Control Freaks

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Control Freaks Americans for Gun Safety set out to give gun control a shot in the arm. Instead, they may give it a shot in the head. By Nicholas ConfessoreIssue Date: 4.8.02 Print Friendly | Email Article It just seemed like a lot of kids were getting killed with guns," mused Andrew McKelvey, recalling the days after the Columbine school shootings in 1999. "I said to myself, someone should do something about it." So McKelvey -- a multimillionaire business executive and political neophyte -- did. In the three years after Columbine, McKelvey poured millions of dollars into advertising, legal action, and groups like the Million Mom March and Handgun Control, Inc., giving gun-control advocates a financial strength approaching that of the National Rifle Association. He also launched a new organization, Americans for Gun Safety (AGS), which set out to unify the otherwise decentralized state advocacy groups and build an NRA-style grass roots. Headed by Jonathan Cowan, a smart, ferociously ambitious former aide to Andrew Cuomo, AGS was meant to be "a nonpartisan group that would work on a McDonald's-like model," as Newsweek put it, with "'franchises' in every state, all using the same logo and strategies." "Our angel," one activist said, "has arrived." But these days, things are a little less heavenly. The grass-roots Army has failed to materialize. The state activists are grumbling. Relations between AGS and other national groups are chilly. And an upcoming fight in the Senate to close the "gun-show loophole" in the 1994 Brady Bill -- which required background checks on gun purchases but didn't cover sales at hundreds of gun shows held across the country each year -- will probably make things worse. While AGS backs a bill introduced by Republican Senator John McCain, nearly all the other gun-control groups prefer a bill sponsored by Democratic Senator Jack Reed. The resulting fight might just tear the gun-control movement apart. Things first began to unravel in the fall of 2000, as gun-control groups across the country prepared for the November elections. The initial contract between AGS and the state groups, signed that July, called for AGS to create a marketing plan, give each of the 29 state groups $60,000 a year for two years, and pay for a substantial amount of training and services. Passage of federal gun licensing and registration, the contract stated, would be "the top national priority." The state groups were ecstatic. But then, at an AGS conference in September, Cowan presented a slew of AGS-funded polls and introduced the new national slogan: "rights and responsibilities." Within a couple of days, as the state groups began to receive talking points and sample press releases from AGS, they found out what Cowan meant by "rights": Americans were guaranteed the right to own guns, a position long promulgated by the NRA and opposed by nearly every gun-violence organization in the country. To McKelvey and Cowan, this was just good politics. Most Americans already believed it to be true, the pair argued. (McKelvey says he didn't think the constitutional issue "was terribly relevant to anything.") But the state groups were livid -- especially given that the July contract had stressed gun licensing and registration. "I remember distinctly looking through it, and when I finished, I got right on the phone," said Bryan Miller, director of Ceasefire New Jersey (CNJ) and a board member of States United for the Prevention of Gun Violence, the informal grass-roots coalition that had signed the contract on behalf of state guncontrol groups. "That's when things really fell apart." For the next few weeks, Cowan and the state activists argued fiercely over the slogan and who would adopt it. The activists felt that they had been blindsided and that AGS in general, and Cowan in particular, were being "a little dictatorial," as one participant put it. Meanwhile, AGS had decided to get involved in Oregon and Colorado referendums aimed at closing the gun-show loophole at the state level. They hired Scott Reed, a Republican consultant, and began to spend what would be a total of $3 million to help pass the initiatives. In early October, AGS triumphantly unveiled its campaign, announcing that McCain would appear in AGS ads (reversing his 1999 Senate vote against closing the loophole). But by month's end, AGS and the state groups had stepped back and negotiated a new contract: AGS would still give out the $60,000 per group, but would offer significantly less training and operational support. The state groups, meanwhile, would not have to endorse specific legislation or adopt AGS's slogan. In the end, the November elections went relatively well for the gun-control side. Though Al Gore's presidential campaign was hurt by his loss in some pro-gun swing states, a number of House Democrats won with strong gun-control stands and some incumbent, NRA-backed state and national lawmakers were unseated. Most significantly, gun control was pivotal in defeating three staunchly pro-NRA Republican senators: John Ashcroft, Spencer Abraham, and Slade Gorton. The referendums in Oregon and Colorado passed with healthy majorities, boding well for the issue. "The passage of these measures," Cowan said after the election, "sends a clear message to policy makers