They Built an Improbable Bridge
On a bipartisan gun policy document, its ceiling, and the work that has no PDF
I don't want to be at the table. I should say that upfront, because it colors everything that follows.
I'm a certified NRA instructor who volunteers as a range coach at the local sheriff's office. I was a Democratic activist who worked against Oregon's Measure 114. I know a woman who was killed by an intimate partner with a gun, and I know a woman who survived because she had one. I carry with the awareness that every bullet has a lawyer attached, and I train specifically so that if the worst day of my life arrives despite every effort to prevent it, the mechanics are below my limit and my brain is free for the things that actually matter.
I don't want to shape national firearms policy. I want fewer people shot. These feel like different projects, and the distance between them is where this essay lives.
The Document
In February 2026, a group called Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy released a 67-page model legislation package — the product of a year-long collaboration between 23 people who, by any reasonable measure, should not have been able to agree on lunch.
The panel included Jonathan Lowy, president of Global Action on Gun Violence, who makes his living suing gun companies. It included Rob Pincus, part-owner of a gun manufacturer. BJ Campbell of Open Source Defense and RECOIL. David Yamane, the Wake Forest sociologist who studies gun culture while trying not to take sides. Richard Aborn, strategist behind the original federal assault weapons ban. Dr. Michael Siegel of Tufts directed the whole thing — a public health researcher whose work I've found unusually clean of culture war.
They spent roughly 80 hours in facilitated deliberation. Essential Partners, an organization that specializes in getting people who despise each other's positions to see each other as people first, ran the process. And by all accounts, that part worked. Campbell reports that a former chief counsel for the Brady Campaign told the room he'd spent 25 years representing organizations and had only started considering his own views in the last five. Lowy and Campbell ended up eating lobster at a marina in Portland, Maine, arguing about whether Bob Dylan or Tom Waits was a better songwriter.
These are people on opposite sides of one of the most intractable disputes in American politics, and they managed to see each other as human beings. The Capulets and the Montagues sat down, and nobody died. That's worth something real, regardless of what follows.
What followed was a serious document.
The cornerstone is a shift in who gets prohibited from owning firearms. Current federal law prohibits felons but largely ignores violent misdemeanors — meaning someone convicted of aggravated assault can legally buy a gun if the charge stayed below felony level. The document flips this: violent misdemeanors become prohibiting for two to six years, calibrated to recidivism data. Meanwhile, non-violent felons come off the prohibited list.
The racial equity analysis behind this swap is the most sophisticated section of the document. Drawing on studies of prosecutorial overcharging, the panel argues that the current felony-based system is overinclusive for Black and Hispanic defendants — who are more likely to be charged at the felony level for equivalent conduct — and underinclusive for White defendants who get charges downgraded despite elevated violence risk. By anchoring prohibition to violent conduct rather than felony status, the proposal would capture more high-risk individuals across demographics while restoring rights to nonviolent people disproportionately affected by the current system. None of the early coverage gave this analysis the space it deserved.
The background check proposal creates a state-level system with an instant "red light/green light" lookup tied to a driver's license. No registry. No search records retained. Usable for private sales without going through a dealer. This is a universal background check designed by people who understand exactly why gun owners have rejected every prior version.
The red flag law framework — Extreme Risk Protection Orders — runs about ten pages and includes provisions I haven't seen elsewhere: mandatory free mental health evaluations for respondents, penalties for vindictive petitions, expedited hearings for people who need firearms for work, third-party storage options, explicit return timelines, and state-paid storage costs when orders are denied. Mental health professionals involved in enforcement are required to undergo firearms cultural competency training. Seeking mental health treatment, in cases that don't rise to imminent risk, explicitly cannot be grounds for an order.
The suicide prevention section articulates something I've discussed with other gun owners and worked on directly: it deregulates in a crisis context. State gun laws that would impede an emergency transfer get suspended so that someone experiencing suicidal ideation can hand their firearms to a friend or family member without waiting periods, transfer fees, or paperwork. The receiving party gets liability protection. The whole framework treats gun owners as assets in suicide prevention rather than liabilities.
I've consulted with the Oregon Firearm Safety Coalition on similar "hold my guns" proposals — ideas that ultimately stalled in Oregon's legislature. Campbell says this was the only section unanimously approved by the Bridging the Divide panel, and I believe it — it's the section most obviously designed by people who understand what help actually looks like from inside the community. It's also a reminder that good ideas can exist for years without finding the political conditions to become law.
There's more — dealer regulation focused on the small percentage of shops responsible for most traced crime guns, child access prevention with tax incentives, firearm injury education in schools with local curriculum control and parental opt-out, community violence intervention funding. It's thorough. The research is cited. The legal language is specific.
I'm grateful this document exists. I'm grateful that Yamane and Pincus and Campbell and Lowy and Siegel and the rest put in the hours. They did something remarkable.
And I don't think it's enough.
The Ceiling
Campbell, who may be the most analytically rigorous gun writer working today, estimates the mathematical ceiling for gun death reduction through legislation at roughly 12% nationwide. The document's own evidence tables — an 18-19% homicide reduction from violent misdemeanor laws, a 6.4% firearm suicide reduction from ERPOs — suggest the components might collectively exceed that. But even generously, we're talking about lives saved at the margins of a system that loses roughly 48,000 people a year.
