Miller got in touch with a group called New Jersey Citizens to Stop Gun Violence, and, at a conference, got seated at a table next to Jake Locicero.

“That really swung the door for me,” he says. “Jake’s daughter had gotten killed in the Long Island Railroad Massacre, and he got up and gave a talk about his involvement in violence prevention and what his daughter’s loss meant to him. He was this wonderfully down to earth sweetheart of a man, and his relating his experience was a great epiphany for me.”

After two years with the New Jersey Citizens, Miller set his career aside to make activism a full-time job. One of his first priorities as Executive Director was to change the group’s name. “Sure, it says what the group is about, but it’s a terrible name,” he says. “I got tired of not being able to use the name as a marketing hook. I talked the board into changing the name to Ceasefire New Jersey. Immediately, the press was much more interested.”

That attention turned one of Ceasefire’s early campaigns around. When they first began pushing for child-proof handgun legislation in New Jersey, they were “laughed out of Trenton.” But he never took no for an answer. “We just kept pushing and pushing and wound up with 80% voter approval,” Miller says. It took them six years, but since 2002, new handguns in the state to have to be equipped with smart gun technology that prevents anyone except the recognized owner of the gun from firing the weapon. It’s not just the passage of the law that matters to Miller, though.

“I believe during the six-year campaign to enact that bill, we changed the atmosphere in New Jersey dramatically about guns in general. When we started, the National Rifle Association was considered one of the most important lobbying groups in Trenton. Most people think they’re irrelevant in New Jersey now.”

W ith already tight gun legislation made even tighter, Miller’s quest to change laws and attitudes about guns have started to bring him across the river and into Philadelphia. With so few federal laws, legislation regarding handguns comes from state and local governments. Some, like New York and New Jersey, enact strict requirements for handgun purchases and ownership, while others, like Pennsylvania, require only a bare minimum. It is this patchwork of legislation, Miller says, that allows states with looser gun laws to act as exporters of handguns to other states, and allows Camden to be named the most dangerous city in the country despite the state’s gun control.

Last spring, Miller got his hands on a 2004 report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) that proved his theory and showed that guns purchased in Pennsylvania accounted for almost 40% of the guns recovered in Camden during police investigations.

The gun trade between Pennsylvania and New Jersey is, according to Miller, a matter of simple economics. “It takes a criminal entrepreneur to recognize the opportunity,” he says. “They’re classic Americans, filling a felt need.” Gun traffickers use girlfriends, friends, or anyone with a clean criminal record who wants to make a quick fifty bucks to legally buy guns here, where lax gun laws make purchases quick and easy, and then bring them into New Jersey, where gun laws require stricter background checks and a 30-day waiting period, to sell on the street.

Although this trafficking method, called straw buying, violates Pennsylvania law and carries a five-year prison sentence, the local and state police cannot be every place at once, so Ceasefire New Jersey and its allies in Pennsylvania are aiming to stop straw purchases at the source with legislation that will stop traffickers’ buy-in-bulk practices.

Two years ago, State Representatives John Myers and Dwight Evans introduced a handful of bills to curb gun violence in Philadelphia, including one that would limit handgun purchases to one every thirty days. Over a year later, the “one-handgun-a-month” bill was shot down with little debate and a 118-72 vote.

But in November, the political landscape changed. So in February, with support from Ceasefire, Pennsylvanians Against Trafficking Handguns (the PATH Coalition), Governor Rendell, and the new Democratic majority in the House, Evans reintroduced the one-handgun-a-month bill.

“To me, the one-gun-a-month bill is critical for New Jersey,” says Miller. “Once it’s enacted, there will be a much slower flow of illegal guns. But it’s also critical because it’s the tipping point issue for attitudes about guns. My personal goal for working in Pennsylvania on this is much larger than just the bill.”

Like he did in New Jersey, Miller is hoping to change the atmosphere in Pennsylvania when it comes to guns, and, like in New Jersey, he plans to do it through grass roots campaigning across the state. “People are familiar with gun violence in southeastern Pennsylvania,” he says. “They don’t really know it yet in the rest of the state. The ladder is leaned against the wall, and the bottom rungs are public awareness and education. We have to climb those rungs first and we’re still on them in most of Pennsylvania.”