Former Gun Lover Recoils From NRA Romance, Takes Aim at Dogma

In his cluttered downtown office, Tom Diaz drinks his coffee from a mug given to him by Colt, maker of the famous .45-caliber revolver. Multiple copies of Guns & Ammo magazine litter his desk. On his wall there is a semiautomatic replica of an AK-47, mounted on a plaque that came from his friends at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Next to the plaque is a picture of Diaz, holding a rifle, a smile on his face.

And then there are the binders, stacked along the windowsill, that represent the research that went into each chapter of Diaz’s new book, “Making a Killing.” The book is an expose of the gun industry, an attack on what he calls “the increasing lethality” of guns, and a call for stricter gun-control regulation. It is a book that defies everything Diaz, 58, believed 20 years ago.

Then, Tom Diaz made 8 a.m. trips to the shooting range in the old National Rifle Assn. building to fire handguns at silhouettes on Saturday mornings. He frequented gun shows. He bought guns, sold them, bought more. His collection ranged from a handful to more than a dozen. He took them apart, played with the parts, cleaned them, put them back together. He spread his guns across the kitchen table and posed for photographs. He was a proud member of the NRA.

These days, as a senior analyst for the Violence Policy Center, Diaz gets called to debate NRA representatives on the issue of gun control. Recently, for example, he testified about the dangerously widespread availability of .50-caliber sniper rifles at a hearing organized by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Rep. Rod R. Blagojevich (D-Ill.). In the aftermath of the massacre in Littleton, Colo., in which 15 people were killed in a blaze of gunfire, he appeared on CBS news to talk about gun shows and how easy they make it for anyone--including those teenagers in Littleton--to get dangerously powerful guns.

And as litigation targeting gun manufacturers becomes the new frontier in anti-gun activism, Diaz is getting queries from lawyers and lawyers’ groups who want to know how, exactly, the gun industry operates.

Needless to say, the gun industry and gun control opponents have dismissed Diaz’s theories. He has a “laughingly naive view of business,” said a reviewer in the New Gun Week magazine. Conservative columnist Charley Reese said the book was full of inaccuracies about guns and the intentions of gun manufacturers, a view echoed by the American Shooting Sports Council’s executive director, Richard Feldman, in another publication.

“My book argues that the gun industry is purposely making guns sexier in terms of their killing power in order to rejuvenate the market,” Diaz explains. “What I’m saying now is that in terms of our country, and in our times, there are guns out there whose harm far outweighs their utility. And I want somebody in government to say: ‘Don’t make them. Don’t have them.’ ”

There was no one transformative event that changed Tom Diaz from a self-described “gun nut” to a leading advocate of gun control. “No epiphanies,” he says. “No bolts of lightning.”

It was, instead, a series of little things, moments that made him think, question and ultimately change his views so completely that he has lost many friends from his gun-loving days, and gained enough new enemies to make him wary of disclosing his home address.

The change began, subtly, when he became a father. He has two daughters, and feared having guns in a home with children. He studied disturbing statistics about gun violence. He watched television reports of shooting sprees across the country. He found it all hard to ignore.

There were also two experiences that shaped his thinking.

January 1993: Diaz volunteers to provide free legal defense work for indigent clients. He goes to his clients’ homes, most in neighborhoods he’d never been to before. He sees living conditions that he describes as “Third World.” He sees desperation. He sees guns available to children. And he begins to think that the old pro-gun standby argument--”Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”--is a simplification he can no longer believe.

February 1994: Diaz is working for Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) as Democratic counsel to the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime and criminal justice. There is a hearing, titled “Kids and Guns.” Some children speak, each with a personal tale of gun violence, and loss, to tell. Alicia Brown, a 14-year-old from a District of Columbia public school, is one of them. She talks about a shooting at her school the previous week. She talks about her friend Scooter, who was shot dead when she was just 12. And about Hank, whom she watched die from a gunshot wound, his body twitching on the ground.

“It had quite an impact on me,” he says. “It was hard to listen to that girl, and spend time with her, and not start looking at guns in a different way.”

When Diaz first banished guns from his home in the early 1980s, his daughters were young and it was primarily a safety issue: No matter how much he believed in the Second Amendment right to keep guns for self-protection, he only had to look at his little girls to know that no gun was worth the possibility of an accident.

“You’d be amazed at what kids can find once you leave the house,” he says. When he and his first wife divorced, though, and he got his own place, the guns were back. He reverted to some of his old habits--returned to the shooting ranges, read the gun magazines, talked guns with friends and colleagues--but the attachment had lessened. And when he moved into the District in 1990, he decided that the paperwork required by the city to keep his guns was too annoying to be worth it. So again he got rid of the guns. He has not owned one since.

