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 alittle less heavenly. The grass-roots Army has failed to materialize. The stateactivists are grumbling. Relations between AGS and other national groups arechilly. And an upcoming fight in the Senate to close the "gun-show loophole" inthe 1994 Brady Bill -- which required background checks on gun purchases but didn'tcover sales at hundreds of gun shows held across the country each year -- willprobably make things worse. While AGS backs a bill introduced by RepublicanSenator John McCain, nearly all the other gun-control groups prefer a billsponsored by Democratic Senator Jack Reed. The resulting fight might just tearthe gun-control movement apart.
Things first began to unravel in the fall of 2000,as gun-controlgroups across the country prepared for the November elections. The initialcontract between AGS and the state groups, signed that July, called for AGS tocreate a marketing plan, give each of the 29 state groups $60,000 a year for twoyears, and pay for a substantial amount of training and services. Passage offederal gun licensing and registration, the contract stated, would be "the topnational priority." The state groups were ecstatic. But then, at an AGSconference in September, Cowan presented a slew of AGS-funded polls andintroduced the new national slogan: "rights and responsibilities." Within acouple of days, as the state groups began to receive talking points and samplepress releases from AGS, they found out what Cowan meant by "rights": Americanswere guaranteed the right to own guns, a position long promulgated by the NRA andopposed by nearly every gun-violence organization in the country.
To McKelvey and Cowan, this was just good politics. Most Americans alreadybelieved it to be true, the pair argued. (McKelvey says he didn't think theconstitutional issue "was terribly relevant to anything.") But the state groupswere livid -- especially given that the July contract had stressed gun licensingand 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, theinformal grass-roots coalition that had signed the contract on behalf of stateguncontrol groups. "That's when things really fell apart." For the next fewweeks, Cowan and the state activists argued fiercely over the slogan and whowould adopt it. The activists felt that they had been blindsided and that AGS ingeneral, and Cowan in particular, were being "a little dictatorial," as oneparticipant put it.
Meanwhile, AGS had decided to get involved in Oregon and Colorado referendumsaimed 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 millionto help pass the initiatives. In early October, AGS triumphantly unveiled itscampaign, announcing that McCain would appear in AGS ads (reversing his 1999Senate vote against closing the loophole). But by month's end, AGS and the stategroups had stepped back and negotiated a new contract: AGS would still give outthe $60,000 per group, but would offer significantly less training andoperational support. The state groups, meanwhile, would not have to endorsespecific legislation or adopt AGS's slogan.
In the end, the November elections went relatively well for the gun-controlside. Though Al Gore's presidential campaign was hurt by his loss in some pro-gunswing states, a number of House Democrats won with strong gun-control stands andsome incumbent, NRA-backed state and national lawmakers were unseated. Mostsignificantly, gun control was pivotal in defeating three staunchly pro-NRARepublican senators: John Ashcroft, Spencer Abraham, and Slade Gorton. Thereferendums in Oregon and Colorado passed with healthy majorities, boding wellfor 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 onguns has changed dramatically."
So when Rhode Island's senior senator, Jack Reed,decided toreintroduce a 1999 bill (originally sponsored by Frank Lautenberg, a former NewJersey senator) that required background checks at gun shows, he naturallythought of McCain. After all, the referendums that McCain had helped pass inOregon 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 atwhich 50 or more firearms were exhibited or offered for sale; the referendumsdrew the line at 25.) Reed and McCain chatted in December 2000, but McCain wasnoncommittal. When Reed introduced his bill at a press conference four monthslater, McCain didn't attend -- and neither did Carolyn McCarthy, the Long IslandDemocrat 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 hadbegun to reconfigure AGS from a would-be grass-roots organization into a Beltwayadvocacy powerhouse. Last winter, AGS opened a plush new office on L Street inWashington, hired well-connected staffers (including James Kessler, previouslythe policy director for gun-control champion Charles Schumer), and retainedhigh-powered lobbyists (such as John Wyma, a former Schumer chief of staff). AGShad also begun to woo centrist Democrat Joseph Lieberman and McCarthy, who triedand failed to pass a Lautenberg-style bill in the House in 1999 and was lookingfor "a new approach, a new angle" to gun control, according to one aide. (Itprobably didn't hurt that McKelvey had been among McCarthy's biggest supporters:During the 2000 election cycle, McKelvey, his wife, and employees of his twofirms accounted for McCarthy's second-biggest chunk of contributions.) And inFebruary of last year, AGS launched a new ad campaign aimed at getting"Washington 'to stop playing politics with guns' and require criminal backgroundchecks at gun shows."
