by Dan Baum
Most of all, though, what both marijuana laws and gun laws did best was express disapproval of a lifestyle and the culture that enjoyed it.
NRA executive vice president J. Warren Cassidy once told a Time magazine writer, “You would get a far better understanding if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world.” Guns may have been fun, useful, nostalgia-inducing, and mechanically intriguing, but in the America I was touring, they also stood in for a worldview that, broadly defined, valued the individual over the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, certainty over questioning, patriotism over internationalism, manliness over femininity, action over inaction. The gun was the physical manifestation of the tribe’s binding philosophy. It was the idol on the altar. The tribe exalted it and invested it with supernatural powers—to stop crime, defend the republic against tyranny, turn subjects into citizens, make boys into men.
The opposing tribe, which tended to value reason over force, skepticism over blind certainty, internationalism over American exceptionalism, multiculturalism over white-male hegemony, income leveling over jungle capitalism, and peace over war—liberals, for lack of a better word—recognized the gun as the sacred totem of the enemy, the embodiment of his abhorrent worldview. They believed that they could weaken the enemy by smashing his idols—by banning the gun if possible and, if not, by forcing it into an increasingly small box with as many restrictive laws as they could pass.
The elite soldiers of the anti-gun tribe were those of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Washington’s premier gun-control organization, and the disparity in strength between them and the NRA was apparent even before I entered their offices. While the NRA filled those two soaring towers in Virginia, the Brady Center had stuffed itself into a cramped warren of cubicles in a downtown D.C. building that also housed a fusty collection of anti-genocide, anti-war, and anti-racism nonprofits.
Dennis Henigan, the Brady Center’s legal director, was fifty-nine years old and had the weary, exhausted manner of a man who knew that the war he’d been waging would continue long after he’d left the field. He had an enviable head of hair; big, 1970s-style eyeglasses; and long fingers that he pressed together as he spoke. As we took seats in his office, I asked a very D.C. question: Who’s winning, your side or the other guy’s?
“My view,” he said, “is that we’re at a stalemate.”
Dude, I thought, are you joking? If what most concerned the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence was gun violence, Henigan should have been taking a victory lap. Gun violence was falling faster and landing lower than at any time in American history. The only way to see a stalemate was to accept the gun-guy view that what people like Henigan wanted was not only to get rid of gun violence, but to get rid of guns.
By that standard, the NRA was cleaning Brady’s clock. Gun laws were looser almost everywhere than they’d been twenty years earlier. The Supreme Court had settled the meaning of the Second Amendment in the gun guys’ favor. Six million Americans had obtained licenses to carry concealed weapons. Hundreds of thousands more guns were going into circulation every year. One could logically argue that if the Brady Center’s goal was to reduce gun violence, perhaps the thing to do was declare victory and close up shop. But good luck convincing a D.C. nonprofit that it was time to turn out the lights and send back the contribution checks.
“I was raised just outside D.C., in Springfield, Virginia,” Henigan told me as we made tea in the Brady Center’s windowless break room. “You know—tract houses, shopping centers, the classic 1950s suburb.” Henigan’s father, a debate coach at George Washington University, was an Adlai Stevenson liberal who’d died young—“the same age I am now,” Henigan said. “He was a smoker; I’m very passionate about tobacco, too.”
We walked back to Henigan’s office through narrow hallways festooned with blowups of gun-control magazine ads going back to the 1970s; it had been a long fight.
“My father clearly had no use for guns,” Henigan said. “I had all the Davy Crockett accoutrements, cap guns and water guns. But my father wouldn’t allow me to have a BB gun, because they were real. You could put your eye out.” Henigan’s only childhood experience of guns was when a neighbor his family knew well was cleaning his gun in the kitchen and shot his wife in the leg. “I do remember how shocking that seemed to me and my parents,” Henigan said as we took seats in his office, “the notion that someone even had a gun. After that, she walked with a really pronounced limp.”
