How the Gun-Control Movement Got Smart

Here is how advocates of gun control used to talk about their cause: They openly disputed that the Second Amendment conferred the right to own a gun. Their major policy goals were to make handguns illegal and enroll all U.S. gun owners in a federal database. The group now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was once known as Handgun Control Inc.; a 2001 book by the executive director of the Violence Policy Center was entitled Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.

Contrast that with what you see today: Gun-control groups don't even use the term "gun control," with its big-government implications, favoring "preventing gun violence" instead. Democratic politicians preface every appeal for reform with a paean to the rights enshrined in the Second Amendment and bend over backwards to assure "law-abiding gun owners" they mean them no ill will. Even the president, a Chicago liberal who once derided rural voters' tendency to "cling to guns or religion," seeks to assure gun enthusiasts he's one of them by citing a heretofore-unknown enthusiasm for skeet shooting, adding, "I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations. And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake."

A frequent question in the current battle over gun control is why anyone should expect reform to succeed now when it's failed repeatedly for the last 20 years. Maybe this is why: Between then and now, advocates of gun control got smarter. They've radically changed their message into one that's more appealing to Middle America and moderate voters.

In the late '90s, "Democrats and gun-control groups had approached the debate consistently in a way that deeply, almost automatically alienated a lot of gun owners," said Jon Cowan, former president of a now-defunct group called Americans for Gun Safety.

The story of the way the gun debate changed is largely the story of AGS. Formed in 2000 by Andrew McKelvey, the CEO of Monster.com, the group sought to reset the terms of the debate and steer the gun-control movement away from its inward-looking, perpetually squabbling, far-left orientation. The various advocacy groups were often more concerned with fighting with each other than with taking the fight to their opponents, and a vocal contingent valued ideological purity over pragmatism. (...)

"There was as much fighting between the groups as with the opposition," David Hantman, a former aide to the bill's sponsor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, recalled. "Some of them insisted that we couldn't just renew [the ban], we had to strengthen it." With Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, that wasn't politically feasible, and the ban was allowed to lapse. Around the same time, legislation to close the "gun-show loophole" by requiring background checks for non-dealer gun sales was defeated, and Congress passed a bill according gun manufacturers blanket immunity from product-liability lawsuits.

McKelvey, a Yellow Pages ad marketer-turned-tech billionaire, came to the gun issue after being shocked by Columbine. Described by friends as an apolitical businessman who enjoyed hunting (he died of cancer in 2008), McKelvey was frustrated by the tone-deaf approach he saw the gun-control movement taking. He joined the board of Handgun Control Inc. and immediately began pressuring the group to change its name, promising substantial financial support in exchange for such a move; when the group resisted, he quit the board and set out to form his own group -- AGS.

If the NRA today seems fixated on the notion that the left is out to undercut the Second Amendment, confiscate law-abiding Americans' legally acquired firearms, and instigate federal-government monitoring of all gun owners, that's because 15 years ago, gun-control advocates wanted to do all of those things.

by Molly Ball, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Pete Souza/White House