When Barack Obama met in Orlando with yet another set of anguished families who had lost loved ones in a mass shooting, there was one distressingly simple question: “Why does this keep happening?”



It is a question asked around the world about gun violence in the United States – answered most often with a helpless shrug, and almost ritualistic manoeuvring as people on all sides take up entrenched positions.

Does a country with more than 30,000 gun deaths every year simply lack the will to change? And if reform of US gun laws could not happen after the desolation of 2012 when 20 first-graders were killed at Sandy Hook elementary school, is this a nation trapped in a perpetual cycle of failure?

This week, the Guardian will explore just what makes the politics of gun control so difficult. We will ask whether the assault weapons ban is the right target for reformers, why gun rights activists oppose “common-sense” measures, and what can be done to change the conversation in order to save American lives.

“This debate needs to change,” Obama said in Orlando. What would it take – both on the left and the right – to do that?

Nicole Hockley has been grappling with that question since her six-year-old son Dylan was shot to death in 2012 in the arms of his classroom aide.

Last week a photograph of Dylan, smiling in a Superman T-shirt, was held up on the Senate floor, at once a symbol of overwhelming urgency and the abject political failure of Congress to pass new gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting.

Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all called last week for a renewal of the federal assault weapon ban, arguing again that “weapons of war” did not belong on America’s streets. The military-style rifle the Orlando shooter used was just like “the assault weapon used to kill those little children in Sandy Hook”, Clinton said. By Tuesday last week the online petition to ban assault weapons had 400,000 signatures.



But Hockley and Sandy Hook Promise, an advocacy group that she and other family members of victims helped to found, have not joined these calls. “We don’t advocate for an assault weapon ban,” she told the Guardian.

Personally, Hockley does not believe that civilians should own military-style rifles, or that gun companies should market them widely. She and her husband are part of a long-shot lawsuit arguing that gun companies have been “negligent” to sell AR-15s to the general public.

Politically, she believes, focusing on an assault weapon ban is the wrong battle – both in terms of convincing everyday gun owners to support reform and in terms of the number of lives a ban might save.

Other gun control groups take a similar position. But it’s a distinction that few Democratic politicians are making – at least not explicitly.

What journalists call the gun debate is not actually a debate: it’s an endless pageant of dubious statistics, performed before adjudicators who have already decided how to vote. Gun control Democrats argue that every gun control law is worth fighting for, as long as it could save even a single life. Republicans respond that no gun law will make any difference.

Both of those positions dodge the real work of addressing America’s gun violence problem – the slow, painstaking evaluation needed to decide which policies might help a little more or a little less, and how much each of them burdens gun owners.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicole Hockley, a parent who lost her child, Dylan Hockley, six, in the Sandy Hook school shooting, testifies at the Illinois state capitol in 2013. Photograph: Seth Perlman/AP

That’s the work Hockley has been doing for more than three years. The first weeks after her son’s death, still shocked and grieving, Hockley and some of the other parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook began a “crash course” in the history of American gun laws and gun politics.

They learned that while assault weapons played a prominent part in many mass shootings, they play only a tiny role in America’s overall gun violence problem. The loophole-ridden 1994 federal assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004, produced no clear evidence of reducing gun violence. An in-depth evaluation of the law concluded that the impact of even a more comprehensive ban would be “small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement”.

That was not a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention. In the early 1990s, even some gun control advocates criticized the push for an assault weapon ban as a “distraction” with little crime-fighting benefit. But the ban generated intense, visceral reactions from the public. A former Democratic staffer who helped craft the assault weapon ban said he had hoped passing it would give Democrats the political momentum they needed to pass the drier, more technical gun laws that might actually save more lives.

Instead, the push for a political victory backfired. President Bill Clinton later blamed the assault weapon ban for the 1994 midterm victories that allowed Republicans to take over both houses of Congress. Many prominent gun control groups have since moved away from an assault ban – “through hard, bitter experience”, said Matt Bennett, a gun policy expert who advised Sandy Hook Promise.

Democrats know the research behind the ban. While a ban on high-capacity magazines could help some, the assault weapons ban “does nothing”, a former senior Obama administration official said last year.

Despite this, the ban has remained a moral litmus test for Democratic politicians.

Obama endorsed the assault weapon ban after Sandy Hook. Behind the scenes, the ban got little political support from the White House in 2013. Instead, the administration focused its energy on expanding background checks. When it came to the assault weapon ban, “We did the bare minimum,” the official said. “We would have pushed a lot harder if we had believed in it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton talks with Kim Washington, Deborah Davis and Nelba Marquez-Greene in April. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Despite the Democratic rhetoric around assault weapons last week after 49 people died at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Senate will actually be voting Monday on measures to expand background checks and bar suspected terrorists for buying guns.

The horror of mass shootings, and the emotion around them, may make it difficult for politicians to talk bluntly about tradeoffs of banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

That’s what’s so striking about the political decisions that Hockley has made. In talking about the AR-15 at a lawsuit press conference, Hockley spoke precisely, but her face was pale with rage and grief. Other parents wept. This has not stopped them from evaluating the data, and from thinking deeply about what political reforms will most benefit the country as a whole.

In the months immediately after her son’s death, Hockley and other Sandy Hook parents joined the fight to expand the federal background check law – a measure that would not have saved their children, but that Democratic strategists thought had the best political chances and might do the most good. In April 2013, key senators voted against the background check measure. Hockley called it a “soul-crushing” experience. She had visited senator after senator to share Dylan’s story and his photograph. Some of the senators wept at her story, she said, and then later voted against her.

Afterwards, she and other Sandy Hook Promise members worked for months to develop their own gun violence prevention platform. They support a long list of strategies, from mental health reform to school-based intervention programs to laws creating “gun violence restraining orders”. The assault weapon ban does not make the list. But the group does endorse one part of the 1994 ban: limiting ammunition magazines to ten rounds or less.

For Hockley, magazine capacity is an intensely personal issue. “Our shooter brought in 30-round magazines, and shot 154 bullets in less than four minutes, and 11 children from Dylan’s class, from my son’s class, managed to hide and escape while he was reloading,” she said. “If he’d had to reload more often, more kids might have gotten out.”

But Sandy Hook Promise has made ammunition limits a second-tier priority, not one of their main advocacy fights. That was a wrenching decision, Hockley said, but, she believes, the right one.

During the debates over the group’s policy priorities, “I’ve lost my cool on more than one occasion,” she said. “You have to think about the bigger picture. ”

“If we have limited resources, we are going to fight for bills that would make a bigger difference.”