The incident made Henigan wonder whether even well-intentioned people could handle guns safely at home. “All it takes is a single lapse in judgment,” he said. “It’s human not to be perfect.”
After law school, Henigan enjoyed work as a corporate litigator but found pro bono work more exciting. In 1989, he answered an ad in Legal Times: Handgun Control Inc. was looking for an attorney to bring the tactics of Thurgood Marshall–style public-interest law to the gun-control cause.
“From the first day I walked in, it was drummed into me that we were moderates,” Henigan said. “They didn’t want us to evoke an image of leftists or hippies or anything like that.” Pete Shields, who founded Handgun Control, was a Republican DuPont executive whose son had been the last victim of the Zebra killers, who shot random people with pistols in San Francisco in the 1970s. Charlie Orasin, another founder, was also Republican. They realized that restricting such a popular product as guns ran counter to the Republican impulse toward personal freedom, and they wanted a conservative, clean-cut organization. Spokesmen for the group cut their hair short and looked sharp. An American flag stood in the lobby. Shields and Orasin had zero tolerance for hostile or elitist comments about gun owners. And Handgun Control would never promote a ban. It changed its name to the Brady Center in 2001, in honor of James Brady, President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, who had been crippled with a handgun during an attempt on Reagan’s life.
Henigan had tried shooting a gun once, he told me. In the mid-1990s, his nephew and some friends invited him out for a day of practice in a field in rural Maryland. He didn’t like the Magnum or the shotgun, but “When we got down to the .22, I could understand the fun of shooting one. It was educational to be around people who enjoyed it, to hear them talk about it. They fascinate me, the gun people. I want to get into their heads.”
Though not enough to try shooting more than once every twenty years.
“I think my nephew was surprised to find neither I nor the Brady organization was in favor of banning guns,” Henigan said.
“Wait,” I said. It was the third time he’d mentioned that neither he nor Brady supported gun bans, yet reinstating the assault-rifle ban was the Center’s main legislative goal.
“We do say that there are kinds of guns that are significantly distinguishable from others, so ought not to be in civil society,” Henigan said, tenting his fingers.
“So you support a gun ban.”
“Of assault weapons.”
“So why do you keep saying that Brady doesn’t support banning guns?”
He spread his hands and looked at me through the bottom of his glasses as though I’d just fallen off a turnip truck. When Brady said it didn’t support gun bans, most of its friends in the Capitol understood that they meant guns that good Americans wanted. Assault rifles, with their pistol grips, barrel shrouds, long magazines, and sinister black plastic stocks, were evil and murderous—an entirely different category.
I thought of all the gun stores I’d been to in the past year, all the gun shows, competitions, and rifle ranges. The AR-15—an assault weapon, by Henigan’s definition—was so prevalent, so widely accepted as a hunting and sporting rifle, that to make a distinction between it and what Henigan called “other semi-automatics” seemed ridiculous. “When’s the last time you visited a rifle range?” I asked.
“I’ve never visited a rifle range.”
We met again the following day, and he clarified. “We understand here at Bra
dy that you have to be careful when talking about banning a class of firearms. It’s just very difficult to make the case that you need to be able to fire thirty rounds in five seconds.” He swiveled in his chair and looked out along I Street, like an admiral surveying the sea. “It’s not that you can’t imagine legitimate uses,” he said. “You can take an AR-15 out on the range and have a good time. You can use it in competitions.” He swiveled around to face me and frowned at his desktop. “It is simply risk versus benefit. It would be a lot of fun to drive 120 miles an hour on our roads, but we have speed limits. Our position is—and you may disagree—that it’s more important to protect people from being shot by criminals than to allow gun owners to enjoy an AR-15. We have limits on enjoyable activity in this society because some would threaten death and serious injury to other people.”
It made sense in theory, and had we been speculating about what might happen if people were allowed to have such weapons, he might have convinced me. But we didn’t need to speculate: We had data.
