Photo courtesy of Wild Geese/Adobe Stock
By Helen Mondloch
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
At a new establishment called Bullets and Beans, owners Kevin and Tammy Jones hope that one day soon their customers can enjoy a frothy cappuccino while browsing the displays of handguns and semi-automatic rifles.
But so far, their new business, a hybrid gun store and coffee shop in the Loudoun County hamlet of Hamilton, is selling just the bullets and not the beans. That’s because county zoning policies make selling guns a lot easier than selling coffee. The former is classed as a by-right use of property, a condition that grants permits to retailers no matter what products they are marketing. But brewing coffee for profit requires a special-use permit, one that gets tangled up in parking and other issues.
The predicament strikes some observers, including Hamilton Councilman Craig Green, as a little weird. “It’s kind of ironic, right? Virginia has more regulations and controls over coffee shops than it does for gun stores,” Green told the Loudoun Times-Mirror back in June. As of this writing, the Joneses still had not secured the permit needed to peddle their beans.
Business on the bullets side is decent, reports Kevin Jones. That success comes despite some initial community resistance to the store, which is located less than a quarter-mile from an elementary school. Some residents had difficulty stomaching a concept that weds caffeinated beverages to lethal weapons. At a council meeting last spring, one woman choked back tears as she voiced objections to the would-be retail amalgam.
In an email interview, Jones brushed off the opposition by noting that most people in Hamilton have expressed support and that many of the homes surrounding the school are probably stocked with firearms anyway. He also reported that a PTA member from the school had her fears assuaged after Jones took her on a tour of the place and explained the various services he provides his customers. “We teach basic firearms safety, women’s self-defense, first aid certification and more,” he said. “We are not here to change hearts and minds; we are here to save them.”
Jones, an NRA-certified instructor and a federally licensed gun dealer (one who therefore conducts background checks on all gun sales), underscores the need to be realistic and proactive about safeguarding life and limb in a dangerous world. Before sending his 6-year-old son off to school this year, he lined the boy’s backpack with a bulletproof insert, a product perhaps destined to become a staple school supply. “I wish the days were different and safer, but they are not,” Jones said.
Other gun retailers in the area have likewise defended their right to support the keeping and bearing of arms, some with more success than others. Last year the landlord of a prospective store in Arlington’s Cherrydale neighborhood succumbed to pressure from local residents and withdrew the lease. In April, NoVA Armory opened on Arlington’s Pershing Drive despite a firestorm of protests from residents who were piqued by the gun store’s proximity to a military base and a daycare center. In an unusual show of defiance, the store owner filed a lawsuit against his 64 petitioners, including seven elected officials who had enlisted in the protest, for allegedly harassing his family and threatening his business.
The brouhaha provides a snapshot of the broader battle being waged throughout the region and across the country over a plague that claims far more victims here than in other developed countries—the kind of exceptionalism many see as a disgrace and a national tragedy. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports that 117,000 people in America are shot every year and that some 33,000 of them die of their bullet wounds. In a nation that is home to an estimated 300 million guns and where news of mass shootings has become shockingly common, political observers offer differing takes on the direction of gun policy. Some see a robust “gun-sense” movement on the rise, one that’s becoming increasingly vocal in its mission to keep firearms out of the wrong hands while preserving a Constitutional right that most Americans, including Virginians, wish to uphold. Nationwide and statewide, polls consistently show strong majority support (more than 85 percent) for measures such as mandatory background checks for all gun purchases. Others believe that Second Amendment absolutists—those in the “don’t tread on me” camp—are gaining ground in gun battles hitting home from coast to coast.
Glaring Gaps
As reported in part one of this series, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va., 8th District), a leading proponent of gun safety reforms, has decried what he sees as a glaring gap between the will of the American people and that of Washington policymakers, calling congressional inaction on guns a “stunning failure of leadership.” Beyer points to poll numbers that show consistent majority support for stronger regulations, especially a law requiring comprehensive background checks. Such a law would close legal loopholes that currently allow private sales to go unchecked. These include sales conducted on internet sites like Armslist.com—often called the Craigslist of guns. On that site alone, nearly a quarter-million guns reportedly change hands every year with no oversight and no questions asked.
Echoing Beyer and others, the Washington Post recently attributed the gap between government action and majority will to lawmakers’ longstanding “obeisance to the gun lobby.” Moreover, a number of sources, including a provocative new documentary produced by Katie Couric titled Under the Gun, report that 74 percent of NRA members support universal background checks despite the leadership’s staunch opposition. Probing the various disconnects, a recent article in Slate offered the take of political scientist Robert Spitzer, who has authored books on the politics of gun control. Spitzer noted that, unlike people who support gun regulations, those who believe in absolute gun rights “believe in them fervently and unequivocally. The intensity of their feelings has made it possible for the NRA to mobilize them in elections even though they represent only a fraction of the population” (and only a fraction of the NRA itself).
