Gun Control Leader Bucked the Tide

It was no coincidence that the National Rifle Assn. chose Washington state for its annual gun show earlier this year. The state has always regarded the 2nd Amendment as a sacred text.

When gun control proponents backed a landmark initiative in 1997 to require trigger locks and safety training, it didn’t just lose. It lost spectacularly, by a 71%-29% margin. It lost in every single county.

So it was that several dozen members of CeaseFire, demonstrating at the NRA gun show in July, were more than a little intimidated when they were met with several counterdemonstrators, all wearing black, many of them carrying weapons and one of them videotaping the pro-gun control picketers.

With last week’s shooting of the man who organized the demonstration, CeaseFire President Thomas C. Wales, the group’s officers are taking extra security precautions.

Wales, an assistant U.S. attorney since 1983, was shot Thursday night through a basement window in the home where he lived alone in Seattle’s fashionable Queen Anne neighborhood. A member of the Seattle Planning Commission, Wales was divorced from prominent Seattle literary agent Elizabeth Mueller.

Investigators are looking closely at the possibility that a militant gun-rights advocate could have been behind the shooting.

They also are looking at several other options--ranging from a hostile traffic accident encounter to Wales’ work as a federal prosecutor in a wide range of fraud cases, many of them involving defendants with money and the likelihood of a grudge.

“At this point, we are not leaving any rock unturned. The investigators are going to explore all types of possibilities until they can come up with a suspect,” Seattle Police spokesman Scott Moss said.

The hit-and-run case involved a traffic accident July 12 in which the driver of the other car was reportedly so angry that Wales, after offering to exchange insurance information, drove off. According to court records, Wales was charged by the Seattle city attorney’s office with hit and run, but prosecutors dropped the charges Oct. 1, citing “problems of proof” and the fact that the victim did not want to pursue it.

The city attorney’s office declined to discuss the case.

FBI spokesman Ray Lauer said federal officials are allowing Seattle police to take the lead in the investigation. “Our jurisdiction will come in if the crime was committed because of his federal employment. That would make it a federal violation,” he said.

The attention brought by the killing of Wales, 49, who co-chaired the 1997 initiative campaign and was one of Washington CeaseFire’s most outspoken members, sheds light on just how far the gun group has gone to advance the national gun control agenda.

Growing from a few citizens meeting in their living rooms in the early 1980s, CeaseFire was one of the nation’s first gun control groups and was a successful early proponent, even in the politically fractured Legislature of Washington, of laws to ban guns in schools and to require concealed handgun permits.

It became one of the first organizations in the country to maintain a paid staff, a team of lobbyists in the state Capitol and a political action committee that has contributed more than $350,000 to legislative candidates.

“We are now probably one of the leading, if not the leading, gun control membership organizations in the country in terms of staff size and national profile. We have almost 4,000 members across the state now, we have a budget that is, if not the largest, at least in the top five,” executive director Bruce Gryniewski said.

How CeaseFire was able to amass a credible political organization in a state so seemingly hostile to gun control speaks in part, leaders say, to shrewd strategizing by people such as Wales--who insisted on a five-year business plan, a budget and tightly defined goals. They also credit a broad-based membership that included board members from all over the state and a policy agenda that was considered middle of the road.

By avoiding militant positions, the group has been able to extend its reach outside the liberal enclave of Seattle into regions of eastern and southern Washington that normally are considered far more conservative.

“We have a lot of support in areas outside of Seattle, and the reason why is we’re not pursuing an agenda that is very extreme,” said board Vice President Trevor Neilson, a spokesman for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“One of the things that CeaseFire has said is that we’re not out to take away people’s guns. We have for 15 years stood for common-sense legislation that will save people’s lives; things like trigger locks, safe storage, adequate training.”

CeaseFire’s founding, ironically, began with another Seattle lawyer who was shot to death: Tom Neville, who was shot in the lobby of his office by the husband of a woman he had represented in a domestic violence case. Neville’s law partner, now a judge, found other gun crime victims interested in forming a gun control group. Wales came in a few years later.

In 1996, CeaseFire was one of only two state gun control organizations nationwide with a paid staff. A year later, largely with Wales’ leadership, the group organized Initiative 676, the first major gun control initiative on a state ballot since California’s proposition in 1982.

The measure would have required trigger locks on handguns sold in the state and would have required handgun owners to take a safety training test.

CeaseFire members blame a $3.3-million campaign by the NRA for the resounding defeat of the measure, which had done well in initial polls.

But opponents cast the measure as the work of a small number of liberals in Seattle who were trying to impose their will on the rest of the state.

“Ninety percent of their money came from within 20 miles of Seattle,” said Joe Waldron, executive director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. The Spokane Spokesman-Review newspaper, he pointed out, said the measures “seem innocuous.”

“They aren’t,” he said. “They’re fascism, marching in the tassled loafers of do-good, big-government bossiness.”

Far from merely requiring training and trigger locks, Waldron said, the initiative would have allowed access to medical records of those buying handguns and would have imposed impossible requirements for the licensing of an estimated 1 million existing handgun owners.

Wales, Waldron said, seemed “intense” when he debated gun control issues. “I was surprised that he was so very visibly emotional about it, given that he was a prosecutor.”

Jon Scholes, CeaseFire’s project manager, said being aggressive in a state like Washington goes with the territory: “We’re up against an opponent with lots and lots of money and power.

“Wales was a kind of anomaly: a guy who walked away from a high-paying Wall Street law firm to enter the public sector and work his [tail] off.”