across the country that the debate on guns has changed dramatically." So when Rhode Island's senior senator, Jack Reed, decided to reintroduce a 1999 bill (originally sponsored by Frank Lautenberg, a former New Jersey senator) that required background checks at gun shows, he naturally thought of McCain. After all, the referendums that McCain had helped pass in Oregon and Colorado were, in most respects, identical to Lautenberg's bill and, in some ways, even tougher. (Lautenberg's bill defined gun shows as any events at which 50 or more firearms were exhibited or offered for sale; the referendums drew the line at 25.) Reed and McCain chatted in December 2000, but McCain was noncommittal. When Reed introduced his bill at a press conference four months later, McCain didn't attend -- and neither did Carolyn McCarthy, the Long Island Democrat who had won election in 1996 on a tough gun-control platform. It soon emerged that McCain and McCarthy were crafting their own bill. Why? Part of the explanation, certainly, lies in the fact that Jonathan Cowan had begun to reconfigure AGS from a would-be grass-roots organization into a Beltway advocacy powerhouse. Last winter, AGS opened a plush new office on L Street in Washington, hired well-connected staffers (including James Kessler, previously the policy director for gun-control champion Charles Schumer), and retained high-powered lobbyists (such as John Wyma, a former Schumer chief of staff). AGS had also begun to woo centrist Democrat Joseph Lieberman and McCarthy, who tried and failed to pass a Lautenberg-style bill in the House in 1999 and was looking for "a new approach, a new angle" to gun control, according to one aide. (It probably didn't hurt that McKelvey had been among McCarthy's biggest supporters: During the 2000 election cycle, McKelvey, his wife, and employees of his two firms accounted for McCarthy's second-biggest chunk of contributions.) And in February of last year, AGS launched a new ad campaign aimed at getting "Washington 'to stop playing politics with guns' and require criminal background checks at gun shows." At first, it also tried to bring the state groups on board. At an AGS conference in Maryland, AGS staffers tried to persuade local activist Ginni Wolf not to support a pending Montgomery County law to ban all gun shows. The Washington Post and The Washington Times were covering the campaign, and Wolf's group was making AGS look too anti-gun. Wolf refused. After the conference, CNJ's Miller harshly criticized AGS in an e-mail to fellow state activists. The e-mail got back to Cowan, who called up CNJ's chairman, Jodi Tolman, and demanded that CNJ withdraw from the contract. Tolman declined. "It was a difficult conversation," Cowan said, "but I never raised my voice." Tolman recalls things differently. "He was unbelievably rude. He was belligerent... . We said if you want to eliminate us from your roster of grantees, than you do it. He knew that if they terminated the relationship, it would have looked very bad, because there were a lot of state groups besides us that didn't agree with their mission statement. But Jonathan's interest, I think, is in just being on top. He told me, 'Gun control is dead, and AGS is here to revive it.'" With AGS looking to score a big Washington victory, this refrain would prove to be the dominant theme. "Both parties, and certainly Democrats, are looking for a new approach to the issue to break the polarization," Cowan told The New York Times in March of 2001. "It's time for a third way." In May, McCain, Lieberman, and McCarthy unveiled their new legislation, complete with a $1-million AGS ad campaign and public endorsements from the National Association of Police Organizations and the National Education Association. Compared to Reed's bill, McCain's created a somewhat less tightly regulated class of individuals permitted to run background checks and had a looser definition of "gun show." But McCain's bill also had funding to help states computerize their background records and allowed them, after three years, to limit checks to 24 hours provided that 95 percent of those records were accessible by the Brady background-check system. By offering the possibility of quicker background checks and more people able to run them -- both pushed by the NRA in 1999 -- McCain's bill was designed to have more credibility among gun-rights supporters. And by winning McCain to the cause, Cowan argues today, AGS "changed the entire landscape and politics and strategy" of the debate. Schumer, who in the end decided to support both bills, agreed. "I'm tired of going to the floor and arguing passionately about an issue but sending nothing to the president's desk," Schumer announced. "This bipartisan bill bows to the reality of getting something done without sacrificing principle." Reaction in the gun-control community was mixed. Few activists opposed funding to improve background checks, but many questioned the implicit concession that the Brady law's "up to three days" language was inconvenient to gun owners, because 95 percent of all checks were (and are) completed in under two hours. Others were unwilling to criticize longtime allies like McCarthy and Schumer -- and welcomed McCain's involvement -- but questioned the "third way" posturing. Furthermore, Lautenberg's original bill had itself been "bipartisan, moderate legislation," as AGS called McCain's bill, and the Lautenberg-Reed language had already proved agreeable to voters in Oregon and Colorado. McCain went on TV to claim that his bill was "basically the same that passed in Colorado," when in fact it was Reed's bill that was basically the same. McKelvey himself seemed to favor even stiffer kinds of traditional gun control. "If licensing and registration would save kids' lives," he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June, "then yeah, we have to look at it." And though AGS heralded the bill as the only one that could pass in Republican-dominated Washington, the GOP wasn't biting. The McCain bill got only five co-sponsors (Reed had 22) and no Republican co-sponsors besides McCain and Mike DeWine, who had supported Lautenberg in 1999. Indeed, neither McCain nor McCarthy had a single demonstrable "new" vote -- that is, someone that hadn't voted for closing the loophole in 1999. "I think [AGS's] sense was that their bill was going to be the gun-control vehicle for this congress," said the Violence Policy Center's Joe Sudbay, who came out strongly against the McCain bill. "I think they believed that once they got McCain and Lieberman, they were going to wrap this up quickly." This put AGS in an odd position: To get their own version of the gun-show bill passed, they would have to convince Congress (especially Democrats) both that Reed's bill was inferior and that Reed-style gun control was a hopeless cause. Cowan, Kessler, and former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart soon took to the hustings to make that case. In July, Cowan and Kessler published an article in Blueprint, the house organ for the Democratic Leadership Council. "The party will have a hard time recapturing the presidency," they argued, "if it treats gun-owning Americans like sociopaths." While the Colorado and Oregon referendums were "sensible, centrist, bipartisan gun policy," they wrote, the identical Reed bill treated "hobbyists" as "dangerous social misfits." Writing in The Washington Post the same month, Lockhart argued that he had been wrong to advise Bill Clinton to "push gun control front and center," and that his party could only win on the gun-safety debate by embracing the "third way" approach of McCain and "a new group on the scene, Americans for Gun Safety." But Lockhart's conversion was greased: Around the same time his op-ed appeared, AGS hired Lockhart's firm, the Glover Park Group, to do issue ads for the fall. (AGS consultant Reed published a similar op-ed, aimed at fellow Republicans, in the Los Angeles Times -- also without disclosing his AGS connection.) Meanwhile, on the Hill, the AGS spin machine began grinding away. To centrist Republicans and Democrats, AGS trumpeted McCain's endorsement and disparaged Reed's backers as "a group of liberal Democrats," as AGS Communications Director Matt Bennett put it in a recent online chat. To liberal Democrats inclined to support Reed, AGS has highlighted Schumer and McCarthy's support. And to everyone, AGS has argued that the McCain bill is simultaneously an easier vote and a stronger bill. The McCain bill "is always referred to as a compromise -- including by us, for political reasons," Bennett explained, "but in fact the McCain-Lieberman bill is a stronger bill than the Reed bill." Indeed, opponents claim AGS has tried harder to cannibalize Reed's Democratic votes -- focusing on centrists like Louisiana's Mary Landrieu -- than to get new ones across the aisle. "They're pushing their bill as the only real alternative," argued Reed aide Greg McCarthy. "They're trying to create the sense that this is over before it's started." September 11 suspended the debate, but not for long. When it emerged that some would-be terrorists had bought weapons at gun shows, both sides latched on to the homeland-security bandwagon. Sometime this spring, both bills will get the attention of the Senate. But the stakes are higher for AGS: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has promised Reed he'll get the first vote. That means for McCain's bill to get a vote, Reed's has to fail. AGS is "criticizing other groups because they've staked their whole brand name on this," argued Tom Mannard, executive director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, which like most of the state groups has parted ways with AGS. "And if [McCain] doesn't happen, what does that mean for them?" Cowan is undaunted. He predicts that McCain will get between 55 and 58 votes -- though he won't name whom he's counting on -- and brushes off the criticism from other activists. "In any debate where some group has stepped in and taken a high profile, recruited top legislators to work with them, helped carry two major ballot initiatives, tried to define a different position on an issue, has significant resources behind it, other people and other groups are going to attack them." But can a gun-control movement so deeply divided -- personally and politically -- win against the NRA? "Compromise only works when the other side gives," Sudbay argued. "We're compromising with ourselves. If Reed loses because of what AGS has done, they've done the NRA's work for them." Nicholas Confessore Copyright c 2002 by The American Prospect http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/7/confessore-n.html