The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report was as “hard” a set of numbers as could be found in the gun debate. It wasn’t a survey that depended on how questions were asked; it simply tallied the crimes that police departments were required to report to the FBI. And what it showed was that assault rifles were not a public safety problem—and hadn’t been even back when the original ban was passed. The FBI didn’t delineate assault rifles from other rifles in its murder statistics. But in 1993, the year that the first assault-rifle ban was being debated, rifles of all kinds were used in only 3 percent—754—of the 23,271 murders committed. So the entire, polarizing assault-rifle debate was over a problem that, however telegenic and symbolically potent, barely existed. By 2004, when the ban was up for renewal, murder had fallen by a stunning 64 percent, and rifles of all kinds were responsible for the same 3 percent. Since then, rifles’ portion had fallen half a percentage point, with assault rifles only a fraction of that.
It made me wonder why the Brady Center refused to support a ban on handguns. Handguns killed almost twenty times more Americans than rifles of all kinds did in 2009. Assault rifles, though, were just as powerful symbolically as they were ballistically. A renewed assault-rifle ban would really smash the enemy’s idols. And politics was the art of the possible. Depending on whom you chose to believe, support for a handgun ban didn’t rise above about 35 percent, while anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans supported reinstating the assault-rifle ban.
Henigan looked at his watch; he had a meeting to attend.
As we rose, I asked if he’d ever subjected his desire for stricter gun control to a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits were murky, but what about the costs? I mentioned all the serious work Americans needed to do to arrest climate change, expand access to health care, reduce a crippling income gap, and regulate the financial sector. I told him about all the working guys I’d met on my trip who wouldn’t even listen to such talk, because they didn’t trust Democrats when it came to guns. Given that assault rifles—scary-looking as they were—didn’t seem to pose a public safety threat, wasn’t Brady doing the liberal tribe a disservice by needlessly handing the Republicans a big, fat cudgel with which to beat senseless the progressive agenda?
Henigan was the wrong guy to ask. I might as well have asked an infantry sergeant under fire in a Kandahar foxhole to explain his role in managing America’s relationship to global Islam.
“I don’t care what it does to the progressive agenda,” Henigan snapped. “We’re a single-issue group. Which is not to say that our typical supporters are not progressives. But we’re here to advance a gun-control agenda, period.”
Descending toward I Street in the elevator, it seemed to me that Dennis Henigan was as much of a problem for liberals as was Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s shrill and ubiquitous executive director. Henigan, in fact, may have been a bigger problem.
And he wasn’t the only one. Using the law to diminish the gun was only one tactic in the campaign to smash the enemy’s idols. Another was to attempt to expunge the gun from public consciousness. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency wouldn’t allow Columbia Pictures to advertise the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg comedy The Other Guys in its bus shelters until it rolled out a poster that changed the guns in the actors’ hands to badges and pepper spray. Capital One bank invited customers to “Personalize your card with an image of your choice” but refused to let a New Jersey woman use a photo of her husband hunting; no “death imagery,” Capital One said. The Maplewood, New Jersey, Little League wouldn’t let a gun store called Constitution Arms sponsor a team, though it accepted sponsorships from stores selling tobacco, alcohol, and Cluck-U Chicken (“Large Breasts, Juicy Thighs, Luscious Legs”). Twelve-year-old Zachary Fisher of Roseville, California, was sent home from school for wearing a T-shirt commemorating his victory in a trapshooting competition. Lots of cities did buybacks to get guns off the street, but Providence, Rhode Island, also did toy-gun buybacks, trading dolls and board games for toy guns. If gun guys could be like the Taliban in their absolute intolerance of even a slight disagreement, well, so could those on the anti-gun side. And if Sean Thornton’s experience was any indication, teachers apparently believed that it was better to pretend that guns didn’t exist than to teach kids how to stay safe around them.
