Gun rights activists and those in favor of restrictions are set to spend millions during 2014 to get their messages across. Both sides will shower political candidates supporting their views with cash, and debates are expected to be fierce in hot spots such as Colorado, Washington and Illinois.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) plan to back challenges to laws in states like New Jersey and California that they believe restrict law-abiding firearms owners. Advocates of tougher laws say they plan to build stronger state infrastructures and work on issues such as prohibiting domestic violence offenders from having weapons.

“We have tens of millions of people across the country who support the Second Amendment and who will go out and listen to the NRA and vote the way NRA tells them to,” said Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for the NRA.

On the other side of the fence sits former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire whose group Mayors Against Illegal Guns says he’s ready to spend much of his personal wealth on strengthening gun laws.

“Because it’s a political year, it’s going to be an infrastructure-building year for us,” said Mark Glaze, executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “We are going to be trying to make some small but important progress in states.”

It’s clearly stated in the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Clumsy wording like this has allowed for the deaths of 172 children and teachers and injuring 191 in 109 separate school shootings since the turn of the millennia.

Without this sentence, ratified on December 15, 1791, to form what is known as the Bill of Rights, 20-year-old Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy could have been deprived of her protected right to own a Savage MK II-F rifle and a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle.

Adam used the Savage to kill his mother in her sleep on Friday December 14, 2012, with four shots to the head some time before 9:30 in the morning. He then took the semi-automatic Bushmaster and drove 5 miles from their Sandy Hook home in Connecticut to the Sandy Hook Elementary School where he shot and killed 20 children between the ages six and seven, and six staff members who tried to protect them.

President Obama cited the incident while announcing proposals for increased gun control less than a month after the shootings. The Senate voted down the bill, known as the Manchin-Toomey Background Checks Bill, by a margin of six votes on April 17, 2013.