Stalemate

It's no surprise that an ambitious gun safety proposal died in the General Assembly. But there's plenty of blame for proponents and opponents alike

by Kathleen Hughes

THE NEWPORT RIFLE Club was founded in 1876 by W. Milton Farrow, who also founded Farrow Rifles. It's said to be the longest running gun club in the country. On a warm, clear Wednesday evening in early May, about a dozen fledgling and veteran shooters bring their target pistols, packed in cases like the kind tinkers or traveling knife sharpeners might have carried, and step into the club's eight-port, 50-yard indoor range, where they set up their bull's-eye targets, put on hearing protection, and very sci-fi looking blinders, and wait for team captain and club safety officer Bob King to give the go-ahead. The generally white, middle-aged men, representing professions from engineering to social work, are quiet, focused, and mostly still as their gunshots begin to ring out.

One woman, Gail Hogan, arrives with her husband, Stephen. They've belonged to the rifle club for one year, and drive from Cranston, even though other guns clubs are closer to their home. "The Newport Rifle Club is really safety-oriented, and family-based," Gail Hogan says, gesturing to a wall of recent photos behind her, including the Junior Rifle Team, which shoots high-tech air guns at targets. There's no minimum age for the rifle team, but kids typically start around age 11 or 12. The Hogans looked into shooting after Gail was assaulted by one of her fellow 911 workers. "I wanted to know about firearms," she explains. "I vowed [an assault] would never happen to me again." The couple also like how the Newport club is open 24 hours, since members have keys. "One time we came down here and shot at 3 a.m.," Hogan says. "Neither one of us could sleep."

Gail and Stephen Hogan

The fatal gun violence spawned in America's inner cities by the crack epidemic of the late '80s and early '90s has declined sharply, yet firearms remain the second-leading cause of injury-related death in this country, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. Among American anxieties, the white suburban school shooter has replaced drug turf wars, even though episodes of gun violence by youth fell through the '90s. Still, a decades-long battle rages between those who want guns and those who believe they're unnecessary and dangerous. For the gun lovers, people, not firearms, are responsible for the violence -- and thus criminal prosecution and sentencing is the key. Gun lovers also insist that gun control only punishes the law-abiding non-violent, without doing a thing to stop the flow of illegal guns, which, they say, account for at least 90 percent of gun-related violence.

"There are enough illegal guns in commerce already," says Tom Frank, president of the Newport Rifle Club. "That you could take 95 percent of legal guns [out of circulation] and still not make a dent in gun crimes."

"We need to spend our resources on why people are committing crime," adds the club's chief safety officer Richard Ashmore, a retired Navy officer.

Ashmore, Frank, and other Rhode Island gun proponents have just finished an alarming legislative session, given a much-reviled omnibus gun control measure, the Rhode Island Prevention of Gun Deaths and Injuries Act, introduced by Senator Rhoda Perry (D-Providence), and Representative David Cicilline (D-Providence), who insisted the measure was about gun safety and criminal prosecution, not restraining the Second Amendment. The bill was vigorously promoted by the one-year-old Rhode Island chapter of the Million Mom March, which gathered a broad coalition of emergency room physicians, pediatricians, judges, academics and, of course, mothers, from every corner of the state. "What reasonable person could vote against child safety locks . . . banning military-style assault rifles . . . and protecting women from domestic violence?" chapter co-chair Karina Wood asked the Senate Judiciary Committee during an April hearing.

The 18 provisions of House bill 5580 and the identical Senate Bill 770 included restrictions on the issuance of gun licenses for people convicted of violent misdemeanors, and for people against whom restraining orders had been issued. The bills also sought to offer new police discretion to deny licenses to those suspected of illegal or unsafe behavior -- with the caveat of an appeal process. H5580/S770 would have intensified trigger lock rules, instituted a one-gun-a-month purchase limit, and codified the federal assault weapons ban, which is due to expire in 2004. The bill would also have funded a study about gun injuries, increased penalties for illegal gun activity, and reduced the length of a concealed weapon permit from four years to one.

David Cicilline

But despite the Million Mom March's mobilization of compelling support and the group's local and national publicity, both House 5580 and Senate 770 died in Judiciary Committee votes, by respective margins of 17-3 and 9-4, which surprised few people, particularly given that a 1998 Massachusetts gun bill, upon which the Rhode Island omnibus bill was modeled, took five years to pass.

Yet chances of reintroducing an omnibus bill next year seem slim. As Perry suggests, "There's too much in it to pick apart, giving justification for voting against it."

