In early April of this year, I interviewed Brina Milikowsky ’96 about her work with Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control coalition, Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Shortly thereafter, the Senate rejected a bipartisan bill—supported by a strong majority of the American public—to expand background checks for gun buyers. Flanked by victims of the Newtown school shooting, an unusually angry Barack Obama described the defeat as “a pretty shameful day for Washington.” If our government couldn’t enact limited but lifesaving legislation that most of the populace thought was reasonable, how could we hope for any kind of progress?
I brace myself for a gloomy encounter with Brina. Instead, I get a reminder—almost uplifting—about the mechanics of change.
“Actually, the mood on the inside is very different from what I think the national mood about it is,” Brina says about the fallen Manchin-Toomey bill. “The national news was, ‘The vote failed in the Senate.’ But 20 senators voted the right way in April who wouldn’t have done that a year ago. We’re optimistic that the April Senate vote was just round one, and we’re in a very strong position to have an even better round two.”
Brina sounds convinced. “We’ve come so far in the past six months,” she goes on, “we’re giddy with excitement. Gun violence was an abandoned field. This myth of NRA’s intractable power had come to dominate conventional Washington wisdom.”
When Brina first came to City Hall, she hadn’t planned to work on gun control. “I got this job because I’m an attorney, and I’ve done a mix of law and policy and wanted to come back to New York. I got into gun work without any anticipation that it would be the hot issue of the day.” The work was diverse and challenging; she wrote policy reports, drafted bills, directed strategy, managed field workers, and even helped develop TV ads. Gratifying work, but unlikely to land her office on The Rachel Maddow Show.
That changed after Newtown. Suddenly the NRA’s perceived invincibility was in question. “In terms of the national conversation, Newtown was apocalyptic. It created a singular opportunity when the country was listening. A newfound commitment surfaced in unexpected corners of the country—senators rated A by the NRA were saying, ‘You can support the Second Amendment and still do so much more to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.’ So the last five months have been an accelerated version of what we thought was going to take five years and a national PR campaign: getting people to know that background checks are a problem. And in the meantime, we’ve had solid wins; six states have passed really strong laws since Newtown.”
One irony of this sudden surge is that high-profile mass shootings like Newtown constitute a tiny percentage of the gun violence inflicted on Americans every day. If the public’s concern about mass shootings helps curb domestic violence shootings, which are vastly more common, fine. Idealism will only go so far. This fight requires political finesse and tactical acuity; it’s a challenge Brina clearly relishes. “The other reason morale stays high is that the gun lobby is really good at what they do. They are formidable and insidious. Opposing them is a fascinating challenge.”
This struggle also requires tremendous persistence, which gets back to the question of why Brina is the cheerful one at the table. “I’ve been conditioned to take the long view on this,” she explains. “I mean, the Brady Bill created the background check system. James Brady was shot in ’81. The Brady Bill passed in ’92, and it originally passed one of the chambers in ’87. It took ’87 to ’92 to get it done, and it was 10 years after the man—and also the president—had been shot. So this is actually the pace of really large-scale legislation, especially of the social-issues variety.”
Doggedness in the face of intimidating odds has been Brina’s approach at least since her time at Harvard, where she worked to challenge what she and others experienced as the university administration’s indifference to campus sexual assault. “Harvard lacked resources directed toward this problem at the time, and was falling far behind its peer schools. You would think this would be the kind of thing Harvard would care about it,” she says. “We found deep resistance among certain pockets of the administration. It took a few years to work our way up the chain of people saying ‘no, no, no’ and figure out a way to go above them.”
But she and her co-workers did make things happen, as she is now intent on doing with gun control. By the end of the conversation, my post-Senate-vote despair seemed shortsighted. After all, was this supposed to be easy? Change is work. Real progress demands that we show up, again and again.
Brina has clearly decided to show up. The next time she and her team go up against the NRA, those who think more control of gun violence isn’t possible should be watching closely.
–Peter Smith ’00