‘Slippery Slope’ In Firearms Legislation Is Doing Nothing: Gun Owners

ACROSS AMERICA — Tom O’Connor has been around guns all of his life. Now 76, he has never killed anything but game, a commonality he shares with millions of other Americans whose core beliefs about gun ownership were shaped by hunting excursions with their fathers and grandfathers.

O’Connor, who is retired from the Oregon League of Cities and lives near Portland, still owns guns. He doesn’t hunt much anymore, but shoots targets fairly regularly. He’s not worried he’ll have to give up the right to do either, but an unrelenting string of mass killings and other gun violence has convinced him America isn’t doing all it can to stop it.

“I’m a gun owner, but probably first a parent and grandparent,” O’Connor told Patch. “I want to make sure those kids have a future free from the types of gun violence we’re experiencing now.”

O’Connor is a board member for Oregon-based Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership, a group of gun owners, outdoor enthusiasts and veterans formed after a gunman meandered through a Portland mall on Dec. 11, 2012, killing two people, injuring a third and terrifying a mall filled with Christmas shoppers.

Gun manufacturers and gun rights lobbyists have taken a hard line over any type of reform, but O’Connor said the true “slippery slope” — the erosion of rights some gun owners fear if gun laws are tightened — is for Congress and state legislatures to do nothing.

“Any legislation is a slippery slope on something, I guess,” O’Connor said. “If gun owners don’t get in there and get some practical, workable changes, at some point there will be the type of reaction that ‘nobody should have guns’ that they fear.

“We’re better off to try to get solutions on this,” he said. “One would hope nobody wants this to continue the way it is.”

‘This Was Our Sandy Hook’

Bob Mokos, the president of Minnesota Gun Owners for Safety, a Giffords organization state chapter, counts himself among gun owners who are fed up.

The 76-year-old Burnsville, Minnesota, man lost his sister, 10 years his senior and someone he “looked up to and admired,” to gun violence. She was murdered on July 19, 1986, outside a church in Chicago where she had stopped to pray on her way to work.

“It was early on a Saturday morning, and she was getting out of her car when somebody shot her in the temple,” Mokos told Patch. “It was a random robbery. It was over.”

Most gun violence in America is committed with handguns, which were involved in 59 percent of the 13,620 gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters in 2020, according to FBI data. Rifles, the category of guns that includes military-style assault weapons, were used in just 3 percent of firearms. Importantly, the FBI data doesn’t capture the full picture of gun murders because it is based on voluntary reporting by police departments across the country.

So far this year, more than 42,300 people have died in gun violence, and another 37,oo0 have been injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Regardless of the weapon used, or the number of casualties in a shooting incident, the human toll of gun violence is enormous — the people who are killed and survivors whose lives are forever changed.

“One hundred and ten people in this country die every day at the hand of a gun, and 200 more are injured. Every single day. Sandy Hook, Orlando, Las Vegas — they all tear at the heartstrings, but this was our Sandy Hook,” Mokos said. “We go through the same thing.

“There’s so much of it every day. If you look at it collectively, it’s four or five Sandy Hooks every single day in this country.”

The Dec. 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 26 people — including 20 first-graders, kids just 6 and 7 years old — marked a turning point for Mokos and, he thought at the time, a galvanizing moment for Congress to finally pass sensible gun control measures.

“Those little kids, those first-graders at Sandy Hook,” Mokos started, then left the thought unfinished. “I was certain the federal government was going to do something to end this lunacy.”

What he got instead was mostly silence.

“I was so angry when they didn’t do anything,” he said. “After Sandy Hook, I decided I had to do something.”

Can Congress ‘Do It Again’?

This summer, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed bipartisan gun violence legislation that imposes the most significant curbs on firearms ownership in three decades. Among other things, it strengthens background checks for the youngest firearms buyers, expands the definition of a gun seller and imposes new penalties on gun traffickers.

Biden last week renewed his plea to lawmakers to pass the assault weapons ban to combat the scourge of gun violence, saying the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is significant, but “is still not enough.”

“We can do it again,” Biden said Dec. 7 at a vigil at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., ahead of Wednesday’s 10-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook tragedy. “We did it, and guess what? It worked.”

This year, military-style weapons with high-capacity magazines were used in the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting, the Uvalde school massacre, and the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Collectively 36 people were killed and another 36 were wounded in those shootings.

Biden didn’t lay out a timeline, and the calendar is working against him with the Republican takeover of the House in January. Most Republicans in Congress are steadfastly opposed to reinstating the assault weapons ban, in effect from 1994 until it was allowed to sunset in 2004.

Sen. Pat Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat sponsoring it, said two weeks ago he doubts Democrats can find the 60 votes needed to pass the legislation in the Senate. The House has already passed it.

