WaPo Magazine: Will Gun Owners Fight for Stronger Gun Laws?
97Percent was profiled in The Washington Post Magazine and featured our unique vision of identifying and expanding areas of consensus among gun owners and gun-reform proponents.
“[97Percent] promotes pragmatic gun-policy reforms — with a twist: Their principal goal is to engage gun owners in the conversation. In polls and focus groups, they say they have found that gun owners are more amenable to reforms than most Americans believe. To make real progress on the issue, they argue, gun owners must be at the table."
Read an excerpt of The Washington Post Magazine profile below and for the full article click on the link at the bottom of the page.
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BY REBECCA TUHUS- DUBROW, THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE
09/21/22 10:00 AM EDT
In 2020, Adam and Staci Miller, a married couple based in Los Angeles, launched 1P.org (the P stands for “planet”), with a mission to tackle intractable problems. Adam was the founder and former CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, a human resources and education software company, and Staci was a former McKinsey analyst. No issue seemed more intractable in the United States than gun violence. “When Newtown happened, we had a first-grader at the time,” Staci told me. “When Parkland happened, we had a high-schooler at the time. We really looked at each other and said, God forbid, if this touches our community, will we be able to say to our kids, ‘We did everything we could’?”
They began by setting up conversations with experts and veterans in the field of gun-violence prevention. One of them was Richard Aborn, who is now president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City. “I strongly suggested that the way to crack open the gun-control debate was to try and figure out some safe place for gun owners for gun control to voice their opinion,” he told me. He thought it was crucial to convey to gun owners that “there is perfect consistency between legally acquiring a firearm or firearms, and regulating the distribution of guns.”
Their next step was to find out where gun owners really stood. The Millers brought on two external firms to conduct focus groups and ethnographic interviews in purple states — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and Colorado — in addition to a national survey of more than 1,000 gun owners. They found that large majorities supported universal background checks, training requirements for a firearm purchase, and temporary removal of guns from individuals in crisis who pose a risk to themselves or others (red-flag laws).
But the research also found that gun owners who are receptive to regulations feel alienated by the current national conversation. They have a fundamentally different view than most gun-safety activists and pro-reform politicians who don’t own guns. Whereas someone like me sees guns as dangerous, gun owners typically see them as a way to keep safe. Whereas I associate guns exclusively with harm, gun owners see them as a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes. This helps explain a widespread conviction among gun owners: that policy should focus on “keeping guns out of the wrong hands,” not on bans of certain types of weapons or attempts to reduce the number of guns in the country. Another survey found that most gun owners believe that gun-reform advocates ultimately want to take their guns away. This belief makes them mistrustful and reluctant to speak out for any reforms at all — the “slippery slope” argument.
Based on this research, the Millers developed a vision for a new organization that would identify and expand areas of consensus among gun owners and gun-reform proponents. Their North Star is legislation that is both broadly popular and backed by evidence. Their empirical orientation also led them to recognize that, as Adam said, “There’s really three sets of gun violence.” One set is mass shootings, which prompted the Millers (and me) to get involved but account for a tiny fraction of all gun homicides; another is the community violence that is concentrated in racially segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods; finally, there are suicides, which make up the majority of gun deaths (54 percent in 2020). Each of these sets requires specially tailored responses.
The Millers incorporated the organization as 97Percent — going with the poll that has found the highest level of support for universal background checks — and officially launched in October 2020. They now have a staff of seven and 14 advisory board members, with the Millers providing most of the funding (a small portion comes from undisclosed foundations and individual donors). In the future, they are likely to start a 501(c)(4) to engage in more direct lobbying. So far, though, their purview has been mainly research and education. They are working with Michael Siegel, a professor of public health at Tufts University, to further gauge gun-owner opinion. Siegel has found that the majority of gun owners support four laws shown to be effective: universal background checks, prohibitions for those convicted of violent misdemeanors, permits for concealed carry, and permits for gun purchases and possession. He estimates that if all four were implemented, firearm homicides would decline by 35 percent.
Read original perspective piece on The Washington Post Magazine.