But getting rid of his own guns was one thing. Telling others to get rid of theirs was another entirely. Diaz didn’t take up the gun control cause until several years later, after being bombarded daily by statistics and evidence as a member of Schumer’s staff. He tried to stick to the facts and avoid the emotion, but that didn’t work. The thing about guns is that they are an issue--like abortion, or the death penalty--that is rarely discussed without involving fiercely held views at both ends of the spectrum.

And Diaz understands the passions felt on both sides.

When he was in his early 30s, working as a lawyer, he shared a townhouse with a student. In the building’s entryway, the two men hung a silhouette from one of their shooting range trips. The center of the black body outline was riddled with bullets. The poster was something of a dare, a challenge to intruders.

“Were we hoping somebody would break in?” he asks. “I don’t think so. But there was at least some element of ‘make my day’ to it.”

This is one of the things Diaz finds most disturbing about the gun culture, what he calls the fantasy of “virtuous gun use.” Gun owners often fantasized, he says, about getting to use their gun against an intruder. They fantasized about the kill.

“It was almost as if they wanted someone to break in because they wanted to shoot someone,” he says. “I think that’s very scary, and dangerous. But that’s the way people think about guns. I know because I was around it, and I talked to those people all the time.”

At the time, Diaz preached libertarianism. When the District passed a law making it more difficult to purchase guns, he went to a community meeting and railed against the violation of his rights. He saw the gun issue as an extension of everything he believed in.

“When I talk about the gun culture,” Diaz says now, “I’m talking about people who are obsessed--and I don’t think that’s too strong a word--about guns or the right to have guns, and it wraps itself around you and has a lot to do with what America is all about. . . . The culture sees the gun not as an implement, but a symbol. And that can get scary.”

Diaz likes to refer to the NRA as “the devil.” He belittles Second Amendment arguments against gun control as “the usual claptrap.” But he is not your usual anti-gun activist. He respects a person’s right to have a gun at home for self-protection, even though he thinks it’s foolish. And he has nothing against hunting rifles.

Baby Strollers Are Regulated; Guns Aren’t

If he is fanatic about anything, it is not the guns themselves but the regulation of them. “Why would you have an agency with the power to regulate baby strollers and not to regulate guns?” he asks again and again.

It amazes him that the Consumer Product Safety Commission exists to protect the public against dangerous or defective products in all areas of life--strollers among them--but no agency exists to regulate guns. The only way to get a gun banned as a threat to public safety is through legislation. Diaz believes there should be a separate agency with the power to keep certain guns out of distribution. Guns that cannot conceivably be used for anything but mass killing. Guns, he says, like two of those used in Littleton.

When Diaz heard about the massacre he was, naturally, curious about the guns. There were four guns recovered in the aftermath: an Intratec fingerprint-resistant, high-volume semiautomatic weapon (known commonly as a TEC-DC9), a Hi-Point 9mm carbine, a sawed-off pump-action shotgun and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun.

Two of those guns--the TEC-DC9 pistol and the Hi-Point carbine--are exactly the kinds of guns Diaz rails against in “Making a Killing,” which accuses the gun industry of producing increasingly deadly guns, guns he calls a public health and safety disaster.

The TEC-DC9 was outlawed, specifically, in the assault weapons ban that passed in 1994. But the gun was grandfathered in, so those already in circulation still can be sold and resold at gun shows and between private dealers. “It’s an assault pistol,” Diaz says. “It was designed and basically advertised and used for exactly the kind of thing that was done in Littleton: It’s to spray a lot of bullets over a wide area very quickly.”

Then there is the carbine, a gun that Diaz says represents the gun industry’s “imagination” when it comes to creating and marketing weapons that are legal but still, essentially, assault-style weapons. He calls it a “rule-beater.”

“Those two guns just shouldn’t be out there,” Diaz says. “The shotguns are another issue. I don’t propose banning all shotguns. That’s a part of what has been the problem with all the political discourse. People think it’s all or nothing. It’s not.”

Diaz says he doesn’t love guns anymore. Ask him about the AK-47 on his wall and he’ll take it down, turn it in his hands, explain how it works in clinical detail. Listen to his words, and he sounds like a man horrified by what guns like this can do in the hands of schoolchildren.

Look at the way he holds it, though, and he reminds you of the guy in his townhouse 20 years ago. He sees the danger, but he also sees the allure.