by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
According to a Dec. 16, 2013 article in the marketing trade magazine Ad Age, gun-control groups are heavy on spending but light on return on investment (ROI) based on their campaigns in the past year.
Both sides of the gun debate have raised and spent big dollars in various traditional and social media, but for the most part the anti-gunners have not gotten much return.
In the year after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, gun-control groups spent $14.1 million on TV advertising, Ad Age noted. According to Kantar Media’s CMAG, that gave such groups a seven-to-one advantage over gun-rights organizations, which spent only $1.9 million.
At the same time, gun-rights groups, led by the National Rifle Association, spent about $6.2 million on lobbying instead of advertising, according to a study by the Sunlight Foundation cited by Ad Age.
The gun-rights groups may have had the better tactic—especially in a quiet election year, the magazine suggested.
White House efforts to strengthen gun-control laws went nowhere. Watered- down legislation to broaden FBI background checks of gun buyers failed in the Senate. And the GOP-controlled House did not even consider addressing gun-control legislation.
“The return on the investment has been very weak,” said Elizabeth Wilner of Kantar Media. “When you are doing advocacy advertising you are looking for Congress to pass something.”
And things weren’t that much better on the state level. The New York Times reported that about 1,500 gun-related bills had been introduced in state legislatures since the Newtown tragedy and 109 of them became law. Nearly two-thirds of the laws passed were actually improvements that benefited lawful gun owners, further expanding the rights of gun owners, according to the Times. Most of those bills were approved in states controlled by Republicans.
Gun-control groups did win victories in some states, including Connecticut, New York and Colorado, and California, where the legislature and governorship are controlled by Democrats.
Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City and a billionaire, was responsible for most of the spending on the gun-control side. A co-founder of Mayors Against Gun Violence (MAIG), Bloomberg budgeted $12 million for an ad campaign this year. The effort was kicked off with celebrity-heavy ads demanding a plan but became more targeted as the year went on, even reaching out to “responsible gun owners.”
But not all of Bloomberg’s efforts were aimed at swaying Congress. He used his PAC, Independence USA, in an attempt to elect supporters of gun control and defeat gun-rights candidates. In this, Bloomberg may have had a better return on his investment.
Ad Age reported that the Independence USA spent $2.2 million to defeat Debbie Halvorson, a pro-gun, former one-term House member who was vying to win a special election in Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District. The PAC also spent more than $732,000 on ads to help Democrat Cory Booker, former mayor of Newark, NJ, win an October special election for Senate and $3.1 million in independent expenditures and direct contributions to help Democrat Terry McAuliffe, an outspoken proponent of stronger gun control, win a tight Virginia governor’s race in November.
Bloomberg spent big with no return in the Colorado elections to recall two Democrat state senators who supported the state’s new gun-control law this year. Supported by other anti-gun and pro-incumbent groups, the two state senators lost, even in the largely Democrat-leaning district like that surrounding Pueblo. The anti-gunners outspent the pro-gunners in those historic recall elections by better than two to one and still lost.
According to the Sunlight Foundation, gun-control broadcast advertising peaked last spring, especially in the days before and after the Senate held its decisive vote in April. At one point in May there were nearly 80 buys in the nation’s top 50 broadcast markets, the foundation says.
The Sunlight Foundation predicts gun-rights groups, which have largely kept their powder dry as far as ad spending, will become much more active in 2014 as midterm elections near and both sides compete for control of the House and Senate, as well as state legislatures and governorships. The foundation also said, thanks in part to Bloomberg, “gun-control groups … are heading into 2014 with formidable campaign war chests.”
The anti-gunners have lots of money to spend and are usually supported by big money, as is the case in the battle of referendums in Washington State Later this year. In the Evergreen State, major support of the anti-gun initiative is coming from a few millionaires, while the pro-gun side has been raising its money in lots of small contributions from working class citizens.
As 2013 ended, many in the general media and trade publications took note of the ongoing public policy debate over gun control, some of the articles not necessarily helpful to the Obama Administration.
NBC News in mid-December offered an article that claimed that US schools keep trying wrong fixes to deter school shootings, citing a variety of experts.
It happened after Columbine, after Virginia Tech, and after Newtown, too.
After every massacre in a school, Americans grasp at quick cures. Let’s install metal detectors and give guns to teachers. Let’s crack down on troublemakers, weeding out kids who fit the profile of a gunman. Let’s buy bulletproof whiteboards for the students to scurry behind, or train kids to throw erasers or cans of soup at an attacker.
Researchers who study school shootings say the nation has done the wrong things, again and again, to prevent these rare but frightening events. And when more promising measures that address the real causes of school shootings are tried, the money has ridden a roller-coaster; rising a year after a major attack, then falling as memories fade. Only one out of five schools currently gets money for one of the Obama signature programs to reduce school shootings, NBC noted.
