Los Angeles Times: Gun Control Leader Bucked the Tide

[url]http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-101601wales.story?coll=la%2Dhome%2Dtodays%2Dtimes[/url]

Gun Control Leader Bucked the Tide
Crime: In Washington state, a 2nd Amendment stronghold, some fear Thomas Wales
was killed for his activism.
By KIM MURPHY
Times Staff Writer

October 16 2001

SEATTLE -- 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 counter demonstrators, 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.

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."

For information about reprinting this article, go to
http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm

Diplomacy by another means?  I hope gun control people across the nation are on notice--tinker with American freedom at your own peril.

I think the point of this article is that this guy is doing some semi-unethical things, and the gun control people are stretching it by trying to tie his murder to their pro-gun advarsaries even thought they have not proof, ie guilty by association.  They are just thinking out loud, and passing off this BS as fact. These anti-gunners guys are definitely grabbing for straws.

Or maybe he was killed by a jealous gay boyfriend?  Or a kid who he had molested in the past?

GunLvr

If you ask me this guy got what he deserved.

I think it instructive that the first article posted on this site a few days ago said his wife was visiting on the East coast at the time of the shooting. NOW... it says that he lived alone. No mention of a divorce.

Hmmmmm.....

I wonder if anybody's looked at his life insurance policies lately....

And I wonder if Mrs. Wales has retained an attorney yet?

The LA Times is the stupidest thing to come out of LA, which is saying a whole lot since most things from LA are stupid.

Yep...
She was away "visiting family".
How convienient.

I think that he and the story will be forgotten once it is discovered that his wife had him whacked.

I think the title of this thread should be "Constitutional Control Traitor Killed for his Socialist Beliefs"

Some definate untruths here...

[i]"So it was that several dozen members of CeaseFire"[/i]

[b]There were 50 max. [/b]

[i]demonstrating at the NRA gun
show in July, were more than a little intimidated when they were met with
several counter demonstrators[/i]

[b]there were 25-80 of us during the 2 hour protest.  A steady stream of gun show attendees walked past the demonstration.  Many cars honked in response to the "Honk if you support freedom" sign which we displayed.[/b]

[i]all wearing black[/i]

[b]totally false[/b],

[i]many of them carrying weapons[/i]

[b]the ONLY weapons I saw were the ones being carried to and from the show by gun show attendees and the cops who were watching the protest[/b]

[i]and one of them videotaping the pro-gun control picketers"[/i]

[b]the videotaping I saw was from a guy who was carrying a baby in one of those backpacks (pretty menacing, huh?).  Two of the protesters kept aggressively standing in front of him blocking his camera.  The other videotaping I saw was from the THREE news organizations and once they finished...the protestors left.[/b]  

With this many lies in the third paragraph, I would be skeptical of the rest.

shadows, send your comments to the LA Times and tell them they're story is full of shit with respects to how the facts relating to the show were portrayed.


I'd be interested to see if they bothered to send you a reply email, would be great if you could get a well written commentary posted some place on their website(maybe a readers commentary section) or even in their paper.

[xx(][xx(][xx(][xx(]

What's the deal with coins in the eyelid?

I was there at the show and these comments by 'shadows' are true.  
Calling BS on the LA Times is in order.

shadows,

Please write to [b][email protected][/b] and tell her your side of the confrontation story.  She probably got the unvarnished facts from the gun grabbers.

I wrote her today questioning the whole slant of her story and received an apologetic reply about a much longer story being compressed into a smaller space.  A [b][u]polite[/u][/b] but detailed and persuasive email to her may help water the seed of doubt...

Busmaster, perhaps you could write as well.

maybe the anti's did it, hoping it will make more people anti

I wouldn't put it past them.

I investigated this story further.  Turns out this prosecutor was doing a lot of other highly controversial things, any one of which could have come back to haunt him.  I guess that's what happens when you start interpreting the US Constitution "creatively."

If it would have been Charlton Heston who was killed, and somebody printed some crap like this, they'd be called insane.

I sent an email to Ms. Murphy regarding these inaccuracies.  I also posted the link to the LA times article to the Washington Shooters egroup and CCW egroup.  I expect she will get some corroborating email from them also.

Thanks a bunch!

I lived in Utah from '94 to '00.  When I first moved there, the local paper, the Salt Lake Tribune was quite anti-gun.  I made it a policy to always call them on any bogus claim that they made in their news stories.  I would do my homework, write directly to the reporters and copy their editor, [b][u]keep it polite and friendly[/u][/b] and provide copious citations.  While I am unlikely to be the only cause, by the time I left, their news reporting on guns was vastly improved, and their editorials even included an occassional pro-gun editorial.

Im my experience, only a minority of news reporters are malicious towards gun rights.  The rest are simply ignorant.  I would suspect that Kim Murphy uncritically accepted the story told by the "good guys" - the people who only want to stop the gun violence.  She will now have to intellectually face the possibility that they lied to her, or at least exaggerated.  Her next story will be a little more careful.  [b][u]With enough of us who do this[/u][/b], we will eventually win.

FOor those of you who condone killing this guy because of his beliefs on guns (However wrong they might be) [b][size=6]You are all idiots!!![/size=6][/b]  [V]

The person who murdered this guy is a [u]criminal[/u], NOT a freedom fighter (if he/she did so under the guise of the 2nd amendment). We don't need people like him to represent our cause, It will do just fine without him.  We are a land of laws, not men, and to murder someone for their beliefs is just fucking wrong.
Vehemently disagree with them yes.
   Change their way of thinking, hell yes.
       Murder them,  uh--NO!

Guns should be used in SELF DEFENSE ONLY. This execution was clearly not self defense.

I just hope to god that whoever did this is not NRA affiliated. I hope it was his gay Ceasefire lover getting back at him for sleeping with his Paralegal,  or something.

Let's all hope that whoever did it get's caught and tried so we will not have to speculate about their motivation.

Since Sept 11, WTC attack, all law-enforcemnt resources have been focused on preventing terrorism, I hope the law enforcement is still actively investigating this murder.  Hmmm, I wonder if Chandra Levy is still being investigated in Wash. DC? I bet not, it was winding down before the WTC attack.

  Warlord, you are absolutely right, Terror takes precedence. I just hate being beaten over the head with the deeds of others. I can already hear the ANTI'S wailing and gnashing their teeth.