Can there be a US where kids aren’t shot in schools? This gun safety leader thinks so

Emma Brown, shown here in an undated photo, has taken over as the executive director of Giffords. Photograph: Giffords

Emma Brown was five years old in 1999, when news broke that two student shooters had attacked Columbine high school. She was in elementary school when the federal assault weapons ban expired, and she was a high school student when a gunman shot then congresswoman Gabby Giffords and 18 others outside a grocery store in Arizona.

Now, at 30, Brown has taken over as the executive director of Giffords, the gun-safety group founded by the former congresswoman. As she looks ahead to the crucial US elections this November, Brown hopes she can help mobilize the millions of Americans who, like her, have never known a time when mass shootings were not a common occurrence.

“I grew up in the mass-shooting era in the United States,” Brown said. “I understand intrinsically why Americans under 45 consistently rank this issue among their top concerns.”

Brown stepped into the executive director role last month after leading the successful US Senate campaign of Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, who is married to Giffords. Prior to the Senate race, Brown oversaw Joe Biden’s campaign efforts in Arizona in 2020, and she previously ran congressional campaigns in Illinois and Virginia.

“I do feel like I have been training for this job for years,” Brown said. “I really see it as an extension of this work to bring our country back from the brink and from extremism.”

Over her decade-long political career, Brown has seen the issue of gun regulation morph from a Republican attack line into a Democratic rallying cry. Demands for universal background checks and safe-storage laws have become standard among Democratic candidates, while Republicans increasingly find themselves on the defense to justify their opposition to gun regulations.

“We have, in the last 10 years in the gun-violence-prevention space, gone from a place where guns were really the third rail of politics to a place where it is a major component and a plank of the Biden-Harris re-election campaign,” Brown said. “The political transformation on this issue has been pretty profound, even if there is a lot of frustration for the amount of gun violence we still see in this country.”

Gun violence indeed remains a daily reality in the US. Just on Wednesday, a shooting at a Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City, Missouri, left one dead and 21 others injured.

As gun violence continues unabated, surveys indicate that there is widespread agreement among Americans on a number of proposed firearm regulations. According to a Fox News poll conducted last year, 87% of US voters support requiring criminal background checks for all gun purchases, while 81% approve of raising the legal age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21.

On the question of red-flag laws, 80% of voters said they support allowing police to take guns from those deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.

“The gun lobby for a long time sort of sold this idea that gun violence and guns in America is this really controversial, difficult issue. And we have actually seen in the research that that is not true,” Brown said. “If you have the conversation, and particularly if you have it with the right messenger, you actually feel a lot of consensus.”

Brown believes gun owners are uniquely positioned to make the argument for more rigorous firearm regulations, given that research indicates gun owners support many proposed reforms. A 2022 study funded by 97Percent, a bipartisan group of gun owners and non-gun owners, found that 72.9% of gun owners support universal background checks and 69.2% support red-flag laws.

“We really believe that, in order to break through those political barriers that still exist, we have to expand our coalition beyond Democrats and ultimately beyond politics,” Brown said. “Gun owners are, we think, one of our best vehicles and messengers on this issue.”

Giffords has also paid close attention to finding effective messengers in Black and Latino communities, which are disproportionately affected by gun violence. According to a report from the Johns Hopkins center for gun violence solutions, Black Americans were nearly 14 times more likely to die by gun homicide than their white counterparts in 2021. The same report found that Latino males were 2.8 times more likely to die by firearm homicide than white males, while Latino women were 1.3 times as likely to die by firearm homicide compared with their white counterparts.

Young Americans ages 15 to 24 also made up a large share of gun homicide victims, accounting for three out of every five deaths.

Voters of color and young voters made up crucial components of Biden’s winning coalition in 2020, and he will need their support again to be successful in November. Gun violence could serve as a unifying issue among those key constituencies, Brown suggested.

“There is a direct line between the disproportionate impact on certain communities and the communities that are the most motivated and care the most about gun-violence solutions,” Brown said. “And those are all voting blocs that are very powerful and important.”

If Biden and his party prove successful this year, gun-safety advocates are hopeful that those victories will soon translate into legislative change. In 2022, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law, marking the first time in nearly 30 years that a major gun-safety law was enacted at the federal level. The law enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21 and expanded gun restrictions for those convicted of domestic abuse while investing heavily in community violence intervention programs.

“You’ve got a lot of people being like: ‘OK, it was just a start. It’s not enough.’ And that’s true, but the fact is that it happened and we broke a 30-year logjam that we were unable to break after Sandy Hook. We broke it a month after Uvalde,” Brown said. “That is proof positive, I think, of the progress that’s been made on this.”

That progress does not mean the road ahead will be easy for gun-safety advocates. The conservative justices who form a majority of the supreme court have shown a ready willingness to overturn gun laws, and gun-rights proponents have increasingly turned to the courts to challenge new regulations.

Despite the challenges ahead, Brown takes heart in the achievements of the gun-safety movement to date and warns against the “engineered cynicism” that she blames on the gun lobby and its allies.

“It can be easy to feel discouraged. But if you zoom out and you look at the history of social movements in the United States, this one is pretty young. And we’ve actually made a lot of progress pretty quickly,” Brown said. “We need people to believe that it is possible to live in a country where kids aren’t shot in school.”