Since the Newtown massacre, Mark Glaze has been the face of the gun-control movement. The executive director of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Mr. Glaze led the futile 2013 fight for expanded background checks and has been regular on cable news after each successive mass shooting.
Now Mr. Glaze, 43 years old, has stepped away from the fight. Friday marked his last day working for Mr. Bloomberg’s organization, now called Everytown for Gun Safety, after three and a half years as executive director.
In an interview at his organization’s Washington office earlier this month, Mr. Glaze expounded on how President Barack Obama’s unrelated political problems – health care, Edward Snowden, congressional gridlock – damaged the gun-control cause.
And Mr. Glaze said the movement hasn’t solved one of its signature problems: Many mass shootings wouldn’t have been stopped by tighter regulations proposed by gun-control advocates, even if they might have prevented other gun crimes.
The Obama administration bungling its rollout of the Affordable Care Act website made any effort to enact gun control in the future even less likely.
“There’s an almost perfect overlap, I think, between the people who are the most active and radicalized gun voters and people who just don’t like and trust the government very much. When you take on the gun issue, you’re forced to take on by proxy a much bigger issue in this country, which is a deeply ingrained distrust of government that gets worse every time the government can’t get a healthcare website off the ground or can’t get it’s act together to pass a farm bill.”
Surveillance activities exposed by Mr. Snowden are also not helpful.
“The fact that people have learned that the government has taken for itself the right to listen in on our most private conversations has done nothing to inspire faith in government restraint. It’s that lack of faith in government restraint that makes it difficult to do things like ask everybody to take a background check.”
The most attention on gun control comes after mass shootings – just look at the post-Newtown push and the brief attention paid to the issue after the Memorial Day weekend shootings in Isla Vista, Calif. Yet virtually none of the solutions gun-control groups are pushing would have prevented any of the massacres that capture public attention.
“Because people perceive a mismatch in the policy solutions that we have to offer and the way some of these mass shootings happened, you know, it is a messaging problem for us, I think. … Is it a messaging problem when a mass shooting happens and nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting? Sure it’s a challenge in this issue.”
Before Newtown, the pre-eminent gun control player in Washington was the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. But Mr. Bloomberg’s organization now has more money and Americans for Responsible Solutions, or ARS – launched by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.) – has more star power. It still hasn’t been enough to beat back the National Rifle Association.
“The NRA has a much vaunted, if overhyped political operation. But again, when we came to this the only support that members of congress got when they took a tough vote was a note of thanks from the Brady Campaign, and that’s really not enough. I think [Mr. Bloomberg] with his super PAC, ARS with their political operation and lots of voters who we think are starting to pay attention to this more than they have in the past.”
After the post-Newtown urgency, the timeline for reform is now much longer. Mr. Glaze spoke in terms of multiple election cycles before it would be realistic to think Congress would act.
“The federal picture will change when legislators come to understand that we are here to stay. … I think it will take an election cycle or two to understand that there are new players in town and they are free to do what they know in their hearts are the right thing and what 80 to 90% of their constituents want. You can’t defy political gravity forever.”
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