During the 1990s we passed a couple of major gun laws. The Brady law and the assault weapons ban couldn't actually handle the issue very well. As Al showed, we actually did pretty well among gun owners and we passed some major laws. Then we had Columbine, and what really happened in the wake of Columbine was the media, everybody, talked about how this would shift the entire terrain and we would now actually start seeing a wave of gun legislation, and this really shifted the politics of everything. We then had the Million Mom March, which was one of the largest marches on the Mall ever.
But what happened was that people really overplayed their hand, and that includes the Democratic Party, and Democrats veered -- and I happen to be a Democrat although I run a nonpartisan organization -- we veered very far to the left. And if you looked at the Million Mom March -- and I thought the march was a good thing and it was an important thing for people to speak out, but if you looked at the march, people were walking around holding signs that said "We love our kids more than you love your guns." Well, that is unbelievably insulting to anybody who owns a gun. And as Al said, that is so polarizing you might as well just wipe off that portion of people. Now, people associated the Million Mom March with the Democratic Party, not surprisingly.
We then had more run -- and won't get into all the dynamics of the Gore race. They're obviously very complicated and go far beyond the gun issue. But guns did matter in the 200 election, there's no question, and they mattered in critical states. Well, if you look at how Gore handled the gun issue -- and I say this as a good Democrat -- he did not handle it well at all. First of all, he tacked way too far left to try to compete with Bradley in the primaries, and he shouldn't have done that. A, he shouldn't have done it because it wasn't the right policy, and B, he shouldn't have done it because it was bad politics. He tacked far to the left then in the general election he ducked. He literally just ducked: I'm done on this. He never talked about it; he avoided it whenever it came up. When it came up in the presidential debates he kind of mumbled some answer that wasn't particularly effective, and guess what happened? Not surprisingly, Al Gore was defined by the NRA on guns -- simple as that.
Now, I don't how many of you have seen NRA pieces of mail and their magazine, but they're unabashed about it. They think that Al Gore -- they defined Al Gore as to the left of Chuck Schumer on guns. During the 2000 election I went -- I grew up horseback riding. That's what I did a lot in my life; I went and shot guns a lot at camp. I really enjoyed it. I happen to really enjoy guns and the outdoors and so on. I went out with my father and some friends riding out West in Wyoming for a week. And we went to a ranch there and we got picked up at the airport and we were driven by a woman who works at the ranch. We started getting into a discussion and she got into -- we started getting into guns. People asked what I do, and you know -- I don't always say the same things -- say what I do in Wyoming, but she started asking, and so I told her. And she said, "You know, I'm really concerned. I'm really, really worried." I said, "What are you worried about?" I'm thinking she'd say, like, the economy is not great, or, gosh, out here I've got to provide for my kids, or, I have no healthcare or something. "I'm afraid that if Al Gore gets elected they're going to take my gun away." I said, "Well, you mean that metaphorically, right, like they'll pass a tough" -- "No, no, no, they're going to come take my gun away." I said, "You mean they're going to come to your house and they're going to" -- "Yes, and the NRA told me that, that if Al Gore is elected they are going to come to my house and they're going to take my gun away."
Well, if you talk to Joe Lieberman, he'll tell you, on the campaign in 2000, he saw this kind of stuff everywhere he went. And what happened was -- and it's true of any issue in politics, and you all know -- and I've never held office; you have and you know this -- your opponent will always fill the vacuum of silence, only your opponent has three million members and $100-plus million to spend. You can bet they're going to fill that vacuum and it's not going to be favorable towards you. And that's what they did toward guns.
So when Al Gore -- when folks went into the voting booth and close to half the electorate that has a gun in the house went to pull the lever, if they pulled the lever for Al Gore they had to pull the lever overcoming this thought: If I pull this lever he might take my gun away. Well, that wasn't necessary. Al Gore could have handled, as we're going to get to, the issue very differently. And if he had handled the issue the way we're outlining today, and we'll outline in detail in the workshop, if he had handled the issue that way, I don't know that he would have won. There are other big forces, obviously -- needless to say, Florida and others -- but he might have. It might have been the single issue that closed one or two percentage points, because these gun owners are movable; many of them are movable. And we'll get to that.
