Bloomberg's gun control groups explain their strategy: focus on the states

Gun control advocates are going for a state by state approach, following along what homosexual rights groups have done.  The left wing Salon had this interview with Bloomberg's Shannon Watts:

. . . If you look at what we’ve done in the states alone — in 2013, we helped close the background check loophole in several states (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New York) … and then we built on that this year. We got six different states, red and blue, to pass laws that would keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. And those were signed by [governors] from both parties … And then we went to Washington State where our moms were a huge part of the success of getting I-594 passed with 60 percent of the vote … And this is something we can take to two-dozen other states … to get [similar] initiatives passed there … We passed a critical gun-violence restraining bill in California, which is a prototype that we can take to other states … 

We have had huge success with our corporate campaigns. We decided that this was very much a cultural issue, so we took this issue to companies and said, You need to have policies around guns just like you do [for] attire, outside food, smoking, etc. And just in the last year we’ve gotten Target, Chipotle, Starbucks, Sonic, Jack in the Box, Chili’s — we’ve gotten all these major retailers and restaurants to say, We don’t want open-carry in our stores (in fact, some of them have said they don’t want any guns in their stores). 

If you look at how the acceptance of gay marriage came to be in this country, it was just like this; this is pretty much the playbook. You bypass Congress, you go straight to companies, you go straight to the state legislatures, you build a huge amount of momentum, you educate voters about this issue, and when they go out to the polls in 2016, hopefully you get a Congress in place that’s going to do the right thing. Maybe they’ll do the right thing before that, but we’re not going to rest on our laurels. . . .

The errors in this are quite numerous.  None of the states that they point to are "red" states.  An analysis of the 594 initiative is available here.  An analysis of the California restraining order is available here.

The claims in the second paragraph about the success in their corporate campaign are simply false (see here, here, and here.