Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302280037
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
WHAT TRIGGERED GUN-A-MONTH BILL?
On a Sunday afternoon in early February, House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell sauntered up to the Speaker of the House of Delegates with a question.Had Speaker Tom Moss signed off on a gun-control deal to be announced the next day by Gov. Douglas Wilder and the Republicans?
Moss, who represents Norfolk's well-to-do west side, and Cranwell, who hails from largely working-class Vinton, were on opposite sides of the push to limit handgun sales in Virginia to one per person per month. But, for now, they were at the same place - out of the loop.
"Hell no," was Moss's curt reply.
The words set in motion a three-ringed circus.
Within 36 hours, Wilder would unveil a fragile gun-limit compromise weeks in the making, urban delegates led by Moss would steamroll it for a tougher measure, and startled Senate Republicans would scramble to revive the Wilder-GOP alternative.
But amid the chaos, what would become clear was that Virginia - guardian of individual liberties - was poised to pass a tough gun-control bill unthinkable just a year earlier. And with solid majorities in both chambers.
All that was left to be settled was the form.
"In 12 years in the legislature, I've not seen anything as controversial switch that quickly," said Del. William Robinson, D-Norfolk, who ran into a firewall of opposition when he offered a "gun-a-month" plan a year ago.
As Congress opens debate on a national waiting period for handgun sales, Virginia offers an example of how public outrage over mounting gun carnage can reach critical mass, forcing political action.
The outcome here reflects the growing political power of the suburbs, the appearance of a new breed of suburban Republicans, the increasing isolation of the gun lobby, and the fact that the passion of such ordinary citizens as retired Virginia Beach high school English teacher Patty Masterson can still help change a bit of the world.
But the story is also a sobering one for gun-control enthusiasts. With this lineup of support - the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, two U.S. senators, three former governors, two U.S. attorneys, the superintendent of the state police, the heart of the state's business establishment, civic groups from the PTA to the American Association of Retired Persons, and every major state newspaper - the legislature still did not adopt the most restrictive gun limit bill available.
And it rejected or watered down most other gun-control bills.
That scenario is "a sad commentary on how much impact a single lobbying group can have," said David Weaver, a lobbyist for Handgun Control Inc., alluding to the National Rifle Association.
Noting that similar coalitions have been required in other states - California, New Jersey, New York - to pass tough gun laws, he added: "It's clearly a case of a minority thwarting the will of the majority."
But Weaver also said each victory, particularly in states such as Virginia, adds to a sense that "there is life after gun control" for legislators who buck the gun lobby.
"Every time some state passes a gun law with the kind of broad-based coalition that came together in Virginia, some legislator on Capitol Hill takes a second look," he said.
How it all began
The legislative genesis of gun-a-month in Virginia came in 1991 when Robinson was hired to defend a Norfolk State University honor student accused of buying 26 handguns for acquaintances in his home state, New York.
It was Robinson's introduction into the world of gunrunning. What the lawyer-delegate soon learned was that his client, who earned an eight-month jail sentence, was far from unique.
Drawn by Virginia's lax gun laws, the state's easy access via Interstate 95, and the prospect of huge profits when guns are resold in Washington D.C., New York, and other East Coast cities, an untold number of individuals have been carting Virginia guns north.
What they often leave behind as payment are drug stashes with far higher street values here than in New York or Philadelphia. The guns they take home supply firepower for murders, robberies, and other crimes.
Dismayed at the discovery, Robinson in 1992 introduced a bill limiting handgun sales to one per person per month. His reception was as warm as a polar ice cap. The House Committee on Militia and Police dumped the bill on a 10-5 vote, with every Republican and rural Democrat voting "no."
And when Robinson maneuvered to get a House floor vote on one-a-month - and then two-a-month - he was summarily defeated. As the legislature went home, Robinson concluded that success was, at best, two or three years away.
What Robinson could not forsee was that independently, on at least four fronts, forces that would converge in an exponential explosion of clout were beginning to move.
The horror hits home
In Richmond, Randy Rollins - deputy secretary, and soon-to-become secretary of public safety - was drafting a March 13 letter to Wilder proposing that "during the last two years of your term, you and this entire administration take a major leadership role in addressing violent crime."
After 22 years practicing corporate law, Rollins had put on hold a partnership with one of the South's blue chip law firms, McGuire, Woods, Battle and Boothe, to satisfy a yen for public service. As a Richmonder, he brought to his new job a growing horror at the murder rate - one every three days - in the Capitol City.
What Rollins proposed was a gubernatorial task force on violent crime. Its aim would to be to make "every sector" of the community "part of the war on crime, just as it has [been] for drunk driving and drugs."
Wilder agreed. Beginning in June, the task force would become a focal point for developing public consensus on the gun issue.
