surging across demographics that once rejected them, including women, who since 2019 have accounted for nearly half of new gun purchases. Left-leaning Americans are also reportedly buying guns and signing up for firearm training in record numbers, driven by concerns about personal safety and government tyranny. “I just filed an application for a permit to carry here, and it scares the life out of me,” says Jennifer Topper, a 54-year-old single mom in New Jersey, who applied for her first gun permit after watching federal immigration raids turn violent. She’s “totally terrified of guns” but likes the idea of being listed as a gun owner in government databases. “I just think they’re picking on the most vulnerable, and it’s dangerous, and I want them to know that I am armed.” At the same time, gun violence continues to take a staggering toll on the country. More than 44,000 Americans died from gun-related injuries in 2024, according to the CDC, down from pandemic-era peaks but still among the highest totals on record. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for American children and teens for the fifth year running. In response, a grassroots gun violence prevention movement has gained real political power over the past decade, passing hundreds of restrictions at the state level and flipping legislatures on this issue. Whatever comes next, the fight is already playing out in statehouses, in schools, and in how Americans talk about what makes them feel safe.
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un ownership in America has gone mainstream and off-script. New firearm purchases spiked during COVID amid political unrest and widespread government distrust, and the trend has only continued to climb. Now, firearms are
The gun control movement is optimistic about its momentum. As the National Rifle Association’s lobbying power and funding are diminishing amid lawsuits, infighting and revelations of corruption, grassroots groups like Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action, and Students Demand Action have mobilized over the past decade to pass hundreds of gun restrictions at a state level. Moms Demand, which formed in 2012 as a response to the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, has become especially politically potent over the past couple years. In Virginia, former Moms Demand volunteers just swept the state’s off-year elections in November, winning 13 seats in the state legislature and flipping the governorship blue, which could finally enable the swing state to ban the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. “The issue of gun violence prevention [has moved] from an issue of third rail politics, where no one would touch or talk about this, to something where we actually have people that are running for office on this,” says Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director at Moms Demand. “And not just running, but winning on this.”
her contractions started, she left home, but chose not to go to Al-Awda Hospital because of the danger. Instead, she went to a tent clinic newly set up in central Gaza by the International Medical Corps. Pain relief was not available for her eight-hour delivery, so she had to work through excruciating contractions. Against all odds, her baby boy was born healthy. She named him Yamen, which meant “generosity and ease,” something she longed for.
Abed stayed at the hospital for just a few hours after the birth and then went home because there wasn’t space to keep women for long. There, she groaned in pain and bled for days. But she was able to breastfeed, and Yamen thrived. Food was scarce but enough. She imagined a better future, of taking him to schools and parks and restaurants. Of having ease again.
At Al-Awda Hospital, Al-Nashef was nearing the end of her six-week medical mission. When a bomb went off, she instinctively knew to jump away from the glass because the IDF usually struck a second time. One of her fellow midwives had nearly lost her arm to shrapnel. She'd spoken to young boys who acted like men, including one who held his brother in pieces. She'd watched as more women gave birth to preterm babies, like Alreqeb’s wife had, likely from the stress of war.
One day in July, Al-Nashef heard a drone outside the hospital that she thought was a “zenana,” which means “buzzing” in Arabic—an IDF drone that is loud on purpose to let people know they’re under surveillance. But it was a quadcopter, a far more terrifying drone with four rotors that can kill people at close range. Al-Nashef was helping a woman push out her baby when the quadcopter started shooting. The woman panicked. “I said, ‘Forget about it, no one is coming close, just have the baby,’” Al-Nashef said. “I’m suturing her and hearing the firing, trying to calm her down, and you just have no idea what’s going on.”
Where before her colleagues were overworked, now “they are holding on by a thread,” she said. “They went to work, helped people have their babies…but they’re so exhausted, they kind of dissociate.” When Al-Nashef finally left Gaza for home, she immediately began thinking about returning later this year. She struggled with guilt at having left her colleagues behind. “Something about Gaza takes a piece of your heart and leaves it there,” she said.
In Cairo, Alreqeb’s daughter, Salma, received a much-needed surgery. Between shifts at the hospital, Alreqeb speaks to his wife and daughters over WhatsApp as often as he can. All he wants, all any ordinary person in Gaza wants—the mothers, the humanitarian agencies, the doctors and midwives—is a ceasefire so the war can end. Some days he sounds deeply sad, other days he speaks with fight in his voice. “Maybe you hear that people of Gaza, they love death, or they know nothing except death,” he said by voice note in June. “But actually,” he told me, “we people of Gaza, we love life.”
Abed had loved her life before the war; being a mom, working with her husband on building their own graphic design company as they saved for a house. Alreqeb loved his life, too: watching romantic movies with Issra at home, taking his daughter to restaurants, bringing life into the world without bombs. His tent clinic, he said, is the seed of a larger idea; he wants to build his own maternity hospital after the war, when all of Gaza is rebuilding—and being reborn.
her contractions started, she left home, but chose not to go to Al-Awda Hospital because of the danger. Instead, she went to a tent clinic newly set up in central Gaza by the International Medical Corps. Pain relief was not available for her eight-hour delivery, so she had to work through excruciating contractions. Against all odds, her baby boy was born healthy. She named him Yamen, which meant “generosity and ease,” something she longed for.