As the Post also reported, several states recently pushed past “politicians too easily bullied” with November ballot initiatives, bringing the debate to the grassroots. On Nov. 8, the citizens of Maine, Nevada, Washington and California voted on measures that varied from state to state. They included mandatory background checks on ammunitions and a ban on high-capacity magazines; the measures passed in three of the four states (all but Maine). The Post characterized the initiatives as a show of “new muscularity” in the gun control movement and a bold shift “from a Washington-centered effort that has proved fruitless.”
Adding to this momentum is the emergence of Everytown for Gun Safety, a lobby group founded in 2014 by former New York Gov. Michael Bloomberg with $50 million of his personal fortune. His aim has been to create a stalwart opponent for the deep-pocketed NRA, which takes in $310 million a year in revenue to finance a famously strident campaign against measures aimed at regulating the manufacture, sale and carrying of firearms. “We’ve got to make them afraid of us,” Bloomberg told The New York Times when he was launching his group.
Besides using moderate, incrementalist strategies to affect policy at the state level, Everytown seeks to bolster lawmakers who embrace gun regulation, a platform once considered a path to political suicide. Beyer, a former ambassador to Switzerland, is one such lawmaker. (When asked about that country’s famously low incidence of gun violence despite its abundance of guns, Beyer points out that the Swiss regulate magazines and require gun owners to register their weapons.)
Beyer has sponsored a number of gun-related bills, including the ATF Enforcement Act, designed to reverse decades of NRA-backed restrictions on the records kept by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The lobby claims such restrictions are needed to prevent every gun owner’s worst nightmare—government confiscation of guns. But Beyer and others marvel that an agency tasked with 1,000 requests a day for gun traces needed to solve crimes relies on an antiquated, unsearchable system. Couric’s documentary presents the mind-boggling reality: ATF agents rummaging through boxes and flipping through reams of paper to do their jobs.
A standby in the gun-sense movement is the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an umbrella organization founded in 1974. Arguably one of the most muscular endeavors waged by any group is the CSGV’s 17-page report about the NRA’s intimate ties with the firearms and ammunition industry—ties that, according to the report, challenge the legitimacy of the organization’s status as a tax-exempt social welfare organization. Co-authored by Alexandra F. O’Neill and Daniel P. O’Neill, an attorney and financial analyst, respectively, the report pegs profit, not principle, as the driving force behind the NRA’s agenda. The paper’s title perhaps says it all: “The NRA, a Tax-Exempt loaded with Private Interest.”
Notwithstanding those determined to expose its abuses, some say a greater existential threat to the gun lobby may lie closer to home. An August issue of Vanity Fair predicted an all-out civil war within the NRA, the result of a “growing divide between its ferocious leadership and sportsman rank-and-file.”
Don’t Tread on Me
Of course, certain trends belie the notion that America is toughening its stance on guns or that the gun lobby is going away. There’s plenty of heat to go around and plenty of laws making it easier than ever to pack it. Ten states now allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon with no permit. In some 30 others, including Virginia, the permits come with minimum requirements. Moreover, Virginia is one of 33 states that grant colleges and universities the power to set their own policies with regard to carrying weapons on campus. The commonwealth’s most gun-friendly halls of education are located at Liberty University, where President Jerry Falwell Jr. this year expanded carry rights to include dormitories.
All of this meets with avid approval from President-elect Donald Trump, who courted the Evangelical vote at Liberty and has vowed to make concealed carry permits from any state valid in all 50, meaning, for instance, that a carrier from lenient Virginia would be free to carry a gun in stringently regulated New York City). On the campaign trail, Trump also vowed to end gun-free zones and to appoint Supreme Court justices who would scrupulously defend the Second Amendment. Besides a rousing endorsement speech delivered by NRA official Chris Cox at the Republican National Convention, the gun lobby poured some $30 million into Trump’s campaign. In a post-election letter to its members, Everytown offered this prediction of the NRA: “They’ll expect to get what they paid for.”
Among prominent defenders of gun rights in Northern Virginia is Joyce Lee Malcolm, professor of constitutional law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University. The author of several books, including To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, Malcolm garnered spotlight in the 2008 landmark Supreme Court case, District of Columbia v. Heller. In delivering the 5-4 opinion affirming the individual right to gun ownership, the late Justice Antonin Scalia cited Malcolm’s historical studies of the Second Amendment.
In a phone interview, Malcolm asserted her belief that Americans are leaning increasingly toward demanding more, not less, unfettered access to guns. The rising number of lenient concealed carry laws is evidence of such a trend, she notes.
Malcolm has repeatedly called the right to self-defense “the most fundamental of all rights.” She decries laws that violate that principle or make government its arbiters, including restrictive statutes in places like New York, where concealed carry permit applicants must show proper cause—a credible and imminent threat to their personal safety. That petition is then subject to approval by local officials. (Even some self-described liberals like author Craig R. Whitney characterize such laws as draconian bad apples that effectively breed contempt for gun control. Whitney is the author of Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment.)
