In June 2022, four Senators, two Republican and two Democrat, gathered in the basement of the US Senate to negotiate the details of what they hoped would become the US’s first national gun safety legislation in decades. Such bipartisan negotiations had long seemed impossible. Debates of gun-related legislation had historically been dominated by the influential National Rifle Association (NRA), which vehemently defended the right to bear arms through a large grassroots base and direct pressure on politicians. Gun safety advocates, on the other hand, had failed to convince politicians to support their mission, struggling to amass enough funding and grassroots support to influence political campaigns – even when the majority of Americans supported stricter gun laws. But gradually over the 2010s, a few large gun-safety activist groups emerged and pursued new strategies, and by the 2020s, they were seeing some political victories at the local and state level.

This had given hope to Democrat Senator Chris Murphy who had supported gun safety since 2012. But now his colleague, Republican Senator John Cornyn, threatened to walk away from the negotiations over the inclusion of ‘red flag laws’, a tool to remove guns from individuals deemed to be at extreme risk to themselves or others. The provision was championed by gun safety groups and derided by the NRA. Murphy did not want to lose this potential moment for change, and he had to figure out if he could hold the coalition together.