With a Republican-dominated Congress and President Donald Trump back in the White House, many gun reform advocates fear that the country’s progress on firearm safety policy will stall out, or possibly reverse course. Guns Down America is charting a different path.
The gun violence prevention organization has long been one of the more unorthodox of the advocacy groups. It focuses on the business of guns: It played a major role, for example, in a campaign that pressured banks to sever ties with the gun industry.
Now, with little prospect of action in Washington, D.C., the group’s executive director, Hudson Munoz, tells me that Guns Down America is developing a strategy to disrupt the social and economic dynamics that drive up demand for guns in the first place.
In his view, Guns Down America’s ideas could be a path forward to push gun violence down even in the Trump era.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Chip Brownlee: What do you see as the most critical area of focus for gun violence prevention right now, considering the current political landscape?
Hudson Munoz: The most important focus for gun violence prevention right now is on the commercial determinants of health. What I mean by that is that we need to focus on the connection between the business of guns and the adverse public health impacts of living with so many guns in circulation.
The movement has done a really good job of documenting, analyzing, and coming up with solutions very far downstream from the gun industry itself. And the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act has been a barrier to moving that analysis and those accountability options further upstream towards the gunmakers, the distributors, the retailers, which is where we see the greatest opportunity to do new analysis that links those entities directly to the problem of gun violence.
How does your strategy differ from the traditional approaches of gun violence prevention groups?
Areas with high levels of racial inequality, income inequality, and low investment in social capital — like parks, clubs, and other third places — are areas where you see the highest incidences of gun violence.
We see an opportunity to address that problem through the lens of unlocking business capital and corporate philanthropic capital to move money and resources into those areas — to give people opportunities for jobs, change their employment practices, and provide green spaces where people can be together.
I can pitch Guns Down America seven ways to Sunday, depending on who I’m talking to. But at its core, what we are talking about — and what I think the movement needs to be talking about — is how we contribute to community power. We’re not just saying regulate the tool, but opening our focus out and saying, why do people want the tool to begin with? What are the factors in their life that make them say, I need a gun?
When you say addressing why people want the tool to begin with: What role do you see Guns Down America playing there?
What we can see in our Consumer Insights research is who I call the “zero to one” set. These are people who currently report that they don’t own a firearm but that they’re planning to buy their first gun in the next 12 months, and they’re doing it for personal protection. Those people — if you look at them through a purely political lens — are part of what you could call the MAGA set.
But if you look at them through an economic lens or a socioeconomic lens, what you see is a set of people who are profoundly vulnerable and acutely stressed. They are worried about getting evicted from their home. They’re worried about the impact of addiction. They are falling behind financially or report that they are struggling to keep up. And they say they want to buy a gun.
When communities are strong, when people are not afraid or worried about eviction, when they have economic security, when they have opportunity and education — those things create connection in places, and they mitigate the risk of firearm injury and death.
Hudson Munoz, executive director of Guns Down America
When I look at that, I see that the desire to own a firearm is genuine. But it’s genuine in the context of a life in which they don’t have security. I see it almost as a signal that if we want to prevent firearm injury and death across the board, we need to be talking about the reasons and the motivations behind people demanding firearms.
What’s your theory about how to reach those people?
That brings me back to the community power piece. Because when communities are strong, when people are not afraid or worried about eviction, when they have economic security, when they have opportunity and education — those things create connection in places, and they mitigate the risk of firearm injury and death.
This is where our Business Must Act campaign is going to go through a bit of a transition. We’ve done these corporate scorecards for six years now. The rubric overall heavily indexed on political contributions to the NRA’s million-dollar members, the A-ranked members of Congress, as judged by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
But we also heard some really valid feedback that said: What about banning the box? What about DEI policies? What about corporate philanthropy for community violence intervention, or for building up green spaces, or for investing in, for example, the local baseball league?
Those are core community power issues. The next version of our scorecard is going to focus on the connection between business practices that relate to the social determinants of gun violence rather than business practices that relate to the politics of guns.
What that new focus gives us is a way to say to the business community, to corporate America, that the toolbox here is much bigger than passing laws just about gun violence.
Why should businesses pay attention to that scorecard?
The toolbox here includes those investments in communities that create a positive feedback loop with the business itself. In fact, there was just a report from the Urban Institute that demonstrates that gun violence significantly reduces the growth of new retail and service businesses, slows home value appreciation, and higher rates of gun violence are associated with fewer retail and service establishments, fewer jobs, lower home values, lower credit scores, lower ownership rates — all that kind of stuff.