Keenly sensitive to centuries-old historical precedent, Malcolm is notably cautious about gun policy proposals, including universal background checks. She concedes that the “idea is fine” as long as the criteria are limited and appropriate. But she displays little trust that government can exercise the proper restraint. To that end, she affirmed the NRA’s opposition to a national gun registry, citing instances in places like the U.K. when registries have enabled mass gun confiscations. “The Second Amendment ought to prevent such seizures, but it wouldn’t,” she cautions.
When it comes to finding solutions to gun violence, Malcom’s thinking evokes a common saying: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” She has called for increased policing of gangs, the common perpetrators of inner city shootings. She also calls out the inadequacies of the mental health system, citing what she sees as a crucial correlation between the dismantling of mental institutions in recent decades—a trend she says has left many people suffering from serious disorders without proper care—and the spike in deranged shooters. Her theory evokes cases like that of Gus Deeds, the son of Virginia state senator Creigh Deeds. In 2013 the 24-year-old victim of bipolar disorder stabbed his father and then committed suicide with a shotgun. The day before his violent outburst, the elder Deeds had tried to check his son into a mental hospital but was turned away due to a lack of beds.
Photo courtesy of Joyce Lee Malcolm
Guns Do Kill People
While many agree that reforms to the mental health system are crucial to reducing gun violence, many others still insist that guns do, in fact, kill people. In June, that argument arose from an unlikely set, one traditionally opposed to gun regulations: some two dozen high-profile military veterans. They included retired Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, along with retired Navy captain and former astronaut Mark Kelly, whose wife, former Arizona Rep. Gabriel Giffords, suffered a severe brain injury in a 2011 mass shooting. The men joined forces to establish the Veterans Coalition for Common Sense, an advocacy group promoting universal background checks, proper enforcement of existing gun laws, as well as mental health care reform.
McChrystal, who now runs a consulting firm in Alexandria, had already declared support for a ban on certain assault rifles. In 2013 he told the Washington Post, “I spent a career carrying, typically either a M16 and later, a M4 carbine … When [the M4] hits the human body, the effects are devastating.” He added, “I personally don’t think there’s any need for that kind of weaponry on the streets … in America.”
McChrystal’s sentiments were echoed in an interview by a retired army colonel who wished to remain anonymous because many of his decades-old missions were never declassified. Now living in Leesburg, the former officer recalled, “During my time in Latin America in the 1980s, while working in special operations and training Allied Special Forces, we did not have access to some of the weapons I have seen available for sale at the Dulles Expo Center.” He added, “The AR-15 sold today is a replica of the M16 weapon and can be modified into a fully automatic weapon by a skilled gunsmith.”
A Huffington Post article published last June, “Stop Saying AR-15s Aren’t Assault Rifles,” affirms the former officer’s assertion. The story describes a device called a “bump stock” that’s readily available online. A link takes readers to a website that sells the device for $135.95, promising the buyer that “this stock will let you use your semi-automatic rifle to bump-fire—or mimic automatic firing—without breaking any laws.” To prevent jamming, the site also sells a “rugged, reliable 50-round magazine” that “provides plenty of capacity and reduces reloading time.”
Gundamentalism
Rev. James Atwood of Harrisonburg, a 40-year veteran of the war on gun violence, contends that guns not only kill people but emblematize the “greatest spiritual threat before our country today.”
In a phone interview Atwood recalled that in 1975, while he was serving as pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Springfield, a friend and charter member of the parish was shot and killed at a gas station by a teenage robber. Heartache over the senseless tragedy moved him to join CSGV, where he still serves on the board. In 2012 he published America and Its Guns: A Theological Expose, which probes America’s gun culture from all angles, including its effects on the national soul. An upcoming book, Gundamentalism, presses further into what “so many guns are doing to our psyches and our communities.”
A longtime hunter, Atwood distinguishes average gun owners—most are “pretty reasonable,” he believes—from followers of an overzealous gun lobby that gives guns a “sacred status.” He calls them gundamentalists, a term coined a few years ago by a fellow minister and now listed in the Urban Dictionary.
In a 2008 article on a Presbyterian website, Atwood said, “I define America’s idolatry with guns as an aggressive belief system dedicated to the expansion of gun ownership which encourages people to take their guns to the workplace, college campuses, public schools, libraries, national parks, churches and bars … Although claiming the highest of social values, the belief system requires continuous … distortion of the truth in order to minimize or ignore the 30,000 people who are killed by guns every year.”
Atwood noted that gundamentalism is always “couched in the language of freedom”—what he calls “unexamined hogwash.” If there’s any consolation, he noted, it’s the fact that gun violence is garnering a spotlight in our national discourse, including in many faith communities. He hopes the discussion will lead to regulations that most Americans are calling for—universal background checks and the rest. “We need to do more than pray,” insists the minister.
The crucial question, of course, is: Can regulations quell the epidemic of gun violence? The answer often depends on whom you ask. It also depends on which measures you are talking about. Research strongly suggests that some laws work and others don’t, just as some impose undue burdens on a right that is constitutionally guaranteed, while others clearly do not.
(January 2017)