Only last year, the National Rifle Association appeared to be on the verge of losing its chokehold on Congress. The extremist pro-gun group, peerless as a hardball lobbying force in Washington, found itself fighting tough election-year battles on many fronts. Suddenly, or so it seemed, the NRA was facing a formidable new foe: a predominantly female, middle-class anti-gun movement driven by the appalling failure of the federal government to respond to the spate of gun violence that had erupted in suburban and rural schools.

The Million Mom March, the brainchild of New Jersey suburbanite Donna Dees-Thomases, vastly exceeded organizers' most optimistic expectations when it drew some 700,000 people to the National Mall on Mother's Day 2000. "A lot of politicians looked at the crowd that day and said, 'Oh my god. Here's the beginning of a real movement,' " recalls Michael Beard, president of the Washington-based Coalition To Stop Gun Violence.

The problem with the modern gun-control movement in the United States, ever since it

VANESSA ACUNA & JANIEL ENGELSTAD/ PEACE SIGNS PROJECT

was born with the Kennedy and King assassinations in the '60s, has been its inability to assemble anything close to the kind of unified national organization that might counter the NRA. Gun control has been the domain of a few Washington organizations that have tended to focus far more on issues analysis than political organization. Their connections to state gun-control organizations, many of which are shoestring operations in the homes of various brave souls, have been weak. But the Million Moms, with their state-by-state representation on the National Mall, seemed poised to change that. Could the Million Mom March strengthen gun laws the same way that Mothers Against Drunk Driving toughened penalties for driving under the influence?

While the NRA is a more formidable legislative foe than the liquor industry--especially with its dubious claim that private gun ownership enjoys constitutional protection--it appeared that the Million Mom March would at least change the terms of the gun debate. And many candidates who spoke out for stronger gun laws did emerge. Gun regulation even arose as an issue in the platforms of Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and Bill Bradley. (Bradley favored licensing of gun owners and registration of handguns, while Gore supported licensing but not registration.)

One should never make much of NRA alarmism--fear is the essential tool the organization uses to extract money from its membership, after all--but the pre-election rhetoric of the NRA did sound genuinely fearful. And for good reason: A lot of anti-NRA candidates were popping up and election-year polls were showing strong public support for gun control. (Contrary to NRA rhetoric, polls consistently have showed that Americans want stronger gun laws.)

When ballots were counted on November 7, the outcome was mixed, but certainly no cause for pessimism among the gun-control forces. While the NRA influence arguably may have kept Democrats from taking over the House, gun control very likely stopped Republicans from taking the Senate. Of the seven tight Senate races that the NRA poured its money into, five of their candidates lost. The most humiliating of these defeats was that of Missouri incumbent John Ashcroft, a longtime NRA lapdog, who lost to a dead man. The NRA suffered other embarrassing losses in Colorado and Oregon, where voters overwhelmingly passed statewide ballot initiatives to close gun-show loopholes--which exempt buyers at gun shows from the background-check requirements of the Brady Law--despite massive infusions of NRA money to defeat those efforts. And despite the NRA's efforts to defeat Al Gore in the critical states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, he won both.

Of course, the NRA would go on to land its biggest prize, a George W. Bush presidency, as well as the spectacular bonus prize of Ashcroft's appointment as attorney general, but the election returns in general contained a lot of troubling news for the NRA. The day after the election, the Million Mom March's policy director, Eric Gorovitz, issued a statement claiming that the election "demonstrated a dramatic shift in the politics of gun laws. Eight years ago, few candidates were willing to run on platforms expressly advocating the passage of new gun laws. Yesterday, many candidates were elected after embracing sensible gun laws in their campaigns. This shift demonstrates that the once-powerful gun lobby can no longer control the agenda."

What, then, explains the congressional response in March when a 15-year-old boy at

The Million Moms marched ... but the Democrats didn't follow. DON WRIGHT/AFP

Santana High School in Santee, California killed two classmates and wounded 13 others, and an eighth-grade girl in Williamsport, Pennsylvania was charged with wounding a schoolmate? Democratic Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, one of the strongest gun-control proponents in Washington, called for only a voluntary "code of ethics" for gun owners and their families.

And how does one account for congressional timidity on closing the gun-show loophole? The Brady Law provides the FBI three business days to complete a check, if it needs to go beyond the instant-check database. (Since most gun shows occur on weekends, some buyers would face the onerous burden of not getting their guns until the following Wednesday.) The FBI has found that 95 percent of gun transactions are approved within an hour and 73 percent within minutes through the instant-check database. The 5 percent who must await further investigation are, of course, questionable buyers who sometimes turn out to be felons looking for instant firepower.

Nevertheless, a bipartisan compromise bill authored by Sens. John McCain (R-Arizona) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) proposes to cut the maximum wait to 24 hours--even though the FBI has stated that if the background check had been 24 hours all along, some 17,000 transactions that were rejected on the second or third day would have gone through. And the McCain-Lieberman bill would leave intact a widely abused exemption that many gun sellers use to avoid scrutiny by proclaiming their stock a "private collection."