Campbell calls the remaining space "societal and hard." He's right about the adjectives even if I'd locate the drivers somewhat differently than he does. The point stands: policy has a ceiling. The gap between what regulation can do and what the problem actually requires is cultural — and culture change doesn't happen through a 67-page PDF.
The Terrain
Here's where I start talking from the shanty town.
The Bridging the Divide initiative is structured as a negotiation between two sides: gun rights advocates and gun violence prevention advocates. That framing made the document possible. You need two sides to produce a compromise. But the framing also flattens a landscape that is nothing but peaks and troughs.
Gun violence prevention includes people who want fewer shootings and people who want civilian disarmament, and those aren't the same project even though they share organizational infrastructure. Suicide prevention is its own domain with its own evidence base, awkwardly stapled to "gun deaths" statistics in ways that distort both the problem and the solutions.
Gun rights advocacy also contains multitudes — the training-and-safety culture that I inhabit, the abolish-the-NFA crowd who want suppressors and select-fire in every household, the constitutional originalists, the competitive shooters, the collectors who rarely fire most of what they own.
And then there are people who want personal and community safety, who see the disparities in how law enforcement and courts actually operate, who enjoy the craft and community of firearms handling, and who don't fit into any advocacy organization's membership model. The trans folks and immigrants I've trained alongside who've been forced to be present because the alternative was erasure. The volunteer coaches and RSOs who show up on weekends to teach people not to negligently discharge.
The conversation flattens everything and everyone.
I also need to critique my own position here. Public discourse almost requires flattening, because humans aren't great at handling multivariable equations. Just look at how algebra stumps almost everyone. A conversation between two people can hold six dimensions of complexity. A conversation among 23 facilitated panelists can hold maybe four. A conversation at the level of a state legislature, a ballot measure, a cable news segment — you're down to yes or no. Each step up in audience size sheds a variable. By the time policy actually passes, the constitutional turducken has been carved into two slices: for and against.
The Bridging the Divide initiative operated at the 23-person scale, which is why it could produce nuance. But the moment the document enters public discourse, it gets compressed. The Trace covered it as a grand compromise. Campbell framed it as harm reduction with a ceiling. Others apparently reduced it to wishful thinking at best, naive idiocy at worst. Each outlet performed the compression their audience requires.
That's not a failure of the document. It's a structural constraint of scale. And it means the gap between the document's complexity and the public's capacity to process it is itself a variable that no model legislation can account for.
The Gap
I resent what I see as blindered and uninformed angles from the gun control side — the Measure 114 crowd, the people who think banning features reduces deaths, the advocates who treat gun owners as the problem rather than as part of any plausible solution. The Bridging the Divide document validates that resentment to a degree: it explicitly excludes assault weapons bans and magazine restrictions as not evidence-based. Richard Aborn, the man who helped pass the original federal AWB, said walking away from that was one of the hardest things for him. I respect that honesty.
And I also would like fewer people shot. Those two positions aren't contradictions — they're the same position viewed from the actual ground rather than from either side's preferred altitude. Getting the mechanism wrong doesn't just fail to achieve the outcome. It alienates the people whose cooperation and cultural participation are necessary for anything to work.
And "anything working" is ultimately cultural, not regulatory.
The document's model of responsible gun ownership is transactional: you pass a check, you store your gun, you don't sell to prohibited persons. That's a reasonable floor. But the building above it — maintaining the capacity for judgment when everything around you is trying to take it away, the willingness to spend a Sunday getting humbled in a concrete box, the low-grade awareness that the thing on your hip can end a human life — has no policy lever. It lives in coaching relationships, in range communities, in the accumulated norms of people who handle firearms every day without incident. It lives in what "responsible gun ownership" actually requires, which isn't a category you qualify for and inhabit but a practice you maintain, imperfectly, with effort, forever.
It lives in something David Lynch, as Gordon Cole, said: "Fix your hearts or die." That's not a policy recommendation. It's a declaration of stakes. And it's the right register for what we're actually talking about.
The Bridging the Divide initiative changed some hearts in a room of 23 people. The policy document is a genuine achievement. The humanization — the lobster dinner, the shared laughter, the moment when a Brady Campaign lawyer started thinking about how policy affects individual gun owners — may matter more than the legislation itself.
But the question remains: how does any of it propagate beyond the room?
Members of the Capulets and the Montagues sat down and produced a 67-page ceasefire agreement. The architecture is sound. The trades are smart. The evidence is solid. And the hard-liners of each clan will treat that document as peak heresy. And I hope — against the grain of my own cynicism — that some state legislator's staffer picks it up, reads it carefully, and starts the slow work of turning model language into actual law.
I also know that law alone won't get us where we need to go. The remaining distance is cultural, and culture changes the way competence develops: slowly, through practice, through failure, through the unglamorous maintenance work of people who show up and do the thing without needing to be at the table.
Not heroic. Just careful. And telling folks about the bridge with the hopes that it gets used.
The Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy proposals are available at bridgingthedivide.us. Commentary that informed this piece includes BJ Campbell's after-action report at Handwaving Freakoutery, David Yamane's Light Over Heat, and Chip Brownlee's coverage in The Trace.