Koon’s stance hasn’t always been popular in his Rochester district; a gun owner posted a bullet on his door with the message DIE KOON. But since the school shooting last April in Littleton, Colo., hundreds of supporters have called his office, and now Koon can sense that his moment is here. Poll after poll bears it out: thousands of ordinary Americans, many of whom own guns, now say the industry needs tougher controls. “Gun shows used to be fun, full of real good hunting rifles,” says an executive at a major hunting organization. “Now you go in and they’re selling pamphlets that tell you how to make pipe bombs and how to make your semiautomatic gun into an automatic. These people aren’t concerned about hunting pheasants. They’re concerned that the government is going to get them.”
Guns have always been a part of America’s frontier mythology. But now Little Big Horn and the O.K. Corral have given way in the public mind to places like Stockton, Jonesboro and Littleton. Those who make guns can feel the balance shifting against them, to the point where some no longer tell strangers what they do for a living. Although a strong lobby has beat back gun control in Congress, support for new restrictions is gaining at the state level; last week California began limiting buyers to one gun a month and passed the nation’s toughest restrictions on assault weapons. Sensing a choice between compromise and bankruptcy, some gunmakers are re-examining their practices and trying to soften their hardened image. “Owning a gun is a responsibility as well as a right,” says Richard Esposito, whose New York consulting firm, CM, is retooling Colt’s message. “And we don’t just think it’s the customer’s responsibility. We also think it’s the industry’s responsibility.”
The Columbine shooting will be remembered as a pivotal moment. But in fact, attitudes toward guns, like those toward tobacco, changed gradually. For 20 years, a small band of anti-gun crusaders has been waging a holy war against the industry, using carefully crafted lawsuits, journal articles and even oversize billboards. They were inadvertently helped by pro-gun activists themselves, who turned off a wary public with increasingly extremist rhetoric. An evangelical gun lobby won virtually every gun-control battle in the last 30 years–but in doing so may have lost the war for the soul of Middle America.
In some ways, not much has changed in the American gun market. After all, Al Capone had plenty of illegal machine guns, and Lee Harvey Oswald bought his rifle through the Sears catalog, no background check required. But the American handgun market only recently spiraled out of control. In his new book, “Making a Killing,” Tom Diaz, a self-described “gun nut” turned anti-gun activist, notes that before the 1960s, most buyers wanted rifles and shotguns used for hunting and shooting sports. As more people left rural areas for the suburbs, the number of hunters fell off, and long-gun sales declined. But a new market was opening up–based on selling powerful new handguns as “protection” for a public fearful of rising crime. In 1962 there were just 540,000 handguns for sale in the United States; 30 years later, the figure had reached 2.7 million.
The rise of the handgun split the 100-year-old-National Rifle Association into two groups: sportsmen who still wanted to focus on hunting and a “new guard” who saw any attempt to regulate handguns as an assault on the Second Amendment. The hard-liners won, and soon doubled the NRA membership to 2 million. But there was a price to pay: the NRA’s tough stands against sweeping restrictions on “cop killer” bullets and assault weapons alienated police and hunters, and America’s image of a gun owner began to change after horrific shootings like the 1984 massacre at a California McDonald’s. By the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the NRA was bound up in the public mind with a growing militia movement.
By then, opponents had long been plotting innovative ways to take on the gun industry. None was more influential than Stephen Teret. A trial lawyer with a master’s degree in public health, Teret was teaching injury prevention in 1983, concentrating most of his efforts on air bags. Then a couple he knew lost their 22-month-old son in an accidental shooting. Teret began writing papers on the gun industry, suggesting that gunmakers could be just as liable for turning out unsafe guns as Ford was for making the dangerous gas tank in the Pinto.
Teret recruited Garen Wintemute, a ponytailed emergency-room physician and his favorite student at Johns Hopkins, and together they drove a beat-up rental car up and down Connecticut’s “Gun Valley,” home to such legendary gunmakers as Smith & Wesson and Colt. They snapped pictures of the industrial-age factories and drew up profiles of the wealthy CEOs, trying to put a face on the industry. While the Goliath NRA worked from its suburban Washington office, Teret and Wintemute assembled slide shows in Teret’s Maryland living room. The idea was to show audiences that guns did not magically appear in the hands of criminals. “We wanted people to know that someone is making decisions every year about how many guns to make and how to design them and how to sell them,” Teret says.
Their work built the foundation for years of litigation. While Wintemute went on to write about the “Ring of Fire” companies making cheap guns in California, Teret consulted anti-tobacco lawyers on suing the industry. His theories–along with 25 unsuccessful cases brought by a Dallas lawyer, Windle Turley–eventually led to a series of landmark suits. Now more than 20 cities have filed lawsuits against the manufacturers, claiming they knowingly supply a criminal market and sell unsafe guns. The industry is reeling. One maker of cheap guns has already filed for bankruptcy. Colt admits it has talked with officials in several states about what might be done to change the industry’s sales, marketing and distribution systems, although the company says that began before the litigation. Colt has also stepped up plans to market a “smart gun” that would prevent anyone who doesn’t own the gun from using it.
In response, the NRA is pushing state legislatures like those in Georgia and Texas to outlaw the lawsuits. But in politics, too, the tectonic plates seem to be shifting. The gun lobby recently suffered stinging gun-control defeats in California and in Missouri, where voters rejected a referendum that would have allowed them to carry concealed weapons. Jim and Sarah Brady’s Handgun Control, the godfather of the anti-gun family, declared war on 11 candidates last November; all but one went down to defeat. The group hopes to raise more than $2 million for the 2000 presidential race.
Gunmakers also face a fledgling grassroots movement. It began in the 1980s with anti-gun citizens’ groups in Maryland and Illinois. In 1995 John Rosenthal, a Boston developer in business with the late Michael Kennedy, decided to post the world’s biggest billboard. It featured 15 giant faces of children killed by guns, with the message: THE COST OF HANDGUNS KEEPS GOING UP. The sign led to some 900 like it across the country. Now Rosenthal, himself a skeet shooter, wants to form an alternative to the NRA, and he is asking gun-company execs to join him. “Most gun owners believe the NRA doesn’t represent them,” he says. “They’re looking for a new organization that doesn’t want to take away their guns, but wants to restrict unsupervised access to kids.”
Then there’s the California-based Bell Campaign, which has already scored $4.3 million in foundation money, the biggest anti-gun grant ever. Modeled after Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the group is recruiting victims’ families to push for stricter gun control. “These are people who will work 24 hours for the rest of their lives on this issue,” says founder Andrew McGuire.
With at least 240 million guns floating around the country, it’s unlikely that more laws alone would have much impact. “You could implement total gun registration tomorrow, and gun crime probably wouldn’t be affected for 20 years,” says a veteran law-enforcement source. The most sweeping law on the books–the Brady bill–has kept about 400,000 people from getting guns from licensed dealers, but only a handful of them have been prosecuted for trying. Federal agents are overwhelmed, and most U.S. attorneys won’t pursue such small cases. “You can pass a law that says everyone has to drive 55,” says Smith & Wesson CEO Ed Shultz. “But if there are no cops out there to enforce it, it won’t matter.” It took 30 years for America to decide it has a gun crisis. All the will in the world won’t undo it overnight.
