Talking to Five Senators About How to Reduce Gun Deaths in Minnesota

Senator Erin Maye Quade. Photo Sarah Whiting

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), firearms are the number one cause of death for children in the United States. This has been the case since 2020, when gun deaths surpassed car accidents. In 2022, gun-related deaths among individuals ages 1–17 averaged nearly seven per day. This includes homicides, suicides, and unintentional deaths.

In July, shortly after Rep. Melissa Hortman was killed, Students Demand Action gathered more than 100 student organizers from around the country for a conversation at the University of Minnesota about what people can do to effect changes around gun violence. One of the three politicians featured on a panel discussion was Sen. Erin Maye Quade — who did a 24-hour sit-in on the House floor in 2018, when she was a new Minnesota representative, to protest inaction on gun violence prevention. She read the stories of Minnesotans who died because of gun violence. It was two months after the Parkland school shooting that killed 17 students and staff.

Maye Quade told Students Demand Action organizers that her sense of urgency stemmed from a lifetime shaped by gun violence in the U.S.; the Columbine High School shooting happened when she was in eighth grade. She told them that students today practice active shooter drills — something her generation never faced.

“Some kids don’t even know the difference between a drill and having an active shooter in their school, because they’re too little to understand the difference between make-believe and reality. That is unacceptable.”

In 2022, Maye Quade was elected to the Minnesota Senate. In 2023, she and her colleagues passed a law requiring background checks on all gun sales and established extreme risk protection orders, sometimes called red flag laws. Yet she stressed in her July remarks that laws alone are not enough: “We need a culture change, too. If the people, the hearts, the minds, don’t change, then it doesn’t matter what laws we pass.”

We recently talked to Maye Quade in more detail about the legislative divide over how to reduce gun violence.

Senator Zaynab Mohamed. Photo Sarah Whiting

“There are a lot of issues that aren’t partisan in the population but are partisan at the legislature and at the U.S. Capitol,” she says. “Gun violence prevention is one of those, and it has a lot to do with the extreme amount of money that the NRA [National Rifle Association] and gun groups put into elections. There are Republicans in the Minnesota legislature that support some of the gun violence prevention measures we’re talking about — like limiting access to certain guns — but they don’t want to [vote against] the Republican caucus stance.

“This is running moderates out of the Republican Party,” she continued, indicating that they would support gun violence prevention measures, but they are afraid of losing the next primary. “It’s so disheartening, especially because the consequence isn’t [about building codes or road infrastructure] — people die, children die. I would be willing to lose my seat to save a kid’s life.”

Maye Quade shares something we heard from other Minnesota legislators: “Unless the consequence for inaction is losing your seat, I think we’re going to see more inaction. That’s the sad part. ”

Results from a recent Everytown for Gun Safety poll showed that 62 percent of suburban Minnesotans said they support taking action to ban assault weapons. A recent KSTP poll found 60 percent of suburban voters support a ban on assault weapons. But the Everytown poll also surveyed 800 voters who are likely to vote in 2026 midterm elections about the assault weapons ban: 93 percent of Democrats support it, while 68 percent of Republicans do not.

Maye Quade points out that one reason people have objected to gun control is the historical argument — “we need guns to stand up to the tyranny of the government. Yet here we are. Those excuses don’t really hold up anymore” if the government is taking people who have not committed a crime from their homes, streets, hospitals, and city buildings to undisclosed detention centers.

The History of NRA Politics

The NRA started in 1871 to focus on sports shooting and gun safety. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed in reaction to assassinations that decade, which is when the NRA became a political force.

In the 1970s, a divide within the organization grew when some members wanted to adopt a “no compromise” stance in defense of the Second Amendment. According to an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, a coup at the NRA annual meeting in 1977 in Cincinnati focused the mission on protecting gun rights. Membership grew from 1.2 million to an estimated 4.3 million in 2023.

The NRA campaign to grow memberships and gun ownership pushed marketing messages about fear, anger, and resentment, Maye Quade says, “such as, people are flooding across the borders, invading our country, staining the blood. Racist undertones and imagery: ‘This country isn’t white anymore and you need to arm yourself to protect yourself from violent, dangerous criminals.’”

She says the solution offered by the NRA and aligned gun groups is simply to have guns because of the slogan: ‘The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’”

Now we are “a country where a subset of the population has been scared into bulk purchasing weapons of war, with the purpose of being able to kill a lot of people very quickly.”

The results can be devastating. “Now, teenagers showing up at the wrong house to pick up their sibling [are getting shot],” Maye Quade says. “We have a country that is armed to the teeth and has been told to fear every person, especially people who don’t look like you.”

Senator Erin Murphy (l) and former senator Patricia Torres Ray. Photo Sarah Whiting

A Frank Assessment of Legislative Action

According to data from the Minnesota Department of Health, analyzed by the gun safety organization Protect Minnesota, 564 Minnesotans died from gun violence in 2024. Each year, the majority of Minnesota gun deaths are suicides, with roughly one-quarter generally being homicides. Typically, the Gun Violence Archive tracks more than 650 mass shootings across the country — with “mass shooting” defined as an incident in which at least four people are shot and either wounded or killed.

At a conversation held at St. Catherine University by Twin Cities Nonviolent in September, four legislative leaders talked about how to reduce violence in our communities. The panelists included current Minnesota senators Heather Gustafson, Zaynab Mohamed, and Erin Murphy, and former senator Patricia Torres Ray.