Representative Maxine Shavers (D-Newport) who provided one of nine nay votes for the House Judiciary, agrees, saying H5580 was "too condensed, with too many measures . . . I'm not going to pass gun bills just to pass gun bills -- we need the right bill."

This type of stalemate is business as usual when it comes to gun control. This isn't the first year that omnibus legislation has been attempted, notes Representative Edith Ajello (D-Providence), a co-sponsor of H5580, who has introduced one-gun-a-month purchase limits three times in three years. The stalemate, Ajello and others say, is due in large part to the well-organized and well-funded forces of the National Rifle Association, plus its colleagues and affiliates, such as the 200-member Cranston-based Citizens' Rights Action League, which recently formed in direct response to what it calls the Million Mom March's "disinformation . . . [and] deadly deception."

But the stalemate also seems due to the gun lobby's selfish and slightly racist, categorical denial of any responsibility for the locus of firearms violence in American's inner cities. Proponents of gun control are also due some of the blame, since they propose incremental measures that seem arbitrary, minimally effectual in decreasing most gun violence, and most effective in inconveniencing safety-conscious gun hobbyists -- just the thing to arouse the passion that practically ensures the defeat of such well-intentioned measures.

PERRY WHEELER, a lawyer and lobbyist for the Rhode Island Rifle and Revolver Association (RIRRA), the state's NRA chapter, is clear evidence of the gun lobby's effectiveness. Testifying against the Rhode Island Prevention of Gun Deaths and Injuries Act, Wheeler calmly, efficiently dismisses several of the bill's measures as either senseless, unnecessary, a violation of the rights of law-abiding gun owners, and/or "yet another back door attempt to further restrict firearms." Whether before the Senate Judiciary Committee or in a telephone interview, Wheeler seems to be playing badminton, swatting back every question tossed his way, frequently tossing in sarcastic asides like, "I'm actually thinking of joining the Hari Krishnas, shaving my head, and getting a saffron-colored cloak."

In between such comments, Wheeler seems to have a near-photographic memory of Rhode Island's gun laws, federal laws, plus those of other states, and he tells legislators about poor fictional Aunt Judy or Uncle John, the law-abiding citizens who would become accidental felons because of a proposed law. He's effective, and for support, several dozen members of RIRRA and the nascent Citizens' Rights Action League pack the State House chamber. Meanwhile, NRA members from across the country send dozens of letters and make plenty of phone calls to Rhode Island legislators, not to mention making campaign donations.

Five of 19 House Judiciary Committee members, and six of 16 Senate counterparts, received campaign funds from the NRA in 2000, totaling $3460. The House and Senate leadership reached an additional $2150. Yet Representative Joe Scott (R-Richmond), who calls his home the "Ponderosa" district because of its gun-loving constituents, denies the money has much import. "If I saw the sense of people in my district was for gun control, do you think [the NRA's] $400 is going to make a difference? Nah." Scott voted against H5580.

Still, according to the National Institute for State Politics, pro-gun forces spent $17,000 in Rhode Island in 1998, the seventh highest amount among 39 states listed. Rhode Island received three times as much as Massachusetts, 14 times as much as New York, and slightly more than Connecticut. No one, not even Rebecca Williams, the NRA's regional lobbyist, had much idea why, but at the least, the money shows that the NRA is very serious when it comes to fighting gun laws that it dislikes in Rhode Island.

IN A SMALL ROOM off the center of the Newport Rifle Club there sits a huge safe around which a massive chain is wrapped, like a test worthy of Houdini. Frank and Ashmore, the club president and safety officer, without anger or impatience, eagerly answer questions about trigger locks, assault weapon bans, one-gun-a-month limits, and other measures meant to prevent gun accidents in the home and reduce inner city violence. As Frank rattles off some of the endless technicalities of various pieces of proposed and enacted state and federal gun control legislation -- "I can keep this all straight in my head," he says, "I'm an engineer" -- it's easy to see why he finds the laws arbitrary and hapless.

The two men maintain the standard pro-gun line on trigger locks, asserting that the devices can malfunction or prevent gun owners from protecting their households. And they find it amusing and foolish that the current state law merely requires new gun purchases to include a trigger lock, without requiring anyone to use them. As for parents who leave guns in places where children can get to them easily, such as under a stack of sweatshirts, Ashmore says, "They oughta be slapped upside the head."