At first, it also tried to bring the state groups on board. At an AGSconference in Maryland, AGS staffers tried to persuade local activist Ginni Wolfnot to support a pending Montgomery County law to ban all gun shows. TheWashington 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 proveto be the dominant theme. "Both parties, and certainly Democrats, are looking fora new approach to the issue to break the polarization," Cowan told The NewYork 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 ableto run them -- both pushed by the NRA in 1999 -- McCain's bill was designed to havemore 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 butsending nothing to the president's desk," Schumer announced. "This bipartisanbill bows to the reality of getting something done without sacrificingprinciple."
Reaction in the gun-control community was mixed. Few activists opposed fundingto improve background checks, but many questioned the implicit concession thatthe 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 -- andwelcomed McCain's involvement -- but questioned the "third way" posturing.Furthermore, Lautenberg's original bill had itself been "bipartisan, moderatelegislation," as AGS called McCain's bill, and the Lautenberg-Reed language hadalready proved agreeable to voters in Oregon and Colorado. McCain went on TV toclaim that his bill was "basically the same that passed in Colorado," when infact it was Reed's bill that was basically the same. McKelvey himself seemed tofavor even stiffer kinds of traditional gun control. "If licensing andregistration would save kids' lives," he told The AtlantaJournal-Constitution in June, "then yeah, we have to look at it."
And though AGS heralded the bill as the only one that could pass inRepublican-dominated Washington, the GOP wasn't biting. The McCain bill got onlyfive co-sponsors (Reed had 22) and no Republican co-sponsors besides McCain andMike DeWine, who had supported Lautenberg in 1999. Indeed, neither McCain norMcCarthy had a single demonstrable "new" vote -- that is, someone that hadn't votedfor closing the loophole in 1999. "I think [AGS's] sense was that their bill wasgoing 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 thegun-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 hopelesscause. Cowan, Kessler, and former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart soon tookto the hustings to make that case. In July, Cowan and Kessler published anarticle 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. Tocentrist Republicans and Democrats, AGS trumpeted McCain's endorsement anddisparaged Reed's backers as "a group of liberal Democrats," as AGSCommunications Director Matt Bennett put it in a recent online chat. To liberalDemocrats inclined to support Reed, AGS has highlighted Schumer and McCarthy'ssupport. And to everyone, AGS has argued that the McCain bill is simultaneouslyan 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 somewould-be terrorists had bought weapons at gun shows, both sides latched on to thehomeland-security bandwagon. Sometime this spring, both bills will get theattention of the Senate. But the stakes are higher for AGS: Senate MajorityLeader Tom Daschle has promised Reed he'll get the first vote. That means forMcCain's bill to get a vote, Reed's has to fail. AGS is "criticizing other groupsbecause they've staked their whole brand name on this," argued Tom Mannard,executive director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, which likemost of the state groups has parted ways with AGS. "And if [McCain] doesn'thappen, what does that mean for them?"
Cowan is undaunted. He predicts that McCain will get between 55 and 58votes -- though he won't name whom he's counting on -- and brushes off the criticismfrom other activists. "In any debate where some group has stepped in and taken ahigh profile, recruited top legislators to work with them, helped carry two majorballot initiatives, tried to define a different position on an issue, hassignificant resources behind it, other people and other groups are going toattack them."
But can a gun-control movement so deeply divided -- personally andpolitically -- win against the NRA? "Compromise only works when the other sidegives," Sudbay argued. "We're compromising with ourselves. If Reed loses becauseof what AGS has done, they've done the NRA's work for them."