The Big Five Gun Control Groups
Everytown for Gun Safety | Giffords
March for Our Lives | Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
While these five groups dominate the national landscape of nonprofit gun control activism in the United States—particularly on the 501(c)(4) and PAC sides—dozens of others are active as well. Some of the larger and/or more noteworthy ones are Guns Down America, the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, the Violence Policy Center, and The Trace. There is also the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which is housed at the eponymous university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Additionally, some large left-of-center general public policy advocacy groups (such as the Center for American Progress) count gun control among the many issues on which they are active.
It is worth emphasizing the importance of “charitable” money—as evidenced by the size of the 501(c)(3) arms of each of the Big Five groups—even on an issue as thoroughly political as gun control. This phenomenon is evident across the entire American public policy advocacy landscape, particularly on the left. The charitable sector can, paradoxically, be very political indeed.
Finally (and relatedly), the Big Five gun control groups also illustrate the importance of donor-advised funds to the charitable sector. Many of the same grantmakers appear as the largest organizational funders of the 501(c)(3) arms for each of the groups discussed, and these grantmakers are in turn some of the largest donor-advised fund providers in the country: the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, Donor Advised Charitable Giving (formerly known as the Schwab Charitable Fund), the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, and so on. The nature of donor-advised funds makes it impossible to know whether the grant reported to a given recipient reflects the gift of just one or, more likely, any number of different individual donors.