Meanwhile, across town, the newly appointed Republican U.S. attorney for eastern Virginia was setting his own priorities. Richard Cullen, a behind-the-scenes counsel and confidant to an assortment of GOP politicians over the last two decades, had moved to center stage and was displaying a knack for attracting the limelight.
At an April 30 retreat with subordinates from his offices in Norfolk, Richmond, and Alexandria, Cullen identified gun-trafficking and gun violence as his top priorities. Through the summer and fall, he and his staff would file a number of highly publicized cases.
Among them were charges against a United Parcel Service driver accused of stealing 850 guns from a Northern Virginia firearms importer, a New Jersey-to-Richmond drug gang accused of 11 murders in 45 days, a suburban Richmond gun dealer charged with selling hundreds of weapons to East Coast gunrunners, and a New York-to-Richmond gang the dealer helped supply with almost 300 illegal guns.
Through newspaper and television accounts, "gunrunning" was becoming a household word.
Cullen also was making news in another way - as a member of Wilder's task force on violent crime. Like Rollins, he was a product of the McGuire, Woods, Battle and Boothe pipeline. That helped get him on the commission and would prove fortuitous as gun-control advocates tried to forge a bipartisan coalition.
"The connection was crucial to this thing," said Cullen. "Randy Rollins trusted me. I trusted Randy Rollins. . . . If you're a partner at McGuire, Woods, you're basically brothers. We weren't close friends, but we had a bond."
GOP gets involved
To the southeast, in Hampton Roads, other forces were stirring.
As the '92 General Assembly adjourned, the GOP caucus decided it was time to appoint a subcommittee on criminal justice.
Emerging as the group's informal leader was Virginia Beach Sen. Kenneth Stolle, a former narcotics detective who a little over a year earlier had unseated the author of the toughest gun-control law then on the books in Virginia. The NRA had contributed thousands of dollars to that effort, and Stolle had no illusions about the result. "A lot of people thought I was bought and paid for by the NRA," he said.
It was not a distinction he cherished, politically or personally.
Throughout the summer and fall, in lunchtime meetings and conference telephone calls, the Republicans hammered out an agenda: increased penalties for the use of guns in crimes; tighter clamps on driver's licenses, whose easy availability aided gunrunners; and more access to gun-sale records for state police, among them.
The Republicans took no position on what became the hot topic of 1993: gun-a-month. Disagreement on that issue was fierce in the GOP caucus. But a sizable block of Republican lawmakers were coming to feel that they had a stake in addressing the gun-trafficking problem.
A fourth group also was organizing.
The February 1992 murder of two young men on the grounds of a Norfolk high school had spurred a small group of outraged South Hampton Roads citzens to action. Patty Masterson, who was ending a 35-year teaching career, and Alice Mountjoy, a Norfolk neighborhood activist and elementary-school PTA officer, were among them.
Meeting over coffee at kitchen tables, they and others gave birth to Virginians Against Handgun Violence, the state's first broad-based citizen action group on gun control. The networking began. By the time the General Assembly convened in January, the group had an informal organization in pockets around Virginia. And a gun-a-month resolution drafted at Taylor Elementary had won the backing of the state PTA, voice of 350,000 parents.
Determined that Capitol hallways would not be conceded to the NRA, the gun-control group also had lined up office space in a building at the foot of Capitol hill and citizen lobbyists to staff it. Without surety of the first month's $300 rent, "we opened the office on the faith that the people of Virginia were ready for this," Mountjoy said.
Campaigns in motion
As the Assembly session approached, Wilder's crime task force settled on a broad package of initiatives, with gun-a-month the centerpiece. When notions of substituting two-a-month surfaced, the governor vetoed them. A marketing plan worthy of Madison Avenue was devised: a steady drumbeat of endorsements; formation of a group of business backers, headed by the boss of the state's largest bank; visits by Wilder and Rollins with newspaper editorial boards around the state; the release of a poll that conveniently showed citizens in every region of the state clamoring for gun control, and the development of a television/radio/newspaper ad campaign.
Of course, the gun lobby also was mobilizing.
Gun enthusiasts packed a series of public hearings on gun violence, demanding that criminals - not honest citizens - pay for crime. House Majority Leader Cranwell, prodded by constituents and his strained relations with Wilder, agreed to sponsor alternative bills making it tougher to get drivers' licenses and tightening other record keeping. The NRA began greasing its awesome computerized direct-mail machine, capable in past years of whipping many of its 90,000 state members into action almost overnight. And it planned its own ad campaign.
There were several signs that it would not be business as usual in 1993, however.
Shopping for auxiliary lobbying help during the session, the NRA got a cool reception from several prominent lobbyists. Charles Guthridge, who was 5 years old when he got his first marksman award from the NRA at summer camp, said bluntly during an informal contact that he did not believe gun-a-month violated the Constitution's guarantee of the right to bear arms.
And he advised: "I told them if they were strident and uncompromising, it wasn't a winner."
