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The Denver Postdenverpost.comPosted: 12/21/2012 02:37:16 PM MSTDecember 22, 2012 12:37 AM GMTUpdated: 12/21/2012 05:37:26 PM MST
Josh Sugarmann came out of college determined to protect people — particularly children — from the proliferation of guns in America.
He founded a unique gun control advocacy group, the Violence Policy Center, 24 years ago. His center didn't argue about the rights of U.S. citizens to own guns. It didn't treat gun control as a political battle. It did call 300 million guns in circulation a public health threat.
His target: Assault-style weapons.
Sugarmann and the Violence Policy Center witnessed the wanton use of assault-style weapons to kill children, adults and themselves again and again.
Last Friday the madmen's war on children finally landed at Sugarmann's doorstep, in a quaint New England community called Newtown.
"Yeah, it's my home town," he said Thursday. "Class of 1978. I grew up there."
It has been a long week at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Calls have come in from all over the world from people asking how in the world 20-year-old Adam Lanza managed to murder 20 children and six adults in an elementary school he once attended.
Some callers expressed shock and horror. Many asked questions about the status of assault-style weapons in the U.S. Others just asked how they could help.
For Sugarmann it was a bittersweet week.
"The friends I've talked to only recently stopped crying," he said.
On the bright side, many people have united to say that now is the time to talk about guns — particularly semiautomatic rifles, shotguns and pistols, 100-round ammunition drums and other weapons possessed by lunatics.
Assault-style weapons also include police Glock pistols with more than 10 rounds and semiautomatic weapons that can be turned into machine guns.
In the last week, sportscasters, football and basketball coaches, pro-gun Republican and Democratic congressmen and the president of the United States agreed that now is the time to do something about keeping these types of weapons out of the wrong hands.
And this time, Sugarmann hopes, President Barack Obama and Congress will do what is needed.
When Congress enacted a temporary assault weapons "ban" in 1988, Sugarmann objected that the new law created a small island of regulation in a vast sea of laissez-faire manufacture.
The ban grandfathered every existing assault-style weapon in the U.S., as well as ammunition drums, armor-piercing bullets and second-hand police weapons — everything from Glock pistols to Army rifles.
"We warned about the limits of the original ban," he said.
The Violence Policy Center also warned about the "sporterization" of assault weapons as purported hunting guns, when some were clearly designed to hunt people.
"The grotesque irony?" Sugarmann asked. "The National Shooting Sports Foundation locale. They've taken the lead in working to rebrand assault weapons as modern sporting rifles."
The National Shooting Sports Foundation is headquartered in Newtown, in a building across the street "from the old duckpin bowling alley," he said. "It's their neighborhood, their community, their friends, their families."
Sugarmann said he has seen the ship of state slowly turning on assault-style weapons ownership for about two years.
It began, he said, with the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords outside a Tucson grocery store, followed by the killing of a Florida kid who looked suspicious to a vigilant neighbor and then, in July, the murderous rampage in an Aurora movie theater.
Now, in Newtown, the world has watched a parade of tiny coffins.
"How can it get any worse?" Sugarmann asked. "This is so much worse. People are looking in the mirror and saying we just can't put up with this any more."
In the outpouring of support, "there's anger, of course, and helplessness," he said. But also, "in the reaction across the country, people are just saying what can I do? I want to help."
Sugarmann no longer lives in Newtown. He last visited his hometown when a friend's dad died. The funeral reception was held at the volunteer firehouse, the staging area for the massacre response last week.
Sugarmann, who graduated from Boston University with a journalism degree, still subscribes to his hometown paper, the Newtown Bee.
Newtown remains "charming in its small-town way," he said.
The volunteer fire department raises money with lobster bakes. At yearly town meetings, "they vote down the budget three times. The news should be the Newtown savings bank giving another $1,000 to a scholarship fund. It really brings to me how people in Columbine and Aurora must feel."
The town newspaper "asks questions of kids every week," he said.
So what happens now?
Sugarmann recalls the words of Charlton Heston, brought in to give the National Rifle Association a well-loved face:
"The final war has begun."
David Olinger: 303-954-1498, dolinger
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