The other important piece of research is, how do you take advantage of whatever political opportunity is available? To do that, you need to think about where the power lies, and what are the drivers and obstacles to change? I'm going to use an example from the campaign that I've mentioned already, the Extreme Risk Protection Order. We did the report. We developed this new policy, which is a civil protection order that allows family members or law enforcement to go to court of full due process and remove a firearm from someone who is at risk of harming self or others. We developed this policy, and I was thinking about, where would the best place to start? Thinking about starting, I'm actually talking about a physical location. What are the opportunities to pass policy at the local level? The municipal level? At the state level? Or federal level? Ultimately for the first attempt at passing this policy, I chose a state, and I was thinking about states because states have legislators that effect, as I said, the entire state, you'd get a lot of power and opportunity from a law that you pass but where would I want that state to be? Would I want to do it for instance, in Texas? Where the power dynamics are quite challenging for gun violence prevention? Or would I want to start for the very first time with a new policy in California? No surprise, but we started this for the first time in California. Let me go through some of the decisions that I made when we chose California as the first state. The first question I want to ask is, what are the drivers and obstacles to change? What does that mean? What are the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about the policy intervention? Well, California, you can just look at the polling, gun violence prevention polls a lot better than in Texas, although things are changing, I have to say Texas is coming along. But this was, again when I started this, was six years ago. In California we have a large group of supporters of gun violence prevention; it polls well; we have legislators who have passed prior gun violence prevention laws; and even when threatened by the gun lobby in their election races have still one. So it's a place where almost every year new gun violence prevention policy gets passed. So when you compare Texas where nothing is ever passed on the gun violence prevention front or almost nothing, California seems a much more strategic place to start a new policy. Second, when I think about drivers of change, what does the political interest groups look like in a state? In California, there's a large group of gun violence prevention advocates already in place. They're there, they work on the legislature every year. In fact, part of the issue for me was making sure that those advocates supported this policy. When you get that large group of advocacy and their networks to support the legislation in California, I had a good chance to get the bill passed. Where in Texas, there is no network of advocates, so it's very small right now. Where would I want to start with a brand new policy? I'd want to think about California, where there's infrastructure to support a new policy change. Then you've got to think about, what are the political opportunities? By that I mean more than just policy maker support, I want to think about legislative timetables. When are the elections? If you're working in the international sphere, when are international summits? That matters, so for another reason, California made a lot of sense. They have a legislature that is in most of the year. They have a big group of professional staff. Other states have very short sessions, or some states even have legislative sessions every other year. So if you want to make a move and you want to do something new, you want to do it relatively quickly, you want to pick a jurisdiction where the legislature is in. Sometimes, for instance, after some terrible tragedy in United States, some shooting tragedy, there's always a call for congressional action, but Congress actually is a big part of the year as well. For instance, in election year, they're often basically out from July until November, and so if you want to pass policy, you need to have the opportunity to move policy, and that means having a legislature that is not only supportive, but in session. In thinking about where to do policy, I always want to try to find a sweet spot between how many people I can affect; and what is the closest level of government to me that I can get that done? So the reason is, if your local school board, and in my case has five people, can make a change that will have the effect that I'm looking for, I'm going to go to that school board. Because the school board is local, I know the members personally and I only have to convince five people. If you want the policy to be effective statewide, then you have to go to the state legislature. If you want the policy to be effective nationwide, you have to go to Congress. But each time you jump a level, the workload, it's exponentially more difficult. For instance, I do a lot of work in the Virginia legislature. To pass a bill, I have to convince 21 senators, 51 representatives, and the Governor. If you want to pass something in Congress, you have to convince 218 representatives, 51 senators, and by the way the senate works, that actually means because of their filibuster rule, 60 senators and the President. Those are exponentially more work each time we go up. Thinking about who has the power to effect the change you're looking for is important. Back to the school board example. If what I'm trying to do is slow drivers down on a road that our school board has jurisdiction over or our county board has jurisdiction over, and I want to put up stop signs or lights or lower the speed limit, I'm going to go to that level of legislature that has the power to do it. But unfortunately, my local legislature cannot enact an extreme risk protection order in the state of Virginia I would need to go to the state legislature. That mix of who has the power to get what you want and where the easiest place to make that change, those are what you have to think about. Going to a state legislature to change a stop sign in your local school is more work than you need to do. You can go to the school board. It's easier and they have the power to do it. But they change the type that saved millions of lives at a time often mean that you have to work at the state level or the national level. That takes time, that takes commitment, and that means doing these types of analyses and thinking that these campaigns may go over for several years. Thinking about who the decision makers are, who has the power to make the change, what's the easiest place to effectuate that change, those are all part of your research. You do that. Just as you try to find the data to support your intervention, you need to do that research about where am I going to do this? When am I going to do this? What legislative body I'm going to do. If it's a regulatory change, is it a state regulator? Is it a federal regulator? But