Bernie and I disagreed on guns, but the Republicans were far more extreme. Just days after terrorists shot and killed fourteen people and seriously injured twenty-two others at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, California, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to stop individuals on the no-fly list from buying guns and explosives. I thought it was a no-brainer that if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy a gun! But the Republicans refused to defy the NRA.
Then there was Donald Trump. From the start of the campaign, he did everything he could to ingratiate himself with the gun lobby, which may have been wary that a New York billionaire with a history of being sympathetic to gun control wouldn’t be a natural ally. So he overcompensated. He promised to force schools to allow guns in classrooms and to overturn efforts President Obama made to strengthen the background check system. After the rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, in which eight students and one professor were killed, Trump called the attack horrible but didn’t seem to think anything could be done about it. “You’re going to have these things happen,” he said flippantly. After the June attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed forty-nine young people, many of them LGBT people of color, Trump said it was “too bad” that people at the club “didn’t have guns attached to their hips”—even though all the research and a growing body count prove that more guns mean more deaths.
Republicans liked to rile up their base with tales about how I was going to shred the Constitution and take away their guns. It didn’t matter that I said the opposite as clearly as I could, including in my acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: “I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not here to take away your guns. I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place.” I was used to being the gun lobby’s favorite villain. But as he so often did, Trump took it to another level. In August 2016, he told a rally in North Carolina that if I were elected President, there’d be no way to stop me from appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Well, he said, maybe the “Second Amendment people” might find a way to stop me. Many of us took that to mean: maybe someone would shoot me.
Trump’s remark caused a stir in the press. I was particularly concerned that if a “Second Amendment person” came after me, he’d be coming after my security detail of Secret Service agents. His campaign tried to downplay the comment, but everyone heard the innuendo loud and clear. Later, there were reports that the Secret Service told Trump’s team to get their candidate to knock it off.
As for the NRA, it kept its promise to do everything it could to stop me. All told, the gun lobby spent more than $30 million supporting Trump, more money than any other outside group and more than double what it spent to support Mitt Romney in 2012. About two-thirds of that money paid for more than ten thousand negative ads attacking me in battleground states. The organization didn’t have the guts to take on my specific policy proposals—which were widely popular, even with a lot of gun owners. Instead, it went for fearmongering and demonizing. In one ad, a woman is alone in bed when a robber breaks into the house. “Don’t let Hillary leave you protected with nothing but a phone,” the narrator warns, suggesting falsely that I would have stopped law-abiding Americans from having a gun.
I’m sure that some of my fellow Democrats will look at this high-priced onslaught and conclude, as many have in the past, that standing up to the NRA just isn’t worth it. Some may put gun safety on the chopping block alongside reproductive rights as “negotiable,” so as not to distract from populist economics. Who knows—the same might happen to criminal justice reform and racial justice more broadly. That would be a terrible mistake. Democrats should not respond to my defeat by retreating from our strong commitments on these life-or-death issues. The vast majority of Americans agree that we need to do more on gun safety. This is a debate we can win if we keep at it.
As I met more survivors of gun violence and the families of victims, I was amazed at how many shared the Mothers of the Movement’s conviction that they had to channel their private pain into public action.
One of the most powerful voices came from someone who had trouble speaking: former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011 while meeting with constituents in the parking lot of a Tucson supermarket. Before the shooting, Gabby was a rising political star: brilliant, magnetic, and effective. After the shooting, she had to persevere through intense physical therapy and relearn how to walk and talk. Nonetheless, she and her husband, the former astronaut and fighter pilot Captain Mark Kelly, became passionate advocates for gun safety. I loved campaigning with them and watching crowds fall in love with Gabby, just as I had. “Speaking is difficult for me,” she would say, “but come January, I want to say these two words: Madam President.”
Other advocates were less famous but no less courageous, including the families of Sandy Hook Elementary victims in Newtown, Connecticut. Every time I tried to talk about the massacre of little children that happened at that school in 2012, I started to choke up. I don’t know how some of the grieving parents found the strength to share their experiences at campaign events, but I will always be grateful that they did.
Nicole Hockley joined me at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. Her six-year-old son, Dylan, was shot to death despite a special education teacher’s heroic efforts to shield him from the bullets. After the massacre, Nicole became the managing director of Sandy Hook Promise, an organization that has trained nearly two million people across the country to identify potentially violent behavior and intervene before there’s a dangerous attack.
One of Nicole’s partners at Sandy Hook Promise is Mark Barden. His seven-year-old son, Daniel, was killed that day. Mark remembers how, on the morning of the shooting, Daniel woke up early so that he and Mark could watch the sunrise together. And when it came time for his older brother, Jake, to go to school, Daniel ran down the driveway to give him a hug and kiss good-bye.
After the shooting, Mark and his wife, Jackie, were the ones who sued Remington Arms, the company that makes the military-grade weapon the killer used in the attack. They argued that Remington should be held responsible for selling and marketing military weapons to civilians. (The case has been dismissed and is now on appeal.)
Then there’s Nelba Márquez-Greene, who spoke with me at an event in Hartford, Connecticut. She lost her six-year-old daughter, Ana, at Sandy Hook. The night before the shooting, she and her husband took Ana and Isaiah, Ana’s younger brother, out for a family dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. They splurged and ordered two rounds of dessert. Isaiah, also a Sandy Hook student, heard the shots that killed his sister from a nearby classroom. The family buried Ana two days before Christmas, her unopened gifts sitting under the tree.