What does that mean, that recent history of guns and the experience with Gore and all that? Well, Democrats concluded the exact opposite of what they should have concluded. Democrats concluded -- and I don't fancy myself a great Democratic general strategist -- no James Carville, et cetera, et cetera -- I've only figured this one issue out with Jim and the rest of our team. And frankly, we really have, I feel, walked the trail that Al and Will and the DLC blaze, which is looking at an issue through a different lens and creating a third way, and we applied the DLC motto to the gun issue. But I will tell you this on the gun issues we've studied in depth: Democrats concluded exactly the wrong thing, and they concluded exactly what the NRA and the Republicans wanted them to conclude. We were literally led down the trail to the place they wanted us to go and we think we're the ones who made the decision to go there. What did Democrats conclude from the last election? We'd better shut up about guns. My god, let's close our mouths. Let's create an even bigger vacuum, and ever-bigger vacuum that will allow our opponents to define us.
So the conventional wisdom in the National Democratic Party in Washington for the last couple of years has been shut up about guns. Just shut up. Don't talk about it legislatively; don't talk about it on the campaign trail. Just shut up. Well, that is a strategy that is doomed to failure. It's doomed in a local election, it's doomed in a statewide election, and it is definitely doomed as a national strategy for the party. Why is it doomed? We'll get into this in great detail this afternoon. But why is it doomed and why are we speaking out as a non-partisan organization to try to change this?
We have three simple messages to Democrats. First -- and people have gone through the numbers; I won't go through them again -- there is a gun gap. Democrats face a bit gap in carrying gun owners. It's real. It's been proven time and time again. Democrats are not carrying gun owners nearly in the numbers that they could, but most importantly, that they need to if they're going to build a national Democratic majority.
Second, their answer to the conventional wisdom has been silence, but silence won't work. Why won't silence work? Well, first of all, silence won't work because nobody ever uses that on a campaign. I mean, I've never heard of such a strategy. If your consultant came to you and said, "You know what? You bounced checks." Remember this scandal? "You bounced checks at the House Bank. I think we should just keep that quiet. Let's be real quiet about it. I mean, it'll be in the papers and your opponent will use direct mail and phone calls on it, but if you don't speak to it, maybe people will think -- oh, it'll just disappear or go away." Whoever heard of such a strategy? None of you use it in your campaigns. Your opponent comes after you and says, when you are city councilperson and now that you're running for state attorney general -- "You know what? There were fewer jobs created." "Okay, you know, I'm going to be quiet about that. That makes sense; I'll change the subject to something else." Well, that's what Democrats did.
Now, there's a second problem besides the fact that it's a stupid general strategy. The second problem is gun owners already have an existing perception of Democrats that is very negative, that is anti-Second Amendment, that is anti-gun, that is -- and this is most important, as Senator Pryor pointed out -- that is anti gun-owner values. Well, if you go into a race and your opponent -- and you've all done this if you've done baseline polling, right, on a candidate -- you look at the attributes going into a race when you run a baseline poll and if one of the attributes is you're 35 years old, you're 33 years old: You're too young, too inexperienced to hold statewide office. Let's say somebody had that as a criteria. Well, guess what? What candidate would go out and not try to fix that poor perception? In effect, one of the core things that people track, particularly in the statewide and national elections, they track that baseline perception of the candidate. And a good candidate has an idea in mind, very clear idea: I'm here, I'm perceived this way, by the end of the campaign I want to be here, and if I can't get from here to here, I'm going to lose.