In terms of assault weapons, the Kalashnikov, Uzi, Street Sweeper, AK-47 -- such as the one enhanced with a 75-round magazine, purchased at a Rhode Island gun shop, and used for two minutes in 1989 to kill five school children and wound 33 more at a Stockton, California playground -- these and other machine guns are banned by the federal assault weapon ban, known as the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act. Beyond such weapons, Frank and Ashmore explain, the prohibited "assault weapon" features of semi-automatic weapons are "almost always cosmetic distinctions."

For example, a folding stock and a bayonet mount on the front of a rifle are superficial distinctions that qualify a gun as an "assault weapon," Frank explains, and are mostly irrelevant to the gun's functioning or use. A more far-reaching California list of banned semi-automatic "assault weapons" has mainly impacted target shooters. One champion target shooter had to move out of California, they tell me, because her prized gun had a magazine forward of the trigger.

Sergeant Robert Boehm, wears a number of hats as armorer for the Providence police. He's the department's lead firearms instructor, head of weapons bureau, manager of firearms evidence, and manager of background checks for city residents who want to purchase guns. Boehm agrees that prohibiting specific guns, besides machine guns, does little to alter the number or type of illegal guns on the street. "The weapon of choice for a criminal," he says, "Is any weapon he can get his hands on."

Assault weapons do appear in crimes. According to Handgun Control Inc., the Washington advocacy group led by Sarah Brady, wife of James Brady, the Reagan press secretary who was paralyzed by John Hinckley's 1984 assassination attempt, at least 13 percent of 122 killings of police officers between early 1994 and September 1995 were conducted with assault weapons. And in the first months the federal assault weapon ban was in effect, 18 percent fewer assault weapons were traced to crimes.

PROBLEMATIC MEASURES in the Rhode Island legislation gave the gun lobby a free pass, in a way -- because they could defeat the bill without focusing on more meaningful measures and difficult questions, such as why it's legislatively sanctioned for gun lovers, who are largely white, male, rural or suburban residents, to categorically refuse abridgement of their hobby or leisure, even to aid efforts against inner city gun violence. Such refusal seems to occur first because gun lovers are convinced, with some reason, that specific proposals won't dent inner city violence. Yet more generally, gun lovers seem loath to engage the problem of urban bloodshed or its putative cause, gang-bangers. This disinclination is something of a not-in-my-back-yard response that is both selfish and slightly racist, and it contributes to the stalemate that prevents any incremental gun control measures from winning approval.

Wheeler asserts that the whole state should not be held responsible for violence in the capital city. "Providence only has 15 percent of the state's population but two-thirds of the homicides," he says, and some gun control legislation "wants to saddle the whole state with one city's problems." He cites a RIRRA report on gun violence in Rhode Island from 1994 to 2000, which claims that minorities account for 80 percent of firearm victims. "In 2000," Wheeler's report states, "South Providence had 14 murders. The State of Maine, with 1.3 million people, had 11."

And thus, not only is gun violence urban, and not the problem of suburban and rural residents, it's also poor and non-white, which, some seem to believe, further releases most white, middle class gun proponents from responsibility on the issue. The gun lobby's common assertion that gun control won't do anything to deter criminals speaks directly to this. "Gang-bangers aren't going to obey the laws," Wheeler says.

"My problem with gun control," says Senator Catherine Graziano (D- Providence), "Is that you can pass all the laws you want, but criminals don't read them. It's criminals we need to address, not responsible gun owners."

Carl Bogus, a professor at Roger Williams School of Law and former Handgun Control board member, says simply, "Gun violence falls disproportionately on inner city residents. White suburbanites [and their politicians] don't feel they have to be as concerned about it." Bogus notes that Vietnam War protests only took flight when white college kids were drafted -- the first wave of mostly black male draftees didn't prompt large-scale objection.

Of course, the gun lobby is correct that getting guns won't wholly cure neighborhoods that are struggling with violence. Drugs, illiteracy, job training, poor housing stock, and more, also need to be addressed. Yet this is not their concern. Even a measure such as the one-gun-a-month purchase limit, which is aimed directly at illegal "straw purchases," which are made when one person buys a gun for a minor, a violent felon, or some other prohibited gun owner, draws vigorous protest.

If the gun lobby has opposed every piece of gun control in the Rhode Island legislature, it did support Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse's enhanced-sentencing effort to make gun crimes distinct from the offense they accompanied. For instance, the bill made the `armed' portion of armed robbery a separate crime with a separate, additional sentence -- 10 years for merely having the gun, 10 years for discharging the weapon, and another 10 if someone is injured -- none of which can be served at the same time. The bill, which became law, also mandates 10-year penalties for providing a weapon or ammunition to minors, and for shooting at a police officer. "The philosophy is that those involved with firearms are the most violent criminals," says Bill Guglietta, Whitehouse's chief of policy and prevention. "And so our aim is to keep the most violent criminals off the street . . . and to be sure they do their time."

