevention groups. Giffords spent at least $300,000 on digital ads in the state. Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, a group funded by New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg, spent $2.5 million in the state, including funding Bell’s ad.

The NRA in a statement said the result is that "Virginians are about to experience life under a distant tycoon’s thumb.”

“Candidates who proudly accepted Bloomberg’s cash — and every voter they misled — will soon realize the cost of being beholden to a Manhattan billionaire who despises Virginians’ right to self-defense,” the group said. “Fortunately, many NRA-backed candidates in Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky and Mississippi prevailed over their Bloomberg-funded opponents. As the battle continues, so does the NRA’s defense of the Second Amendment rights of all Americans."

‘If we can’t change the laws, we’re going to change your seats’

The effort by gun safety advocates followed a special session Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, called after the Virginia Beach shooting. Republicans, who controlled the Legislature, adjourned after just 90 minutes without considering a single bill.

“People are tired and fed up that those in control — and at this point in time, Republicans — are doing nothing about this,” said Lori Haas, the state director of Stop Gun Violence, who has lobbied the state legislature on the issue ever since her daughter was shot at Virginia Tech in 2007. “Virginia Tech happened 12 years ago and people thought there would be something … Of course the voters are fed up and demanding change. If we can’t change the laws, we’re going to change your seats.”

Some Republicans in the state apparently heard that message. State Sen. Glen Sturtevant, who was unseated by Ghazala Hashmi in a suburb of Richmond, sent out campaign mailers in the weeks ahead of the election claiming support for “red flag” laws.

It’s a shift that has started to happen in Texas, as well. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in the wake of the El Paso shooting started calling for expanding background checks — even going as far as to call out the NRA for opposing them. State Rep. Sarah Davis, a Houston Republican, has also voiced support for background checks, as have the Republican mayors of Odessa, Midland, El Paso and Fort Worth.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, meanwhile, is pushing federal legislation that would crack down on people selling guns illegally and expand mental health programs — but notably leaves out measures such as red flag laws and tightening background checks for gun purchases.

Cornyn will likely be a top target for gun violence prevention groups, who say his legislation would do little to stop mass shootings. Cornyn’s opponents, meanwhile, have hit him for taking money from the gun lobby, including a $1,000 campaign donation from the NRA’s political action committee two weeks after a gunman killed 22 at an El Paso Walmart.

“Even though you have John Cornyn, who is putting forward a fig leaf piece of legislation, he is acknowledging by doing that, that he’s in trouble, that he has to have an answer on guns, that his decades-long embrace of the NRA has made him less safe,” Ambler said.

Cornyn has said his proposal “would go a long way toward making sure the background check requirement is more comprehensive” by going after people who go around existing requirements. He has said his is a proposal that can actually make it through Congress and earn the president’s signature.

“For those who say we want you to do more — I’m happy to listen, but I’m also interested to know how we can actually achieve the objective, because people have come up with a lot of good ideas, but if you can’t get the votes to pass it in the House and Senate and get a presidential signature, they don’t count for much,” he said earlier this month.

Moms Demand Action, another group advocating for stricter gun laws, has already vowed that its volunteers will be out in full force in Texas next year supporting candidates — including three former Moms Demand Action volunteers who are running for seats in the state House: Becca De Felice in San Antonio and Jennifer Skidonenko and Paige Dixon in North Texas.

Giffords says its success helping Fletcher flip her Houston seat is evidence of what the group can do outside of Virginia.

“Even that was a sign of the times,” Ambler said. “The idea that a gun safety organization would, in the state of Texas, be able to go into the Houston media market and run negative ads against a Republican incumbent based on his connections to the NRA would have been thought impossible just a few years ago. The changing nature of Texas’ big, big suburbs and cities is really driving these shifts.”

ben.wermund@chron.com