that's the type of research that needs to be done before you start drafting laws, before you start drafting policies. When I talk about research, I'm talking about what supports your policy and what is the power analysis in the opportunity. Those are decisions that need to be made at the very start of your advocacy campaign. In this slide, I'm going to talk a little about the second part of my model, strategic engagement. As I mentioned, it's very important to align your allies in support of your policy. Forgetting to engage the people who are likely to support you is a big mistake. There will always be someone who doesn't like what you're doing and trying to stop you, but not fully engaging your natural allies and people who can support your cause is always a mistake. Again, before I go to legislators, before I try to make that policy change, I want to identify and I want to engage potential allies and advocates. One of the ways I do that is by bringing the people who actually have done the research, the academics and the public health professionals, to meet with community members and with stakeholders prior to legislative battles. I do that because it's great for those stakeholders to hear the research, but it's also important for them to be part of when we do a policy, what does that policy look like? Bringing the academy, if you will, to the organizer level and having that dialogue informs people prior to starting a legislative battle, it gives the important stakeholders the opportunity for input and to share their solutions and knowledge prior to a legislative campaign. I will tell you, if you want to develop allies, you can't ask them to do something, if they've been shut out of the decision-making process of what that policy looks like. You want to get people involved. One of the ways that I've done that is to hold these community forums where I bring the academics and the stakeholders together to spend substantial time thinking about what the evidence looks like and thinking about what a policy might do and how that's designed. The community members have a lot of expertise. That needs to be taken into account the same way as the academics expertise needs to be taken into account. What I'm encouraging people is to get into the community and have these dialogues as part of the policy-making process, part of your strategic engagement. You're likely to have a better outcome than if you ignore people affected by your policy suggestion. In this slide, I want to drill down a little bit more on media advocacy and how that works, and how timing is so important. Again, how we're trying to use the media, not just to educate people, but to put pressure on policymakers. So you can see the date of this editorial was May 26th, 2014. As I mentioned, I picked California to develop our first campaign around extreme risk protection order. In the spring of 2014, I'd been working with legislators and stakeholders to develop this policy for introduction in California. I was having trouble getting the law introduced. It was a new law, there was a lot of discussion, but the sponsor still had not introduced the the legislation. Unfortunately, a few days before this op-ed was published, there was a terrible shooting in Isla Vista, California. It was a mass shooting where the family had tried to remove the gun from their son who was the shooter and were unable to do so. The tools did not exist. The gun violence restraining order policy that we're trying to push was seen as that tool that might have made a difference in that shooting. This op-ed, which I had been shopping around for a number of months, prior to the shooting, got published a couple of days after the shooting. Now again, the purpose was to educate people, of course, but the real issue was, I needed the legislators; the people who had been talking with me to start taking action. This op-ed pushed that action. The shooting, pushed that action. But as soon as we call a media window opened, and we could get this op-ed published, and we could put a potential solution for what just happened, the legislators I was working with took notice and after three or four months of hemming and hawing about whether they should drop the piece of legislation, they dropped it the day after this op-ed was placed. The point is, we had been talking about the need for this, there was this terrible tragedy, we showed how this policy could make a difference, and we got it published in the biggest paper in the state. Legislators had an opportunity to introduce legislation that we've been working on and they took that opportunity. The Time's editorial is, again, not just about educating the general public, but making lawmakers feel like it's time to get moving, and that's what we did with his piece. Another piece of the model, as I mentioned before, is communicating directly with policymakers. It's an incredibly important piece of this. Maybe we can do that sometimes in private and private meetings, but oftentimes we're going to do that through testimony at a hearing on the bill that you care about. So for the extreme risk protection bill in California, there was a public hearing in June after this terrible shooting that I mentioned. The question was, who should do the communication for our side of the issue? Who should communicate in support of this bill? We had a wide range of skilled voices who were ready to testify, but in support of this bill, we chose two people. One was a mom whose daughter had been killed in a shooting, and the other was a psychiatrist. We talked professionally how important it was to have this new tool. So we chose UC Davis Professor Amy Barnhorst. Amy was able to bring real-life experience, as a practicing psychiatrist, to the need for a tool like the gun violence restraining order. She talked for only three minutes, was able to put three distinct scenarios together. One of the most chilling things was when she said, "As a psychiatrist, I treat people with mental illness, but there are many people that I cannot hospitalize because they do not have a mental illness, but they're dangerous. I'm putting someone who's dangerous with a firearm back into the community. There needs to be a tool to help address this and extreme risk protection order, is that tool." It was a really important moment. Coupled with the emotional testimony of the mother, that was a powerful punch and the legislators got the message. Even though we were late in the legislative session, in fact this was the last opportunity to get this bill passed, the committee voted it out. I credit the incredible testimony both of the mother, Amanda Wilcox, and Amy Barnhorst, for getting this done and for making that compelling case. They only each had three minutes of testimony, but they made it matter, they did it publicly, and they had it, and they did it. This is what is important, in an opportunity where the legislators could not look away. They were having a hearing, the cameras were on and both Amanda and Amy made it count. That's what good lobbying, that's what good communication is all about.