Mokos isn’t hopeful, either.

He’s an atypical gun owner in that he owns a single handgun, one purchased after the 9/11 terror attack after he and other commercial airline pilots who qualified were allowed to carry handguns in the cockpit. As it turned out, “no country wanted us bringing our guns in,” so it remained locked away, Mokos said.

‘The NRA Has Changed’

The obstacle to any meaningful gun reform, as Mokos sees it, is the National Rifle Association.

He barely recognizes the organization that had trained and certified him as a sharpshooter for a competition rifle team as a kid. Today, he said, the NRA is largely a lobbying group that has put millions of dollars behind its longstanding message that tightening gun laws would do nothing to prevent shootings.

Gun rights groups have consistently outspent gun-control groups. In 2022, according to a database maintained by OpenSecrets.org, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that tracks campaign finance and lobbying spending, gun-control groups spent $1,776,680 on lobbying. That compares with $8,580,056 by gun rights groups and $2,335,000 by gun manufacturers.

“The NRA has changed,” said Jon Gold, 54, of Novi, Michigan, Mokos’ counterpart at Michigan Gun Owners for Safety, and a longtime NRA-certified firearms training instructor,

“It used to be about hunting, hunting safety, conservatorship of the land and firearms safety for children,” Gold said. “Eventually, the NRA started getting checks from gun makers, and it became more about gun profit than safety.”

Comparing the gun industry to Big Tobacco, Gold said that anytime an “industry puts its profits ahead of customers, bad things happen to good people.”

Fewer than 20 percent of Americans support the NRA with paid membership, according to some estimates. Gold said he has tried to “resign from the NRA six times” due to its mission shift, but the organization continues to send him membership cards.

The NRA did not return Patch’s phone and email messages requesting comment.

‘That’s Intimidation’

O’Connor, the leader of the Oregon gun-reform group, said manufacturing hunting rifles, shotguns and handguns wasn’t profitable for the gun industry. Once people had what they needed for sporting and self-defense, they didn’t build an arsenal and sales dropped.

“We went through this period where, if you look at the trends of firearm gun ownership, that was dropping, and it coincided with more urbanization and fewer people hunting,” he said. “It was pretty clear that firearms manufacturers were going to lose money.”

In response to market saturation, gun manufacturers turned to “the development of the semi-automatic quick-change magazine, lightweight weaponry that came out of Vietnam,” O’Connor said. Gun manufacturers used an “explosion of marketing techniques” that included phrases such as “ ‘consider your man card reissued’ and Christmas photos of families and kids with ARs,” he said.

“The NRA is playing on fear, and tactical all of a sudden, and that type of marketing was extremely successful,” O’Connor continued. “There are legitimate reasons to own a firearm, but given the consequences of what we’ve seen, we don’t need them for self-defense. And they’re not any good for hunting.”

“I do believe there are legitimate uses for firearms,” he emphasized. “It’s a tool like any other tool, but the big difference is, guns are lethal weapons at the same time.

“I think there are situations where people feel they would need them for self-defense,” O’Connor continued. “I think that’s rare, but it’s a fact of life; the most important thing is to make sure that they’re used and stored safely so that other people aren’t harmed.”

Most gun owners, he said, are responsible and use their firearms for hunting and target shooting, but “firearms aren’t a major part of their life.”

Others see gun ownership as part of the cache of masculinity, Gold said.

“It became an issue of ‘cool,’ and I don’t think a lot of people talk about that,” he said. “We glorify gun violence in this country. That’s nothing new, but this is glorification on an unprecedented scale.”

A proliferation of open-carry laws means “anyone can put a gun on their hip,” Gold said. “What’s the purpose of that? It’s their First Amendment right to exercise the Second?

“Bull crap,” he said. “That’s intimidation. That’s not supposed to be the code — be quiet, be safe, protect our loved ones and be ready for an emergency.”

The culture of gun ownership has changed — Gold fears permanently so.

Solid evidence, he said, came in the spring of 2020 about 60 miles away from his home in suburban Detroit when demonstrators, many armed and wearing tactical gear, swarmed the Michigan Capitol to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 lockdown. Whitmer herself was the target of a foiled kidnapping plot, and several of the 13 people charged attended the protests, according to prosecutors.

“Had I been in Lansing on that day storming our Capitol, my instructors would have found me, relieved me of my weapons and disavowed knowing me,” Gold said. “I would have been ostracized.”

That said, he doesn’t think banning assault weapons is the answer, even if Democrats could “by some miracle” come up with the votes needed for the legislation to clear the Senate. Neither does he support other curbs on gun rights.

