The current battle to reshape gun laws can feel like a stalemate, but there have been victories too. This is what the landscape looks like right now

The students who survived a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school are aiming to reshape America’s gun control debate.



“You’re either with us or against us,” senior Emma González told politicians on Sunday, following a viral speech to gun control advocates the day before when she promised, “We are going to be the last mass shooting.”

Many people see the American gun control debate as a helpless stalemate dominated by the intransigence of the National Rifle Association (NRA). But there has been more action – and more gun violence prevention victories – than they realize. Here’s the landscape the Parkland students face as they demand new congressional action on gun control laws:

Between 55 million and 75 million Americans own guns, but the NRA only claims 5 million members. That’s less than 10% of America’s total gun owners, according to the best survey estimates.

Just 3% of American adults own half the country’s guns. Most gun owners have just one or two, but a tiny group of super-owners, who have an average of 17 each, collectively own half of the country’s 256m guns.

Seventy-two percent of American adults have shot a gun, according to the Pew survey, even though only 20-30% personally own a firearm. In contrast, 44% of American adults say they personally know someone who has been shot, either accidentally or intentionally.

Twenty-nine percent of gun owners say the NRA has too much influence over gun laws, according to a recent Pew survey. Overall, though, 55% of American adults say that the NRA has the “right amount” of power or even “too little” power over American gun laws.

Most gun control legislation being debated now is 100% compatible with the second amendment. The supreme court’s 2008 Heller decision, a pro-gun-rights ruling, made it unconstitutional to completely ban Americans from keeping handguns in their homes for self-defense. But it left the door open to a wide swathe of other regulations.

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Donald Trump once supported an assault weapon ban. Though the president is a close ally of the NRA, which spent $30m to put him in the White House, it is not clear he has much ideological commitment to gun rights.

Doing what Australia did to stop mass shootings would mean a mandatory buyback of an estimated 90m semiautomatic rifles and other long guns, at a cost that might be in the billions of dollars, according to a leading Australian researcher. Australia confiscated and melted down about a third of its overall gun stock after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

The 1994 American assault weapon ban did not accomplish much. The federal ban, which was allowed to lapse in 2004, allowed Americans to keep the military-style guns and ammunition they already owned. The law also defined “assault weapons” according to certain external features, allowing gun makers to tweak a few features and produce almost identical semiautomatic rifles that were compliant with the ban. There was no clear evidence the 10-year ban contributed to a reduction in gun violence, mostly because the weapons the ban targeted were not used in a huge percentage of gun crimes. An in-depth evaluation of the ban concluded: “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

Completely banning military-style rifles would not save the majority of gun violence victims, who are most often killed with ordinary handguns. According to the best available data from the FBI, only 3.55% of gun murders were committed with any kind of rifle from 2010 to 2014.

Most American gun control groups agree that fighting for universal background checks on gun sales is the law that would do the most good. They have shifted their focus away from banning assault weapons to closing the loopholes in the federal background check system, which currently allows private sales between individuals with no background check.

Many gun control advocates worry the current movement is too moderate, and that it needs a more radical left flank. The NRA is often pushed to more extreme positions by smaller groups with even more hardline second-amendment views.

There are dramatic racial, economic and geographic disparities in American gun violence. Black children 17 and under are 10 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than white children. About half of America’s gun murder victims each year are black. The census tracts that saw the worst gun violence in 2015 represented about 1.5% of the country’s total population, but 26% of the total gun homicides.