One year after Sandy Hook, Americans still up in arms An ugly stand-off in a Texas car park last month showed just how bitter the debate over gun control has become in America in the year since the killings in Sandy Hook. Four women from the group Moms Demand Action, formed days after the massacre of 26 children and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14 last year, had met in a coffee shop. Word of their presence spread among members of the pro-gun group Open Carry Texas, and soon about 40 people had gathered in front of the coffee shop brandishing firearms. Customers in the Huron Valley Guns store in Milford, Michigan. Photo: Alamy Some carried shotguns, others AK-47s. A few had AR-15s, the same military-style semi-automatic rifle used at Sandy Hook. "They were clearly there to intimidate and bully," Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts says. Instead of using words to debate us, they used loaded weapons. For two hours the women stayed in the coffee shop as the men paraded their guns out the front. The manager declined to intervene for fear of causing a scene. Police made no arrests because Texas is an "open carry" state and no laws were broken. Terror: Two women and a child are led to safety from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Photo: AP/Newtown Bee Finally the gun advocates drifted off to a nearby Hooters. Later, Open Carry sent Moms Demand Action an email explaining that, "People are getting used to seeing and being around guns, and police have come to accept it and don't even question us any more. What we are doing is working and society is coming to view the sight of 'military-style rifles' in public as ... normal ... Isn't that a good thing? Holding on: Mike Acevedo returns a weapon to its display at the National Armory store in Pompano Beach, Florida. This is the gun-control gulf in America - not just between those for and against new restrictions, but between those who want to reduce the number of guns and those seeking to create a society in which it is normal for citizens to go about their daily lives armed with assault rifles. The collective horror America felt in the days after the massacre at Sandy Hook cannot be exaggerated. The image of a gunman shooting six- and seven-year-olds in their classrooms, as their teachers tried in vain to shield them with their own bodies, seared the nation. That the shootings happened in a small New England town, days after Thanksgiving and just before Christmas, seemed to compound the tragedy. Across the nation, parents imagined what it would be like to remove a dead child's wrapped presents from beneath the Christmas tree. Gunman Adam Lanza. The call for gun reform was immediate and loud, and though the President had avoided the issue during both his election campaigns he immediately echoed it, confirming the fears of gun rights advocates. Gun control activists thought their time had come - the last time significant gun control measures were passed was when the nation reeled after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Four days after the shooting, Barack Obama addressed a vigil in Newtown, saying, "This is our first task, caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged. And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we're meeting our obligations? ... If we're honest with ourselves, the answer's no ... we will have to change. A month later Obama urged Congress to pass laws banning high-capacity magazines and ensuring all gun buyers were subjected to background checks. He signed 23 executive orders, mostly focused on information sharing between state and federal agencies. Polls at the time showed that a record 58 per cent of Americans supported stricter gun control. Parents of children killed in Newtown joined the campaign. In the halls of the Capitol building, they had an almost unique moral authority. They were among the few lobbyists who could secure face-to-face meetings with politicians at will. Powerful new allies joined the movement including the billionaire mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and Gabby Giffords, the congresswoman who had made an extraordinary return to the public eye after being shot in the head during a mass killing in Arizona. The Moms Demand Action group was founded and started holding rallies. Either sensing a change or truly appalled by the carnage in Newtown, politicians who had previously backed the National Rifle Association voiced support for the background proposals. Even the NRA's angry response seemed to play into the hands of the gun-control movement. In downtown DC, the group's public face Wayne LaPierre held a press conference so bizarre even the trenchantly conservative New York Post called him an "NRA loon." LaPierre argued the great danger for America was not too many guns, but too few. Teachers should be armed, he said. He lamented the dangers of "gun-free zones." Politicians pass laws for gun-free school zones, they issue press releases bragging about them ... in doing so, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk. The families of the Sandy Hook children had their first success in early April when they travelled to their own state capital, Hartford, Connecticut, to witness a vote on new gun restrictions. The parents lined the hallway leading to the chamber, so the last thing politicians saw before they voted was, as Politico put it, the grief on their faces. The bills passed, as did new laws in New York state and Maryland, which controversially banned assault rifles. Soon though, the tide began to turn. Just weeks later, the US Senate failed to pass the background check and magazine capacity. Then other states began knocking back gun-control measures. The pro-gun movement began advocating laws to protect guns. In September, North Carolina became the third state to pass an NRA-backed law that forbade police departments from destroying weapons they took in off the streets in gun buy-backs. To the frustration of police, the law forced them to return the guns to the streets by selling them to licensed firearm dealers. Soon some of the gun-control movement's early successes were overturned. In Colorado, Democrats introduced their own background-check laws and magazine size limits. In response, the NRA backed a campaign to have the law's authors "recalled" - an electoral measure designed to remove corrupt officials. The campaign worked, and two state politicians were turfed out. A third has since resigned. In Missouri, one Republican, Mike Leara, went as far as proposing a law to make it a felony, punishable by up to four years in prison, for politicians to even introduce legislation restricting gun rights. He conceded it had no chance of passing, but thought his point was well made. "I have no illusions about the bill making it through the legislative process, but I want it to be clear that the Missouri House will stand in defence of the people's constitutional right to keep and bear arms," he said. As an indication of how entrenched the battle lines have become, the editor of Guns and Ammo magazine resigned last month after publishing a column arguing that requiring people to undergo training before they were issued concealed-carry permits was not an infringement on the Second Amendment. The backlash from gun-rights advocates was immediate and overwhelming. The editor, Jim Bequette, later issued an apology to readers. Given the frenzy of political activity, it is no surprise the only clear winners this year have been lobbying firms and ad-buyers. According to a report by the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks political spending, gun control groups spent $1.6 million on lobbying this year, compared with just $240,000 last year. Meanwhile gun rights spent $12.2 million on lobbying. In advertising, though, gun-control groups outspent gun-rights groups. According to Sunlight, it appears the NRA is keeping its advertising war chest full for the mid-term elections next year, holding more than $11 million in reserve. For all that, it is hard to say which side has gained more ground. Gun-control advocates have clearly not made the gains they expected to this year. Since the massacre, states have passed 93 laws expanding gun rights and 43 gun control laws - nearly a quarter of those in California. In that time, support for stricter gun control has fallen to 38 per cent. Guns have taken more than 30,000 American lives this year, around two-thirds of those were suicides. Mother Jones found at least 194 children have been shot dead. The Daily Beast counts 24 school shootings claiming 17 lives, while there have been at least 14 mass shootings, defined by the FBI as an incident in which four or more people are killed. For all that, though, the long-term rate of shootings is declining rapidly in the US, in line with an overall decline in violent crime. Murders dropped from 21,606 in 1995 to 14,173. While some pro-gun advocates have argued that the reduction in violent crime is a consequence of widespread gun ownership, violent crime has fallen in states all over the country, whether or not those states tightened or loosened their gun laws. There are an estimated 310 million guns in civilian hands, and gun sales spiked after Sandy Hook. But about 65 per cent of this arsenal is owned by just 4 per cent of the population, while more and more Americans are living in gun-free houses. The president of one of America's largest gun control groups, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Dan Gross, said he was optimistic. He noted that the laws that Congress failed to pass actually won a majority of votes in the Senate, just not the majority needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. In the future, he says, Congress will pass universal background checks. The newly energised anti-gun lobby will change public views about the ownership, as well as the storage of guns and ammunition. Perhaps. Either way, the shootings will continue. On Friday, a mother was shot in the leg in Rapid City as she tried to remove a loaded revolver from her 23-month-old son; in a Colorado school, a student was wounded when he confronted a gunman, who then shot himself dead.