Following are excerpts of what the senators said about gun violence and the likelihood of reforming gun safety issues in the next legislative session.

Is there hope in reducing gun violence?

Heather Gustafson says: “It is not hopeless. And it is urgent. It needs to be addressed as the public health crisis that it is. If anything else was putting our kids’ lives in as much danger as guns are, we would be addressing it quickly. In fact, a whole bunch of misinformation just went out about Tylenol. Tylenol is not what is hurting our children right now — it is guns.”

She shares that in a purple district, where she door-knocks to talk about four gun policies that she supports, one visit was with a man who had a Trump sign in his yard and was wearing an NRA T-shirt. “I thought, ‘this is not going to go well.’ We talked about guns, and went through several policies. He agreed with most of them. He agreed that safe storage is a good idea. He agreed that we should ban assault weapons. He did not like the ban on binary triggers, [which fire one round when the trigger is pulled and a second round when the trigger is released, making a gun fire almost like an automatic weapon], so we still have work to do there. But he was open. So, if we can get beyond the identity part of politics, there is hope.”

Gustafson says these conversations require not being judgmental, and having the mutual trust to talk honestly about issues. “It is possible — we just have to keep talking.”

One of her recent bills was about safe storage of guns. “Common sense, right? But we couldn’t get it across the finish line. I had a Republican coauthor who had to pull her name off of the bill, who ended up voting against it, because she got so many death threats from her own party.

“So, carrying gun bills and getting them across the finish line is a small miracle.”

Zaynab Mohamed, who serves on the Senate Gun Violence Prevention Working Group, says: “I think the day that I lose hope is the day I will leave this job.” She says that the working group met with families impacted by the Annunciation shooting, who came forward a few weeks after the tragedy impacting their children. They said, ‘We need you to act.’ They are not giving up, and we are in no place to give up.”

Erin Murphy says she was recently in a southern Minnesota town where a newspaper editor expressed concern that people were getting so turned off by politics that they were no longer reading or talking about the issues. “Are we at the point of no return? What would spur the answer to ‘yes’ is if we decide to abandon our voices and power in democracy. If we get so fed up with how hard it is right now that we turn away, then perhaps we do get to a point of no return. I worry about that sometimes, because this is such a hard moment. There’s so much coming at us.

“But then I come to a conversation like this, or listen to any number of women across the state, and I know we’re not going to give up. But we do need to see each other, and we need to fortify each other and stick together through the hardness, so that the hardest issues we face are within our reach to solve.”

Senator Heather Gustafson. Photo Sarah Whiting

Do you think Minnesota will have increased gun control after the shootings this year?

Patricia Torres Ray says: “I don’t think so. Not with the numbers that we have in the Minnesota House and the Senate [split 67–67]. Members of the Republican caucus are not acting to represent the voices of their districts anymore. They are just voting with their caucus. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of work to flip a couple votes in the Republican House and Senate. I personally don’t believe — with the composition that we have in the legislature today — that we will have the votes to make any meaningful changes. I’m sorry to be so pessimistic.”

Erin Murphy is co-chair of the Senate gun violence prevention working group. “In the last three years, the legislature has moved about 11 pieces of significant gun violence prevention policy to the governor’s desk to sign into law, including universal background checks and extreme risk protection orders. So, while the legislative makeup right now makes it difficult, I will not give up hope, and we can’t stop fighting. Perhaps we’re in a better position to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in 2027, if not before.”

How can readers make a difference?

Erin Maye Quade encourages people to join others in the gun violence prevention movement: Protect Minnesota, Sandy Hook Promise, the Giffords group, Moms Demand Action. “Working alongside others to make change, and especially people who are in your community, is the best way.” She also indicates that even if it seems obvious to ban assault rifles, for example, legislators need to hear from their constituents. More legislators need to learn that it is too risky to vote against gun protections that to vote for them.

Heather Gustafson says Republican legislators in particular need to hear from constituents about losing votes if they don’t support common sense gun measures. “You’ve got to show up in those [purple] cities like mine and Chaska. Those are the places we need you to door-knock and get the message out. Your neighbors probably agree with you. But many of them might not be engaged enough to complain to their legislators as much as they could be.”

Patricia Torres Ray says we need to go deeper in conversations with neighbors and policy makers about changing perceptions about the roots of violence. The tendency is to blame victims of both gun and gender-based violence. Of the latter, she says, “If women are victims of domestic violence, the tendency in society is to say, ‘What was her problem? Why did she put herself in that situation?’ We have to turn this around.”

She authored legislation to create state offices focused on missing and murdered Indigenous relatives and Black women and girls. Latine communities want a similar office, she says, but want to work on prevention. “I’m hoping more of us talk about what we need to do in investment legislation to prevent violence. We don’t do enough of that.”

Zaynab Mohamed underscored the need for people in Stillwater, Anoka, Blaine, and Maple Grove to talk to their Republican legislators.

She says those senators are in opposition to an assault rifle ban, even though kids from families of all parties and demographics are impacted by gun violence. “Looking at the basic research, 60 percent of Americans support banning assault rifles, young and old, rich and poor. Gun violence touches everybody. Gun violence isn’t just the [issue] of Democrats.”

To understand more about the difficulties of getting gun safety regulations, read some of the 2023 discussion when bills were being introduced.

Read our first story from the conversation with senators at the Twin City Nonviolent forum.

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