What we see in this is an opportunity to say to the business world: If you invest, if you open a new retail store, if you open a new bank branch, if you do whatever to expand your business in a disadvantaged area, the thing you need to do along with that is a little bit of philanthropic investment to make your business thrive.
That should be compelling to the business — definitely compelling to the community — and a way that we can sort of align business self-interest in success and being part of the community with the overall objective of lowering gun violence rates.
All that makes sense to me, but I wonder if some people may say that feels small fry compared to changing federal law. How would you respond to those people?
I celebrate legislative wins, too. That stuff matters. It matters for public debate. It matters for providing resources to groups on the ground, to law enforcement, to stakeholders across the ecosystem trying to solve the uniquely American problem of gun violence.
But I will also say that federal legislation doesn’t reach everyone. And sometimes it reaches people through law enforcement channels. And when we’re talking about impacted communities, we’re also talking about communities that have a history — a not-so-positive history — with law enforcement.
It’s important stuff, but we also, I think, need to be out there in the world talking about what it means to make neighborhoods a safer place. Who are the stakeholders in my little realm of influence, and what can they be doing to make my little world a little bit safer?
It always strikes me when you look at the maps of gun violence that the highest concentrations of daily gun violence occur in pocketed areas all around the country. And what I want to talk about and where I think we should be focused — and where Guns Down America is quite tailored — is how do we address the factors there that are driving people to engage in gun violence?
The macro stuff moves the nation and the needle. I couldn’t agree more with the statement that we need a sort of national readjustment on this issue. But we also have to adjust how we’re doing it in cities, towns, and rural areas, and we need to talk about suicide.
How does the gun industry fit into this?
Every good corporate accountability campaign has changes in consumer behavior as one of the measures of success. When it comes to guns, I believe I’m a safer and healthier person because I don’t live in a house with a gun in it. And that is a fact that the gun industry doesn’t want people to know. They want people to believe that they are safer when they have a pistol in their pocket.
That is just a complete, unmitigated falsehood. When you bring a gun into your house, the risks of suicide success, the risk of accident, injury, misuse, abuse of a partner with a gun — all of that stuff goes up. That’s where the consumer behavior outcome meshes with the corporate accountability work.
Because we need to disrupt the narrative that guns make you safe. And when we disrupt that narrative, we’re not just talking about grasstops effects here. It needs to ladder down to individuals and the choices they make about their relationship with guns.
Are you suggesting starting with the manufacturers themselves, or is it more on the demand side that you’re talking about?
You can’t really talk about demand without talking about supply. Guns are a super interesting product which — because of their destructive force — become a driver of their own demand. We are building up what I call the Gun Industry Observatory. And that is our proprietary dataset about the global small arms trade.
With all of that, we’re not just able to do observational analyses of supply, demand, whatever. We’re also able to do more analytical work, building econometric models of the gun industry, building forecasts for demand, and building inventory and civilian stock estimates. And this is going to make Guns Down America, I would argue, the only gun violence prevention organization with the same competitive intelligence as the gun industry.
And that is how we’re going to begin to set a new agenda in corporate accountability, whether we’re talking about competitive dynamics among federal firearms licensees and the relationship of that competition to public health outcomes like injury and death. We’ll also be able to look into the distribution network and create or engineer a model of the inventory channel. And then the makers themselves, I think, deserve all the scrutiny that any public company should have.
This type of analysis is what I think is sorely needed, that has been missing, especially when you view the gun industry itself as one of the commercial determinants of public health and gun violence.
On the policy side of things, are there any state or local avenues for action that y’all are looking at?
In our view, the bill is due. The gun industry made untold sums of money putting guns into the world while disclaiming all responsibility, and people are getting hip to that. That is effectively communicated in a tax on the gun industry that goes to pay for community violence interruption, crime victim services, and other behavioral and mental health issues for at-risk populations.
We were a proud supporter and champion of the coalition in Colorado that got Proposition KK passed in the last election cycle. Proposition KK is an excise tax on the gun industry, with proceeds or tax revenue going to support services for survivors of domestic violence, veterans with mental health care, school safety initiatives, and crime victim services.
That is where I think we can start to address long-term factors of demand, and the gun industry should rightly pay for part of it. The social cost of guns far exceeds what they sell them for on a per-gun basis. And these tax policy ideas are a good way to get people talking about that and to effectively provide sustainable funding for vulnerable populations who are most impacted by gun violence.
