No ballot will have a gun-related initiative led by voters this fall, NBC News reports.
While seven states had tried to get 11 citizen-led firearm referendums on the ballot this year, all of them failed, according to Victoria Rose, who tracks the measures for the elections database Ballotpedia.
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Seven of the proposals supported expanding gun rights, including one in Oregon that would have created a right to carry concealed firearms without a permit, Rose said.
Among the four proposed reforms, voters in Washington state wanted to ban assault weapon sales, while voters in California proposed requiring trigger locks on firearms and annual gun license renewals.
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None of the 11 proposals had enough signatures to move forward, Rose said, which is not odd. Only six gun initiatives have made it to a vote since 2000, she said.
The lack of ballot measures pertaining to guns this year is a good thing, according to Christian Heyne, the chief programs and policy officer at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization. Heyne said it is a sign that state and federal legislators are enacting gun laws, meaning voters no longer have to take matters into their own hands.
“We have seen a historic pivot and change in state legislatures across the country to proactively legislate,” Heyne said.
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Since 2012, states have passed more than 620 gun safety laws, advocates said. In 2022, President Joe Biden enacted the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most significant gun safety law in nearly three decades. It provided grants to states for “red flag laws,” enhanced background checks to include juvenile records and also increased background checks for people 18 to 21, among other things.
"Some of this speaks to, in particular, just the way in which states have stepped up to do the right thing,” he said.
Heyne said progress today is “far different” than in 2016, a unique year that saw three states approve major gun restrictions.
That year, Nevada narrowly passed an amendment that expands background checks. Washington state widely supported the creation of a red-flag law, which allows police or family members to seek court orders to take guns away from people who may pose threats. In a landslide, voters in California greenlit proposals that strengthened gun laws.
"Out of necessity,” Heyne said, “I think that there was a huge upswell of public demand for gun laws to be passed and a feeling that if our legislatures are not going to take action, we are going to take action ourselves."
But Randy Kozuch, the executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, pointed to major ways in which gun rights have expanded in the last few years.
In its first major ruling on a Second Amendment case in more than a decade, the Supreme Court in 2022 made it easier for millions of people to carry handguns in public. The court struck down a century-old concealed-carry provision in New York that required gun owners who want to carry a handgun outside their home to prove that they have a unique need for self-protection.
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