Project Unloaded, the Latest Doomed Campaign to Convince Americans Guns Make Them Less Safe

Since its inception, the gun violence prevention movement has invested the bulk of its time and money in a top-down strategy: change gun policy in courtrooms and statehouses, the thinking goes, and the trajectory of gun violence in America will change too. But despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this approach and enjoying the support of most of the American public, the movement has failed to budge the metrics that matter most. Gun deaths have been climbing for decades, and in 2020, guns surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for young people. These losses have persuaded some gun reform advocates that it’s time to try a different strategy: go directly to the people.

For the first time, this bottom-up approach has been drawing major attention and funding in the gun violence prevention world. The Ad Council – kingmaker in the realm of public service announcements – is in various stages of campaign development with three separate gun violence prevention groups. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been building out its own gun-safety messaging efforts focused on service members and veterans and, just last month, on red-flag laws.

But one of the most ambitious efforts to change Americans’ relationship to guns is being led by a non-profit founded two years ago, called Project Unloaded. Rather than trying to improve how existing gun owners handle their weapons, or curry public support for a specific policy, Project Unloaded is using marketing to attack the problem at the heart of gun violence: too many households own guns, and more access to guns leads to more deaths and injuries.

Project Unloaded has flooded the social media feeds of young people in a dozen cities with ads and influencer content about the threat that owning a gun poses, reaching more than 2 million teens an average of 30 times. And last summer, the group experimented with deeper in-person engagement on Chicago’s South Side, where gun violence is not an abstract problem. For six weeks last summer, 50 students from Chicago Public Schools were paid to design and implement a bespoke public-messaging campaign that several teenagers say fundamentally changed the way they saw guns – and made them question whether they want to own one.

A single statistic led to Project Unloaded’s founding: a Gallup poll found that the portion of Americans who believe that having a gun in the house makes it a safer place had jumped from 35% to 63% between 2000 and 2014.

The rise rattled Nina Vinik, the project’s founder and a civil rights attorney who has long been a player in the gun violence prevention world – not just because piles of public health research show the belief to be false, but because the falsehood has nonetheless been accepted by many people who are not part of the traditional gun-owning demographic. Women believe it. People of color believe it. Young people believe it.

— Katie Worth in Can Tiktoks Reduce Gun Violence? Ask These Teenagers