Editorial: Building support for gun safety will take time

In today’s America, trying to imagine the formation of a gun safety organization that could rival the influence of the National Rifle Association is difficult, if not impossible. Then again, most efforts to bring about massive social change in this nation have started small.

The new Rock Hill chapter of the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the national anti-gun-violence organization, is doing just that.

On Monday, the newly fledged group of around 20 people marched from the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in downtown Rock Hill to the offices of The Herald to deliver letters to the editor calling for new efforts to curb gun violence.

The march, like others around the nation, marked the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn. Diane Rudulph, who organized the local march, said she was motivated by the seemingly unending mass killings that occur in this country.

The shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., this month was the breaking point, she said.

“It was kind of an impulse; I think we all have a tipping point we reach. I decided giving money and signing online petitions just wasn’t enough,” she said.

Growing the size of the local group could be tough in a state where the Second Amendment is revered and the state Legislature recently approved allowing residents with licenses to carry concealed weapons to take their guns into bars. But Rudulph notes that she and her husband are both gun owners, and they are not out to confiscate people’s guns. She says they simply favor “reasonable” gun control.

And while it might be assumed that the NRA and its cohorts are close to impregnable, similarly “reasonable” Americans may actually outnumber them.

A CBS News/New York Times Poll taken early this month found that 51 percent of those polled think “laws covering the sale of guns should be made more strict.” Only 10 percent thought the laws should be made less strict, while 36 percent said they should be kept as they are.

There is a political component to this. Only 23 percent of Republicans believe laws should be made more strict, while 76 percent of Democrats do. Fifty-one percent of independents say laws should be more strict, according to the poll.

The point is, those who want to do something about gun violence have a large base from which to build the political clout to change the laws. Significant majorities favor better health screening for prospective gun buyers; banning those on the government’s terrorist watch list from buying guns; and requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers.

A total of 92 percent favored universal background checks, according to an October CBS News/New York Times Poll, including 87 percent of Republicans, 98 percent of Democrats and 90 percent of independents.

Despite current laws, gun violence is pervasive in the U.S. On Monday, NBC News reported that at least 555 children under the age of 12 have been shot to death in America since Dec. 14, 2012, the day of the Sandy Hook shooting. That’s a rate of about one child every other day.

Overall, gun violence claims tens of thousands of American lives each year, even after a significant drop in murder rates. And that doesn’t account for the many thousands more who are involved in non-fatal shootings.

It is ironic that while Americans are rightly concerned about the threat of terrorist attacks, many apparently have come to accept a level of domestic gun violence that dwarfs any conceivable terrorist attack. The nation needs to do a better job of acknowledging where the real threat to our safety lies.

If Americans want to reduce gun violence, they can’t concede to the NRA’s false argument that the only answer is more “good guys” with guns. And they can’t surrender to the notion that there are no sensible, incremental steps that can be taken to reduce access to guns by the wrong people or make it harder for people to shoot others or themselves.

The local Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America is just a small group, but we hope it and others like it around the nation will grow and gain political influence. Eventually, perhaps, our laws will come to match the sensible views of a majority of Americans.

This story was originally published December 15, 2015 at 10:23 PM with the headline "Editorial: Building support for gun safety will take time."