The group also made a critical mistake in a Jan. 14 mass mailing from its chief D.C. lobbyist, James Jay Baker. The letter, soon in Rollins' hands, charged that the gun-a-month bill would "make . . . a criminal" of anyone who tried to buy a shotgun collection or tried to sell a couple of hunting rifles. Both rifles and collections were exempt in the bill.
Wilder, who during his gubernatorial campaign raised to an art form the skill of making an opponent's negative ads backfire, had been waiting for just such a chance to attack the NRA as untrustworthy.
A new alliance created
Political dynamics quickly divided the Assembly into three groups: Democratic gun-control enthusiasts such as Moss and Robinson; suburban Republicans who might be willing to abandon the GOP's traditional opposition to gun control; and other Republicans and rural Democrats opposed to any gun limitation.
Sheer numbers clearly gave the first two groups the upper hand, if they could forge a coalition and use their emerging power to advantage. There was no clearer signal of the passing of the guard than when Moss, who replaced Henry County's A.L. Philpott, a rural gun loyalist, as speaker in 1992, yanked the House guns bills out of a hostile committee and reassigned them.
Confident of their Democratic allies, the Wilder administration concentrated on suburban Republicans. The GOP caucus' criminal justice subcommittee became the focal point of the negotiations.
The Republicans were wary of Wilder and wanted credit for any deal that emerged. Gradually trust grew - partly because Wilder overrode the DMV commissioner's opposition to the Republican plan for tightening driver's licenses, partly through Cullen's reassurances, partly during a Jan. 29 meeting in Wilder's conference room.
Although it would take another week for the compromise between Wilder's original gun-a-month bill and one favored by the GOP to jell, the meeting was pivotal. The critical moment, say several who attended, came when Rollins and Del. William Mims, a freshman legislator from Loudoun County, seized on language exempting gun purchases for "lawful business and personal use" from the limit.
The clause alleviated the GOP concern that lawful citizens not be burdened by a bill aimed at gunrunners.
Too little for some
It did not, however, satisfy a group not in the room - urban Democrats who had carried water on gun control long before Republicans were interested. That group, rallied by Moss, wanted the toughest possible gun legislation and believed Wilder was handing the GOP a plum without making them pay.
At a Feb. 8 press conference, as Wilder, the suburban Republicans, business leaders, and law enforcement officials unveiled the compromise, only one Democratic legislator was in the room. Moss was downstairs fuming.
Hours later, in the most dramatic moment of the gun debate, the speaker maneuvered a floor vote in which House Republicans were left with a single option: vote for Wilder's original bill - or risk going home in an election year with nothing. The bill passed 59-41. Moss had marshalled seven more votes than the administration's most optimistic projection.
A telephone message the next morning to Moss from Sarah Brady, chairwoman of Handgun Control Inc., read: "Mr. Speaker is Mr. Wonderful! He is the `hero' of Virginia in her estimate."
That momentary success would not be duplicated either in the Senate or in a later House vote, however. The bill that emerged at session's end was the compromise.
"The unanswerable question to the end of time is why they thought they didn't have the votes to get the bill out," complained a Moss ally at the session's close.
But Wilder insisted in an interview that his original bill would never have survived the Senate. And what if suburban Republicans had been maneuvered into the same position that Moss engineered in the House? "I don't know. I really don't know and no one else does, either," he said. "It was better to control the destiny of your bill."
Has the NRA lost clout?
What was clear in the final weeks of debate was that the NRA, which had been pivotal to every gun-control discussion in the Virginia legislature over the last decade, was not even at the bargaining table.
In an interview, Wayne LaPierre - the NRA's executive vice president - attributed the defeat to "press hysteria with figures and facts blown way out of proportion. . . . There is a tremendous violent crime problem across the United States, and everybody wants it stopped."
Asked if the NRA and its 3 million-plus members are losing effectiveness because of hardline tactics, LaPierre gave no ground. "The NRA plays politics no different than anyone else," he said.
What the group intends is a massive effort to strengthen the criminal-justice system, he said. A new division called "Crime Strike" will pinpoint weaknesses and lobby state legislatures for change.
"We're going to use the whole power, the platform and the voice of the NRA to fight these deficiencies because no one else wants to," LaPierre said. "We're going to put people on the hot seat and we're going to demand these bills be passed."
The test for those who believe gun control should be part of the anti-crime mix is whether they can sustain equal enthusiasm.
Several of those long familiar with the Virginia General Assembly predicted that the convergence of forces in 1993 was unlikely to be repeated soon.
"I don't think you're going to see this again. Now's the time" to act, Robinson warned during the debate.
But others said the wave of citizen activism signaled by such events as Ross Perot's presidential campaign and the formation of Virginians Against Handgun Violence reflects as sea change in American politics.
"This says the people have power," said U.S. Sen. John Warner, a Republican who lent his name and clout to the gun limit effort.
"The message is that people can make changes when they want to . . ." Wilder said. "Forget who takes credit. The people won."