Gun Control Advocate Is Shot, Killed at His Home

A federal prosecutor who also was a leading figure in the national gun control movement died early Friday after he was shot at his home, apparently with a gun fired through a window as he worked at his computer, authorities said.

Thomas C. Wales, a white-collar crime prosecutor who had mobilized one of the nation’s most far-reaching gun control initiative campaigns, died within hours of the 10:40 p.m. Thursday shooting.

Police said they had not identified a motive but said it was clear that Wales was “intentionally targeted.” They said a man was seen running through a neighboring yard shortly after the shooting.

The attack came only a few days after a break-in at the Seattle offices of CeaseFire, the gun control organization that Wales headed as president.

“What the thinking is now is it was a professional job. People knew what they were doing. They staked out his house. Tom was working at a computer downstairs in his home, and somebody looked through the window with a gun and shot him. They never entered the house,” said a CeaseFire spokesman, who asked not to be identified because of fears for his own safety.

He said members of the group have been frequent targets of death threats. “It happens on an ongoing basis--death threats to people like Tom and the executive director. They happen pretty regularly, mainly on the phone.”

Wales, 49, was a proponent of an unsuccessful 1997 ballot initiative that was one of the most far-reaching gun control measures in the country. He was controversial among right-wing militants supportive of gun ownership rights, and also attracted attention from extreme anti-Semites.

In a gun ownership Internet discussion group in 1997, one participant ominously referred to “Tom Wales, yet another arrogant, gun-banning Jew, out in the open, unafraid.”

Police were joined by the FBI in the investigation. They said they were conducting parallel inquiries that would include Wales’ work in gun control and his work as a federal prosecutor.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft opened his news briefing Friday with the report of Wales’ death, saying: “We have no knowledge of motive or any further details. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Tom’s family.”

In the upscale neighborhood of Queen Anne where Wales had lived for several years, neighbors had reported hearing gunshots.

“I saw a man walking rapidly down the street and getting into a car,” neighbor Emily Holt said.

Wales, who also was a member of the Seattle Planning Commission, had two grown children and was divorced.

Gun control activists said his work in Washington was a mobilizing force for handgun safety education and background checks at gun shows across the nation.

“The death of Tom Wales is a terrible loss to our movement,” Michael D. Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement.

Luis Tolley of West Los Angeles, western director for the Brady group, said CeaseFire was a small group until Wales became involved in the mid-1990s, “and thanks to his leadership, really built that organization. Now, Washington CeaseFire is probably one of the strongest state gun control groups in the country.”

Wales left his job with a New York law firm and came to Seattle in 1983 “because he wanted to do something that was more civically oriented,” said a longtime friend who asked not to be identified.

The gun lobby spent $3 million in 1997 in a successful campaign to defeat Initiative 676, which would have required an estimated 1 million handgun owners in the state to be licensed, to pass a test or take a safety course, and ban the sale or loan of any handgun without a trigger lock or equivalent safety device.

As recently as July, Wales helped organize an informational picket at the National Rifle Assn.’s national gun show, held July 7 in Puyallup, Wash. “We simply cannot sit on the sidelines while the NRA comes into our state and promotes a gun show where weapons will be sold without background checks,” he said at the time.

As an assistant U.S. attorney, Wales had prosecuted a wide range of major business crimes and bank fraud, including a 1997 fraud resentencing case against Raymond Gray, the former board chairman of Home Savings and Loan.