Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun "news" outlet The Trace doesn't usually dig too deeply into the gun control lobby itself, preferring instead to go after the firearms industry, Second Amendment groups like the National Rifle Association and Firearms Policy Coalition, and gun owners. Occasionally the website will cover things like community violence intervention programs that don't directly push anti-gun policies, though the site's reporters are sure to put their own gun control spin on their stories.
It's somewhat surprising, then, to see Trace reporter Will Van Sant do a deep dive into the collapse of the gun control group March For Our Lives, which includes the recent layoff of the vast majority of its paid staff, a new executive director, and internal debate about how involved the group should be in other progressive causes.
Van Sant's report is actually worth reading in its entirety, and my colleague Tom Knighton may highlight some other interesting parts of the story, but one of the first things that really stuck out to me is the struggle MFOL is having raising money.
In its first year, MFOL reported $18.7 million in revenue to the Internal Revenue Service, an annual total it has never again come close to matching. The group was in the red by 2020, and it has spent more than it collected every year since. The situation would have been much worse without substantial infusions from a related foundation that provided nearly half of the $24 million in revenue that MFOL collected from 2019 to 2023. (Such funding arrangements are common among nonprofits, though they can introduce complex oversight and compliance demands.) In 2023, the last for which figures are available, revenue hit $3.6 million, while expenses were $3.8 million.
One of Van Sant's sources within the group told him that just a few months ago the financial situation was so dire that the group's operating funds were "nearly gone", which led to the mass layoffs. A consultant was brought in to look at ways to revamp the group last last year, and issued a report to the board of directors that included some very comments from MFOL staffers.
The report identifies drawing young people to the group’s cause as another challenge. “We need to think about how to pull Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z-ers in,” reads one comment. “There is a whole generation that does not feel connected to this movement.” Another concern was maintaining authenticity as a youth crusade when so much direct support came from an older demographic, particularly white women. “At one point, 80 percent of our following was middle-aged white women. We focused our message on them, and it was effective,” a comment reads. “That’s when we were raising money.”
Those comments, taken together, represent an existential crisis; not only for March for Our Lives, but the gun control lobby in general. While gun ownership has broadened significantly since the 2020 pandemic, with more minorities and women purchasing firearms and obtaining their concealed carry licenses, the gun control lobby is largely populated by those middle-aged white women the staffer talked about.
A 2024 survey by Pew Research showed women were far more likely to support gun control than men, with 64% of women agreeing that gun laws should be made more strict and only 9% saying they should be less strict, compared to 51% of men who wanted more gun control and 21% who wanted less. While that same survey showed that 18-29-year-olds were the age group most likely to support gun control, they're also less likely to donate to charity and political causes.
The donor pool for gun control groups is pretty shallow, though they still benefit from deep-pocketed anti-gunners like billionaire Michael Bloomberg. For groups outside of Everytown for Gun Safety's umbrella, though, especially outfits like March for Our Lives that are supposed to be home to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the pickings are slim. In fact, Van Sant reports that one staffer even floated the idea of being absorbed into Bloomberg's network of anti-gun groups in order to shore up its finances.
So why is this such a problem for the anti-gunners? Well, even their key demographic is becoming more interested in exercising their Second Amendment rights. A 2024 survey by Gallup showed 20% of women report owning a gun, up 5% since 2007. Most of that increase has happened since 2018, and the growth has been particularly pronounced among Republican women, with a 14-point increase over the past 18 years.
At the same time more Republican women are becoming gun owners, fewer women are registering as Democrats. As the New York Times detailed this week:
Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.
That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.
Liberal, middle-aged white women are still the gun control lobby's bread-and-butter, but there aren't as many liberal, middle-aged white women as there were just a couple of years ago.
Not so long ago, in 2018, Democrats had accounted for 66 percent of new voters under 45 who registered with one of the two major parties. Yet by 2024, the Democratic share had plunged to 48 percent, the Times analysis of L2’s data found.
In other words, Republicans went from roughly one-third of newly registered voters under 45 to a majority in the last six years.
The story is even bleaker for Democrats in some key states. In Nevada, which releases particularly detailed data, Republicans added nearly twice as many voters under 35 to the rolls as Democrats did last year, state records show.
The shifts among male voters tell a similar story.
Nearly 49 percent of men newly registering with a major party chose the Democrats in 2020. In 2024, that figure was down to roughly 39 percent.
At the same time, the Democratic edge among women registering to vote has shrunk. The combination inverted a gender gap that in recent years had heavily benefited Democrats.
Now, this doesn't mean that the gun control lobby is going to go the way of the dodo bird anytime soon. There are too many anti-gun billionaires for that to happen, and gun control outfits are too important to the Democratic power structure to wither away and disappear from a lack of funding. True grassroots support for anti-gun groups, on the other hand, is already drying up as more Americans embrace their Second Amendment rights and reject progressive politics in general.