THE MILLION MOM March has pledged tenacity in the multi-year process of passing strong gun legislation. US Senator Jack Reed recently introduced gun show loophole-closing legislation that he believes will pass easily in the Senate, and US Representative Patrick Kennedy recently introduced legislation proposing a consumer safety commission for guns, "because guns at Hasbro have more regulation than real guns." Kennedy sees hope in the MMM, as he argues "It will take more than just passionate speeches and great poll numbers -- it will take the degree of activism and sophistication that our opponents are known for . . . if we're to have any hope of passing sane gun laws in this country."

And yet, according to some, these incremental measures, while useful, will only maintain the general stalemate over gun control. More meaningful, effective measures are needed, even though they are certain to offend the gun lobby more, rather than less.

Shavers, for instance, didn't just feel H5580 was too complicated, she also found it weak. "I'm against gun violence and we need to look at it -- but we need a bill with some teeth," she says.

Bogus believes incrementalism has hindered the gun control movement. He says Handgun Control's Brady Bill, making a seven-day waiting period a federal law, was proposed when the gun control lobby needed a win. Handgun Control felt the bill was common sense, inoffensive, and "No one could possibly oppose it without damaging credibility." As it turned out, of course, the NRA opposed the Brady Bill as vigorously as it might have opposed an outright gun ban and the "milquetoast" Brady Bill took seven years to pass.

The NRA's opposition was a big factor in the Brady Bill stall, but more importantly, Bogus says, was the bill's lack of support. Although polls showed that support for the Brady Bill, even in the most gun-loving states, never fell below 88 percent, those supporters didn't take the bill into the voting booth with them, as its opponents did. Abortion, budgets, and the environment are all "voting issues" but gun control, so far -- even with suburban concern about school shootings -- is not. It was barely on the radar of the last presidential election. Why? Because, Bogus asserts, the bills have been too weak to convince a candidate to take a strong stand.

"If the gun control movement could say gun deaths are very closely tied to the number of handguns in circulation . . . and make a proposal to drastically reduce the number of handguns, and if they could say we need licensing determined by the chief of police," Bogus maintains, "You'd have fewer people supporting it [than support something like trigger locks], but you'd have people supporting it more fervently -- it could be a controlling issue."

Joe Dennison, Handgun Control's director of state legislation, has mixed feelings about Bogus' theory. "I think we've seen that [present `incremental' gun control legislation] can be an important voting issue for people, but candidates need to raise the issue and raise a distinction," Dennison says. Unfortunately, Al Gore didn't actively make any significant gun control distinctions in the last race, and thus it couldn't be a voting issue. The states where HCI ran gun issue ads, furthermore, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, were surprise wins for Gore. "And in Tennessee, a loss which was blamed in part on the gun issue," Dennison notes, "80 percent of polled residents wanted stricter gun laws."

HOWSOEVER INTRIGUING Bogus' theory sounds, it seems unlikely that the gun control lobby will suddenly do an about-face from its established strategy of focusing on trigger locks, carefully regulated purchasing schemes, the abolition of particularly lethal firearms, and safety regulations. This is because a charismatic group like the Million Mom March could mobilize voters in support of these incremental measures in a previously unseen way. Also, the gun control measures that were passed in the last 10 years, including the assault weapons ban, as well as purchase limits in a few states, are now old enough to produce considerable statistics, and given a general eight-year decline in gun violence, statistics seem apt to work in gun control's favor.

There are plenty of theories and statistics to go around, of course, including the John Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime, which argues that there's a direct correlation between the leniency of gun laws and low crime rates, and gives gun proponents a standard rebuttal to all purchase limits and concealed weapon restrictions. Yet Lott's analysis has come under attack, as reported in Newsweek.

But then there's the sobering news that President Bush's campaign received $75,000 from gun-rights groups, of the $2 million total given to Republicans, and that Vice-President Dick Cheney stood on a podium in February of this year, flanked by NRA leaders Charlton Heston, Wayne LaPierre, David Keene, and US Congressman Bob Barr, with his press secretary commenting, "The Vice-President is a strong supporter of the right to bear arms." To boot, Bogus notes something of a trend in NRA-favoring interpretations of the Second Amendment, and rumors that Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have asked to consider the issue for the first time since 1939. The gun control lobby may have gained momentum in the last decade, but the hill may also be getting steeper.

Kathleen Hughes can be reached at khughes[a]phx.com.