Opinion | Gun Safety: Yes, There’s Actually a Reason to Have Hope

The N.R.A. is not vanquished, but it is walking wounded. The primary battleground over gun legislation has been the statehouses, where Parkland set off a startling reversal. After decades of getting trounced by the N.R.A., activists saw 67 gun safety laws passed at the state level in 2019, compared with nine pro-gun laws. This year, 45 new gun safety laws have been adopted in states, while 95 percent of gun-lobby-linked bills have been blocked, according to an Everytown report.

Our power must be real now, because Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, warned his conference it was. Before the vote for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act this June, Mr. McConnell told his conference the game had changed. In a closed-door session, his team presented stunning internal polling of gun-owning households. He summarized it for reporters: “Support for the provisions of the framework is off the charts, overwhelming.”

And with that, the architect of the gun safety blockade in Congress blew a hole in it. He needed to peel off 10 of his senators, and he got 15. The law strengthens background checks, especially for people under age 21 and provides funding to carry out red flag laws and for mental health, school safety and violence interrupter programs.

That was just a start. Our anger, trained on Congress, can propel a string of initiatives to finally bring America’s shameful mass-shooting era nearer to a close.

For the first time in decades, Republicans in Congress are taking our demands seriously. They are finally less afraid of the N.R.A. than they are of us.

This spring, before an act of Congress seemed possible, Angela Kuefler, a key pollster for Everytown and Giffords, explained to me why a breakthrough was on its way. “There has been a shift in the emotion of Americans from sadness after mass shootings to rage,” she explained. “People are increasingly mad in these moments, and that anger is activating.” Sadness is demoralizing and demotivating, she said.

Her polling picked up an even more decisive change just recently. “We’ve broadened out the villain,” she said. For decades, Americans saw the N.R.A. as the impediment to gun legislation. But rage is refocusing on members of Congress, increasingly seen as the N.R.A.’s collaborators: “politicians who actually fail to do anything again and again,” she said, “and have failed to stand up to the N.R.A. And that’s what people actually want — are politicians with a backbone.”