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C H A P T E R S I X Mobilizing around Modest Measures: Three Cases FOR THE FIRST TWO DECADES OR MORE of its organized life, the campaign for gun control was characterized by a smattering of small, resource-poor, and often short-lived associations of concerned citizens, a larger universe of national religious, civic, and labor groups willing to lend their moral support to the cause, and two or three advocacy organizations in Washington , D.C., whose strategic decisions along the way affected the development (or not) of the gun control “movement.” The decision to pursue a national handgun ban—a position that one national gun control group still holds and another held until the early 1990s—constrained the movement by alienating supporters and strengthening opponents. The decision to focus on national efforts and provide only sporadic, ad hoc support to local and state efforts made it difficult for the “movement” to gain momentum. By the late 1990s, however, the “rational national” strategy was no longer the clearly dominant approach. Indeed, bottom-up incrementalism had begun to take root. If my theory is correct, that both horizontal and vertical incrementalism are movement enhancing, we should have seen popular participation rise in the places and at the times when incremental approaches were attempted . Below, I examine such relevant counterfactuals,1 cases in which gun control advocates tried incrementalism, if only in limited ways. These cases are (1) the effort to pass the loophole-plugging Brady Bill in the early 1990s; (2) the effort to pass local gun control ordinances in California in the second half of the 1990s; and (3) the effort to build a grassroots movement of women gun control advocates in the early 2000s. Although constrained from developing into a full-fledged, broad movement for gun control, these cases suggest that incremental strategies in fact do lead to a sustained expansion and intensification of citizen participation. THE BRADY BILL When gun control organizations finally did unite around an incremental policy, they managed both to drum up political participation and to secure a new gun control law. Many factors affected the Brady Bill’s passage, including the fact that pro-control Democrats controlled the presidency Mobilizing around Modest Measures • 177 and both branches of Congress in the wake of the 1992 election. However, political opportunities do not guarantee policy outcomes. Gun control advocates won passage of the Brady Bill in large part because they built a broad coalition to agitate for it, and that coalition was possible because the bill proposed—and built on—incremental, rather than comprehensive , change. Passed in 1993, and effective the following year, the Brady Bill was designed to plug a loophole created twenty-five years before with the passage of the Gun Control Act. The 1968 act had barred certain classes of presumably high-risk people, such as drug addicts and minors, from purchasing handguns. However, the law contained no mechanism by which gun sellers could verify that the would-be purchaser was not in one of these restricted groups. The Brady Law created that enforcement mechanism. The law required people buying handguns from federally licensed sellers to undergo a federal background check to determine whether they were eligible to own a weapon. The law then imposed a five-day waiting period during which the background check was to be conducted. Thus, the Brady Law was a horizontally incremental step in two respects . It represented a modification of one piece of existing law, rather than imposing an entirely new regulatory regime. And, while making it harder for ineligible individuals to buy a handgun, the law did not extend ownership restrictions to anybody not already covered by the law. Besides representing a strategy of horizontal incrementalism, the Brady Bill was also, and less obviously, an example of vertical incrementalism. Its major provisions were modeled on laws that at least eighteen states had passed, mostly since the mid-1960s. Thus, scores of members of Congress had experience with these laws and had confidence, if not in the laws’ effectiveness , at least in their ability to be implemented without seriously infringing the rights of gun owners. With the twin virtues of being modest and road tested in the states, the policy prescriptions embodied in the Brady Bill galvanized participation in the short term and set the gun control campaign on a trajectory of expansion. In the short term, the Brady Bill ignited a broad array of interest groups that had been sympathetic...

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