The Legislative Push
As individual states grapple with their own gun proposals, school shootings are raging on at an alarming clip. There have been eight in the U.S. already this year as of March 12. In 2025, at least 78 school shootings here left 32 students dead and 122 injured. Guns remain the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S. More than two-thirds of states now allow teachers to carry guns in public schools, which has been a growing trend among state legislatures over the last decade. Though, many school districts across the country are refusing to implement those laws. While the idea of arming teachers is being pushed hard by the NRA and many Republican lawmakers, polling shows that the students, teachers, and parents who have been traumatized by these shootings do not feel like more guns in the classroom would make anyone safer. The generation that grew up doing active shooter drills is starting to make itself heard. Carter Ferris, a 17-year-old in Colorado, got involved with Students Demand Action, a sister organization to Moms Demand, after his older brother survived a school shooting when Carter was 6. He spoke at the Colorado State Capitol this month in support of new gun control measures and says his group has helped pass 15 state laws in the past two years.
Inside Schools
That may be the most honest measure of where America’s gun debate is headed: a long, messy fight over what safety actually means. There will be no single piece of legislation that resolves it, no election that settles the question. Vinik says risk education can work “regardless of which party is in control of a statehouse or of Congress.” It’s a bet on the slow game: that if you change the way people think about guns, the politics will eventually follow. Then again, for women like Topper and the scores more who are flooding firearm trainings across the country, buying a gun is less about personal safety now than a constitutional imperative to arm oneself against the government. It seems that the Second Amendment is no longer just a theoretical rallying cry for the right, but a practical necessity for women who see civil rights being trampled. “I’m not going to start throwing Molotov cocktails at ICE down at my Home Depot,” says Topper. “But I will say that the idea of knowing that I can now have a weapon and literally be on the same life level as them, it gives me a sense of some mental relief that we aren’t powerless against a force like this.”
The Long Game
Women are buying guns at record rates. They’re also winning elections, passing state laws, and organizing against gun violence like never before. Where we go next is unclear, but one thing is certain—it will be shaped by women on both sides of the fight.
BY LAURA BASSETT
What Will the Future of Guns Look Like?
Read more stories from our Women and Gun series.
“It gets to a point where you are seeing these news headlines constantly and people that are in school shootings, and you’re doing these drills and it’s constantly in your face,” Ferris says. “It gets to a point where the question becomes, how can I not care? How can I see this and not care?” For Ferris, the idea of arming teachers is not a solution. It’s a threat. “For me, the idea of that is bizarre and so insane—to be in a classroom and to see that my teacher has a gun would change everything,” he says. “The relationship is no longer the same, because one person basically has something in their hands or on their side that could kill me in an instant.”
“For me, the idea of that is bizarre and so insane—to be in a classroom and to see that my teacher has a gun would change everything.”
Legislation alone won’t solve the crisis. Nina Vinik, founder of Project Unloaded and an architect of the gun violence prevention movement, says half the battle of the next decade is undoing a single, powerful message: that you need a gun to be safe. The NRA ramped up its online and social media campaign aimed at women over the last decade with ads that carry a message of safety and empowerment: One Instagram ad from 2018 read, “I carry because you can’t put a cop in your purse”; another featured a blonde woman smiling in her sleep with the caption, “How I sleep knowing there’s a gun in my nightstand.” “In every focus group I’ve seen over two decades, whether it’s a bipartisan group, women, people of color, people from the South or people from cities…whatever their politics, the people in the focus group can recite the talking points of the gun lobby,” Vinik says. “They’ve internalized those messages. But when you ask them to make a counter argument that we should restrict access to guns, they don’t have the words to make that argument.” Project Unloaded is trying to reach young people across the country in a non-partisan way, teaching them about the dangers of having a gun in the home and pushing to get fact-based lessons about firearms into regular high school health classes, much like kids learn about the risks of smoking or fentanyl. The project teaches, for instance, that living in a house with a gun doubles the chance of dying by homicide and triples the risk of suicide. Their strategy is showing big potential: After one six-week pilot program in Chicago in 2023, the percentage of students who said they definitely or probably would own a gun after being exposed to facts about gun deaths fell by over 20 points.
“The idea of knowing that I can now have a weapon…it gives me a sense of some mental relief that we aren’t powerless against a force like this.”
Rhode Island will become only the second state after Washington to ban the sale and manufacture of high-powered assault weapons this summer, after a decade-long fight. Groups are now eyeing New Mexico and Hawaii as the next states with enough momentum for similar bans. Across the country, advocates are also pushing for stronger background check requirements, restrictions on bump stocks and high-capacity magazines, and red flag laws that would allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed a danger to themselves or others. The coming years will also force lawmakers to confront emerging threats like ghost guns and 3D-printed firearms, which are unserialized and therefore untraceable. Nick Suplina, senior vice president of policy at Everytown, says we need to address the ghost gun problem the way we did when the high-quality laser color printer started hitting the general consumer market, and people realized they could print money that looks very real. “Then, as now, the government and industry got together and said, ‘How do we make it so that this can’t be a thing anymore?’ And right now, if you go and try to print a $100 bill on your color printer, it won’t do it.” Colorado Democrats just advanced a bill prohibiting the use of a three-dimensional printer, or similar devices, from making a gun or a gun component, similar to what four other states already have on the books. Not every state is moving in the same direction, though. Permitless concealed carry laws are sweeping the South, and Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) just proposed one in Congress that would make it the policy nationwide. Tennessee and Iowa passed laws in 2024 allowing teachers and school staff to carry concealed guns, enacting the gun lobby’s unpopular solution to school shootings. And as long as Republicans control all three branches of the U.S. government, gun violence prevention advocates are facing an uphill battle to get anything done on a federal level.
“It gets to a point where the question becomes, how can I not care? How can I see this and not care?”
The Legislative Push
Inside Schools
“It gets to a point where the question becomes, how can I not care? How can I see this and not care?”
“For me, the idea of that is bizarre and so insane—to be in a classroom and to see that my teacher has a gun would change everything.”
Content warning: The following story contains references to gun violence.
Content warning: The following story contains references to gun violence.