Well, Democrats right now are perceived in such a negative way by gun owners that unless they actually go out and speak to the issue and actively shift the issue, as you would do in any other issue in any other race, and stop being afraid of the issue and stop thinking that there's some taboo on talking about it and silence will work. Democrats then can actually solve the problem, but first, Democrats at the state, local, and national level in red states, and nationally, are going to have to do the same thing you do when you've got a problem, which is face your problem, admit you have it, and actually do something about it.
Third message -- and this is the good news -- however negative the perceptions are, they can be changed. There is a solution. Remember, Democrats don't have to carry every gun owner. They don't even have to carry a majority of gun owners. Karl Rove knows this and Wayne LaPierre knows this. If Democrats make small, not even huge, small inroads into gun owners, the whole table shifts and now Republicans have real trouble building a majority and carrying a bunch of these states that are won by a very small margin. Tim Johnson in South Dakota won by 500-and-something votes, I believe -- 500-and-something votes. I mean, that means that a small percentage of a piece of the electorate that feels strongly about an issue, if they move your way, you win.
Well, what is the solution? The solution, as I said, steals a page from the DLC play and it's a third-way centrist solution. I'll present what are really kind of the core elements of it now.
I want to say, though, the most important thing about this solution is we are not recommending something that requires the Democratic Party to either lose its core values -- I'm not saying sell out, you know, Democrats must become like Wayne LaPierre. No, that's not what I'm saying. Democrats can retain their core values and progressive principles. Number two, Democrats don't have to give up on their base. The whole point today is not, well, here's our base; lets shift away from our base and pick up new voters and give up on our base. No. We can hold our base and pick up new voters. And that is true on the gun issue as well. And in fact, you'll see in some of the detailed polling this afternoon, if Democrats are carrying the right message on guns, they pick up even more people in the base and even more swing voters like suburban women.
So what is the solution? It has three parts. First, Democrats must embrace, love, own, take back the Second Amendment, period, unequivocally. If you look at Senator Pryor -- and I really believe he's the model on this -- if you look at his direct mail pieces, Senator Pryor's direct mail pieces talk about the Second Amendment. They show him hunting. I mean, we can go down the list. But it doesn't matter whether you are or aren't a gun owner. It doesn't matter if you're a hunter or not. I'm not telling you to go out and start learning to hunt; if you're, you know, 45 and you've never hunted before, take shooting lessons. Although, if you've never shot a gun, I encourage you to do it. It's an interesting experience; I happen to enjoy it. Even if you don't enjoy it, it's an important piece of understanding the cultural piece to this.
Democrats must embrace the Second Amendment for a range of reasons. First of all, Democrats need to strongly embrace the Second Amendment because that's the right thing to do. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. I think this is a silly debate that we're having as a country. In fact, polls show that most Americans think that it's a silly debate. As Al put up there, the tiny fringe on both sides believe that there is no Second Amendment right to bear arms and we can have any gun laws no matter how restrictive, and the other side believes there's an absolute right and allows for no gun laws. Seventy-four percent -- and that's the key number -- 74 percent of Americans believe that there is a right to have a gun, to own guns, from the Second Amendment, and that right carries with it responsibilities to the individual gun owner as well as for us as a society and as a country.
So Democrats need to be clear that they are strong backers of the Second Amendment, which by the way, many Democrats already are but they're not enunciating it clearly as a national party. That should be part of our party platform. We should be very clear about that. And that means the Democrats are embracing a rights and responsibilities position.
Second is closing loopholes. Democrats need to -- and this is part of the formula that we've tested, and it's very clear we also have to be right on the policies. Democrats need to embrace and stand up for reasonable, sensible gun laws that fix problems in the system and close loopholes: things like requiring background checks at gun shows, fixing the Instant-Check system to make it more instant and accurate, combating gun trafficking, renewing the assault weapons ban -- very basic, sensible policies that have wide support that are also good and effective gun policy.
