Julianne Moore and Amy Schumer joined activists and shooting survivors to rally for gun control on Wednesday, ahead of nationwide vigils to remember the victims of more than 1,000 mass shootings in three years.
Ahead of the third anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, gun control group Everytown has released a video of actors and activists declaring “we can end gun violence”.
The video also features actors Laura Dern and Kevin Bacon, comedians Nick Offerman and Sarah Silverman, and victims of gun violence and their families.
The group also released a report touting the progress made on gun control in 2015, although the US has experienced more mass shootings than days so far this year, according to the crowdsourced site Shooting Tracker. The site defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people were shot.
The self-published report card finds good news for gun control advocates on the state level despite grim national headlines, most recently regarding an attack in San Bernardino, California, last week in which shooters killed 14 people with legally purchased weapons.
Everytown praises state lawmakers in nine states for new laws that prohibit people convicted of domestic abuse from buying or possessing firearms, as well as three governors who vetoed NRA legislation.
In New Hampshire, Governor Maggie Hassan vetoed a bill that would have allowed concealed handguns without a license, earning her the gun lobby’s ire. Montana governor Steve Bullock and West Virginia governor Earl Tomblin vetoed similar bills, citing concerns brought by police.
Everytown also claimed credit for defeating dozens of pro-gun rights bills in favor of concealed carry systems without permits or training, guns on college and university campuses, and guns in public schools. The group said it had doubled its donor base – which includes billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg – to 85,000 people.
The gun control group has spent most of its time and energy working to convince state lawmakers of its cause, and notes that Oregon became the 18th state to expand background checks to all handgun sales. In the courts, the US supreme court recently rejected a challenge to an Illinois city’s ban on assault weapons, allowing local governments leeway in how they regulate firearms.
But Everytown’s tentative optimism in its struggle against pro-gun lobbyists is undercut by a year that saw mass shootings in the US become more frequent and more deadly, with the firearms involved often legally purchased, as in San Bernardino and in Oregon that left 10 people dead.
Americans also rushed to buy guns after nearly every high-profile shooting. Smith & Wesson’s stock rose over 125% in the last year, and on the Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, gun background checks hit a new record. The FBI reported that it performed 185,345 background checks – two per second – on the same day that a gunman killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado.
To the chagrin of Barack Obama, police chiefs and activists, gun control measures such as expanded background checks, limits to ammunition, and an end to the ban on gun violence research, all remain frozen in Congress. The president has urged local governments to take the lead on the issue, mirroring the strategy used by both Everytown and the NRA.
The issue has also entered the presidential campaign for the first time in 15 years, albeit along partisan lines. Although Republican candidates have rejected any suggestion of expanded checks or other measures, Democrats have given gun control center stage during debates, raising activists’ hopes that candidates will no longer treat the issue as an untouchable idea.