What Gold said he does favor is a zero-tolerance enforcement policy, with strict regulation and stiff penalties that ask potential assault weapons owners to answer “whether or not they want the most awesome responsibility on the planet.”

“I agree with what some Republicans are saying; we need to enforce laws that are already on the books,” he said. “If a parent leaves a .357 revolver on the end table, and a child gets hold of that gun and uses it and hurts themselves, the fact they lost their child is not enough — why is it, ‘they went through a tragedy and that’s enough’?”

O’Connor and others in his group have discussed Biden’s call to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban but haven’t taken a position.

“Personally, I don’t think those types of weapons have a place in civilian society,” said O’Connor, who describes himself as a political moderate. Like Gold, he doubts the assault weapons ban can pass in the current political landscape.

Rewrite The National Firearms Act

The Oregon group supports regulating military-style weapons and the high-capacity magazines that make them so lethal under the National Firearms Act, legislation passed in 1934 that imposed criminal, regulatory and tax requirements on weapons favored by mobsters: machine guns, silencers and sawed-off shotguns.

The regulatory process, including deeper background checks and yearly registration, would apply to the sale and resale of 20 million AR-15-style weapons in circulation, but would have the practical effect of a ban if placed with those regulated under the Al Capone-era legislation, O’Connor said, explaining, “You can’t go out and produce new machine gun.”

The Oregon group supports other changes, including red flag laws, expanded background checks, raising the age to buy long guns to 21 to match age requirements for handguns, safe storage provisions and stripping gun manufacturers of the broad immunity from liability in gun crimes under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

“Repealing immunity would be a major thing,” he said. “Some form of that would be a good thing.”

Survivors of gun violence are increasingly moving the battlefield for reform from the legislative to the judicial branch of government, where they are filing lawsuits challenging gun manufacturers’ immunity. Two federal lawsuits have been filed in the Uvalde shooting, and survivors of a Highland Park, Illinois, 4th of July shooting, have filed a lawsuit against Smith & Wesson in state court.

Earlier this year, families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, secured a $73 million settlement after suing Remington, the maker of the Bushmaster AR-15 used in the mass shooting.

Mokos called for an entirely new National Firearms Act that addresses machine guns, assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, but also “ghost guns,” untraceable guns without serial numbers that can be assembled from home, and 3D-printed guns.

“A whole new firearms act can plug a lot of these holes,” he said. “The biggest thing, if you have a gun, you have got to get insurance and safe storage.”

‘It’s A Right-To-Life Issue’

Mokos, who said he was once politically conservative but now falls among progressives on most issues, said the ability to sue gun manufacturers for the carnage resulting from their merchandise would be a big step that would give them the financial incentive to stop marketing military-style weapons.

Gun violence is both a public health and public safety issue, Mokos said.

“And,” he added, “it’s a right-to-life issue.”

“The No. 1 job of our government is to protect people. It is obligated by the Constitution to fix the gun problem,” he said, noting that argument is often countered by gun rights groups who say they have a God-given right to protect themselves.

Mokos said such arguments conflate the Constitution, which contains no mention of God, and the Declaration of Independence, which states Americans are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Neither founding document gives people the right “to go into a movie theater, a shopping mall or school and start shooting,” he said.

“It’s a cancer on our society,” he said. “Guns are not making us safer. More guns equal more gun violence.”

One Conversation At A Time

Gold, who describes himself politically as liberal, thinks the best chances for gun reform are in state legislatures, not Congress.

“We do it one day at a time, one conversation at a time,” he said. “It is a slow and grueling process to rip the wool off people’s eyes. It’s hard. But we are doing it.”

Gold said he wouldn’t have been involved in the conversation six years ago, but that was before he lost four people important in his life to gun suicides, which accounted for more than half of firearms deaths in 2020.

“They’re uncomfortable conversations,” he said, adding he has lost friends over his shifting position on the responsibilities of gun ownership. “Americans have got to stop seeing each other as enemies, and maybe we’ll have a chance. As long as people think they have an enemy, they’re going to want to have a way to defend themselves.”

O’Connor is optimistic that America is waking up. More organizations of gun owners are forming to push sensible regulations.

The Giffords organization has members in all 50 states and chapters in seven, including those in Michigan and Minnesota headed by Gold and Mokos.

“You’re starting to see more organizations of gun owners supporting practical gun violence prevention efforts that weren’t there before,” he said. “The NRA, and more extreme groups, really did dominate that space. That has provoked a reaction. I think there’s a growth of gun owner groups that are actively participating in these efforts. I think folks have been interested in hearing our approach.

“If gun owners don’t get in there and get some practical, workable changes,” he continued, “at some point, there will be the type of reaction that ‘nobody should have guns’ that they fear.”