Third, Democrats need to be vigorous supporters of enforcing the existing gun laws and take that issue back. I want to talk about that in a little more detail right now. The enforcement issue is a fascinating issue. As you've all, I'm sure, seen widely, Republicans, President Bush, the NRA, their answer to the gun violence problem in America and the gun permit problem is let's just enforce the laws on the books. That's all we need to do, enforce the laws on the books. And, in fact, that actually polls quite well with many Americans, including non-gun owners.
Finally, let's take them up on it. Let's enforce the laws on the books. So what Americans for Gun Safety did that nobody had done before was we went and we FOIA'd about 5,000 pages of Justice Department documents. It took us about nine months to get it. They weren't thrilled to release it. I'm sure whoever released it lost their job. And we took a close look at Clinton's last year and Bush's first year on federal gun prosecutions to see whether Bush and his allies, the NRA, whether they were actually fulfilling their promise to enforce the laws on the books. Well, guess what we found? That on 20 of the 22 major federal gun laws -- 20 of the 22 major federal gun laws, they were being enforced so infrequently by Bush and Ashcroft that they might as well not exist.
Two of the laws, which are important laws in which we're prosecuting felons who are in possession of a gun, they were doing better than Clinton. Not amazingly better, but better in perspective and we give them praise for that. They, however, were ignoring the other 20. I'll give you one very powerful example of that. This became the signature issue for the NRA.
It's a crime called "lie-and-buy." Anybody here -- how many people here own guns? A lot. So, you've bought guns. When you go in to buy a gun from a gun dealer you have to fill out the background check form, and when he fills the background check form -- that's what the Brady Law did -- so that when you go to buy a gun, that you make sure that it's John Cowan, the nice guy who lives in Washington who, you know, never did anything bad except when he was a kid and didn't get caught for it, versus John Cowan who is a known felon.
Well, many people -- I mean, this is shocking but a lot of criminals, bizarrely enough, are stupid enough that they go and they go to gun stores to buy guns still, and they fill out the background check form and they fail the background check test. A hundred and thirty-six thousand of them in 2002 went into buy a gun -- 136,000 criminals went in to buy a gun, filled out the form, it was rejected and they were denied their gun purchase. Well, it's good they were denied their gun purchase, but as the NRA and Bush have pointed out so many times, wait a minute, that's a felony. Lying on the background check form means you illegally tried to purchase a gun. You're a felon. You're a domestic abuser. You're adjudicated mentally incompetent. You can't go buy guns. You should go to prison for that.
Well, let me read you a couple of things that the NRA had to say about this so-called crime of lie-and-buy. This was on "Nightline" in March of 2000. "The question here is, has the president looked into the eyes of Ricky Birdsong's family, because that death is on his hands." Ben Smith, the shooter, who shot this guy named Ricky Birdsong -- "Ben Smith walked into a gun store on June 23rd, was flagged under the Instant-Check system" -- i.e., he filled out a background check form and was denied -- "committing a brand-new federal felony right under the president's nose. The president's policy did nothing to him except let him walk out the door and go home." In other words, there was this guy who committed the crime of lie-and-buy, he tried to buy a gun illegally and President Clinton and Attorney General Reno did not prosecute that crime. Let me just read those words again: "The question here is, has the president looked into the eyes of Ricky Birdsong's family, because that death is on his hands."
Well, let's look at the facts. A hundred and thirty-six thousand people in 2002 committed the crime that Ben Smith did that the president apparently has blood on his hands for, the ex-president. How many of those people, 136,000, were prosecuted under the new Bush-Ashcroft regime of tough, vigorous enforcement of all federal gun laws? Well, there were 501 under Clinton -- and I'm a Clinton fan, but that's obviously not a great record. Well, Bush and Ashcroft, they changed the whole thing: 578 -- 578. Out of 136, 000 people, they increased it by 77. Why do Democrats let them get away with that? You want a gun issue that works in California, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama. You want a gun issue that works anywhere in America? Take back the enforcement issue if you're a Democrat. Hold the Republicans and the NRA's feet to the fire.