How has it come to this? How has the NRA actually tightened its control of the gun debate? For starters, of course, the president himself is an NRA guy and the attorney general is so far gone that he's trying his best to undo 62 years of federal legal precedent on the meaning of the Second Amendment. (In May, Ashcroft told the NRA that he supports their "individual rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment, rather than the 1939 Supreme Court ruling that the constitutional "right of the people to keep and bear arms" was intended for state militias.) But many Democrats too believe that gun control is a political loser. "The common view now is labor people and white males went against the Democrats because of the gun-control issue," Beard explains.

But Beard doesn't buy it. "The NRA successfully managed to spread the myth that it was gun control that defeated Al Gore," he says. "Most politicians now believe that gun control is a losing issue for the Democrats --overlooking the fact that we got five U.S. senators elected, that we passed the two statewide referenda by overwhelming margins in the West."

The problem with the conventional wisdom--and polls conducted for Beard's group by pollster Celinda Lake prove it--is that the rural, blue-collar white males were voting against Gore regardless of his position on guns. Beard argues that Gore's decision to stop talking about even his mild gun control plans cost him the election. By abandoning the gun issue, he lost the one demographic group that gun control could have drawn into his camp: undecided and Republican women from the suburbs. "Gore was way ahead with suburban Republican women, and when he backed off--in the debate he couldn't even face the issue--they lost commitment," Beard says. "The white males who were going to vote against him no matter what, did. The white females who were thinking of voting for him, didn't see any reason to any longer."

Meanwhile, the new gun-control movement has been victimized by its own expectations. Immediately following the Mother's Day march in Washington, "a lot of people really went overboard thinking we really had things in hand now," Beard says. After the march, the number of Moms chapters proliferated, but when the Moms merged with another new national gun-control group, the Bell Campaign, the marriage proved disastrous. The organization deteriorated, and in March, the NRA cheered the latest news from the Million Mom March front office: 30 of 35 staff members were being laid off. "We set the bar so high in terms of expectations that we couldn't meet it," Beard says. "And when we couldn't meet it, people said, 'There's something wrong with the movement.' "

Americans have become numb to the astonishing levels of gun violence in this country.

This cover image was taaken from Peace Signs: Youth Anti-gun Violence Billboard Project. The Chicago project paired six professional artists with six young artists to design billboards against gun violence. The completed billboards appeared throughout the Chicago area. The other five billboards can be viewed here.

More than 30,000 Americans will die this year by gunshot and another 80,000 or so will be seriously injured. These are numbers that dumbfound people from other industrialized nations, where death and injury from guns is a tiny fraction of the American total. In 1996, 15 people were killed with handguns in Japan, 30 in England, 106 in Canada, 211 in Germany--and 9,390 in the United States. Gun deaths among American children are particularly horrifying. A 1997 article in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report disclosed that among developed nations, three-quarters of all murders of children under age 14 occur in the United States.

The NRA contends, with breathtaking cynicism, that this is the price of freedom.

That price keeps going up. Last year, Professors Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of Georgetown University co-authored Gun Violence: The Real Costs, a book that aspired to tally all the direct and indirect ways we pay for gun violence. They counted medical costs, urban renewal-projects in areas devastated by gun violence, taxes paid for protection of public officials, metal detectors, loss of workplace productivity, etc. Their final tally on the annual cost of guns in the United States: $100 billion.

But dealing with gun violence in the United States is a lot like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube. By most counts, there are more than 200 million guns in private ownership in the United States, some 80 to 90 million of them handguns. The situation is depressing. But there is reason for hope. For starters, the polls still show that Americans want stronger gun laws.

What's more, the Moms--who now exist in some 230 chapters across the country--have joined forces with the group known for 25 years as Handgun Control Inc. The new combined group will be known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence. Closing the gun show loophole tops the group's agenda. But the Brady Campaign will also push for child-access-protection, or CAP, laws--which would require gun owners to keep their guns safely stored and inoperable, via trigger locks or other mechanisms--and legislation that would give the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms the power to regulate guns as consumer products. (Bizarrely, toy guns must meet certain safety requirements established by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but real guns do not.)

The merger of the first nationwide grassroots gun-control movement with the most established gun-control lobbyists on Capitol Hill is cause for optimism. As of October 1, when that merger goes into effect, the NRA will encounter an organization that has the potential to be the most formidable opponent it has ever seen. The new activists have a tough enough foe in the NRA, but their bigger nemesis may be the congressional Democrats and other Washington insiders all too willing to embrace the easy scapegoating of gun control for the Democratic Party's own failures.

But the Democrats will look back on this retreat as a mistake. "The polling all says it's very clearly not going away as a political issue," Beard says, "and if the right people step up and push it in the right way, it will move forward."