The year before I met him, he’d set up a booth at the National Education Association’s annual conference to try to interest teachers in the NRA’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program, which taught kids four things to do if they happened upon a gun: Stop. Don’t touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult. Not particularly sophisticated, perhaps, but simple and apolitical. “That whole weekend, I had maybe six people come up who were open to the idea,” he said. “The majority were very upset with us—that we were even there, that we were the NRA. They wouldn’t even listen.” I asked a Boulder friend who taught third grade how she’d feel about Eddie Eagle, and she was adamant. “I don’t want the NRA in my classroom getting kids all excited about guns.” She sounded like the right-wing parents who opposed sex education because they felt it would encourage kids to have sex. I didn’t tell her that, though. She didn’t seem ready to listen.
If liberals thought they were weakening the enemy by smashing its idols, they had it exactly wrong. It was hard to think of a better organizing tool for the right than the left’s tribal antipathy to guns. From the kid at the Family Shooting Center in Colorado to Infidel in Nebraska, from Biff in Louisville to the sparkly-eyelashed parks worker in Wisconsin, America was full of working people who wouldn’t listen to the donkey party—about anything—because of the Democrats’ identification with gun control.
The Democratic strategists Paul Begala and James Carville recognized this trap when they wrote of the gun-show loophole in their 2006 book Take It Back. “Democrats risk inflaming and alienating millions of voters who might otherwise be open to voting Democratic. But once guns are in the mix, once someone believes his gun rights are threatened, he shuts down.” The NRA and Republicans knew it, too, of course, and were doing all they could to whip up hatred of the “elitists,” “liberals,” and “gun grabbers” in the Democratic Party—the same “effete corps of impudent snobs” that Republicans had been invoking to consummate the awkward marriage of working people to the GOP since the time of Spiro Agnew.
But the tactical damage that reflexive anti-gun sentiment did to the Democratic Party was the least of it. At a time when the economy was plummeting and the electorate was polarizing, vilifying gun owners seemed simply, and needlessly, impolite. The historian Garry Wills wrote in the Baltimore Sun that handgun owners were “accessories to murder” who had implicitly “declared war on their neighbors.” Newspaper editorialists called gun owners “a ridiculous minority of airheads,” “a handful of middle-aged fat guys with popguns,” and “hicksville cowboys” with “macho” hang-ups. For Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, gun guys were “bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their hom
es against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.” Mark Morford of SF Gate called female shooters “bored, under-educated, bitter, terrified, badly dressed, pasty, hate-spewin’ suburban white women from lost midwestern towns with names like Frankenmuth.” It was impossible to imagine getting away with such cruel dismissals of, say, blacks or gays, yet among a certain set, backhanding gun owners was good sport, even righteous. When I told an elderly friend of my mother-in-law—a generous and civic-minded Unitarian—that I was interviewing gun people, she spat, “I certainly hope you’re going to condemn those awful people.”
Which ones? I thought. Marcey Parker? Casey Gunnels? Rick Ector? Most of the gun guys I’d met were admirably careful, sober, self-reliant individuals. They had taken up the responsibility to handle incredibly dangerous weapons with great care, and were doing so safely. Even the unpleasant ones I’d encountered weren’t doing any harm. For that matter, the one guy I’d met who’d actually shot someone—Tim White—had devoted his life to keeping others from doing likewise. The community of gun guys had work to do in getting its members to keep their guns locked up, and no doubt awful people existed among the ranks. But I was alarmed at the breadth of the brush my mother-in-law’s friend was willing to deploy.
In the fall of 2011, I called an energetic gray-haired woman whom Margaret and I had met at the Iron County Fair, in far northern Wisconsin, more than a year earlier. Her name was Janet Bewley, and when we met her she was campaigning as a Democrat for a seat in the Wisconsin State Legislature. She’d won, and since then Wisconsin had scrapped its long-standing prohibition on concealed carry and had gone all the way to being a shall-issue state. I wanted to know whether Bewley had voted for or against.