By Charles Bethea
Each of the half dozen times that I’ve heard Stacey Abrams speak during her campaign for Georgia governor, she has mentioned growing up in Mississippi, where her great-grandmother taught her how to shoot a shotgun. Abrams usually notes that her great-grandmother also taught her that it was her “responsibility to keep people safe” around guns. In terms of policy, though, Abrams evidently believes that the government has a responsibility, too: she has called for universal background checks for firearm sales and the repeal of Georgia’s controversial “campus carry” legislation, which allows permit holders to carry guns on college campuses.
This is a fairly dramatic shift from previous Democratic nominees for the governor’s office. The last Democrat to govern Georgia, Roy Barnes, boasted, in 2002, of his A-plus N.R.A. rating and endorsement while running for reëlection against the Republican Sonny Perdue, who is now Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture. Perdue challenged Barnes to a skeet shoot for the N.R.A.’s endorsement, and dismissively said that Barnes didn’t know “the difference between a shotgun and a bass boat.” (The skeet shoot did not happen; Perdue won the race.) The last Democratic nominee for governor, Jason Carter, had an A rating from the N.R.A. and backed what was referred to as the “guns everywhere” bill, which allowed those with permits to carry concealed firearms in places where they were previously forbidden, including churches, school zones, and some government buildings. (His opponent, the current governor, Nathan Deal, had an A rating, too, plus more than half a million dollars in N.R.A. support. After Deal won, he signed the “guns everywhere” bill into law.)
The Mississippi anecdote aside, Abrams’s rhetoric is a stark departure from all this. “I am proud to have an ‘F’ rating from the @NRA,” she tweeted, in May. “And I am proud to have the support of Congresswoman @GabbyGiffords, her husband, @ShuttleCDRKelly, and their organization, @GiffordsCourage To Fight Gun Violence.” Still, Abrams has not made gun control a signature issue, preferring to focus on health care, education, and Georgia’s economy. In fact, she avoids the term “gun control,” generally speaking of “gun sense” and “gun safety.” Recently, at a Moms Demand Action “Gun Sense University” event in Atlanta, media members were excluded from speeches delivered by Abrams and Lucy McBath, a former flight attendant turned Democratic politician running for Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District seat, which has long been held by Republicans, on a staunch gun-control platform inspired by the fatal shooting of her son. (An event representative told me that these events are “typically closed to press,” so that participants can privately discuss group strategies and tactics, though press members were welcome at a speech given by the Everytown founder and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.)
Ultimately, the campaign provided a recording of Abrams’s eleven-minute speech to a few members of the media who requested it, including me, after the founder of Moms Demand Action, Shannon Watts, misquoted it in a since-deleted tweet. Watts quoted Abrams as saying, “We’re not going to allow guns for anyone, anywhere, anytime,” a comment quickly seized upon by Republicans. Abrams actually said, “We believe that the right to bear arms does not mean the right to bear arms everywhere, anytime, anywhere.” The comment received loud applause. The crowd also roared when Abrams said, “It is O.K. to say that background checks are necessary because not everyone who has the right to bear arms deserves the arms they want to bear.” Anne Allen Westbrook, the legislative lead for the Georgia chapter of Moms Demand Action, described the speech as “refreshingly bold” and insisted that candidates are now realizing “that the middle-of-the-road voter wants gun reform.”
That proposition will be put to the test in the governor’s race. Everytown’s president, John Feinblatt, is optimistic. “When I started working on this issue—even five years ago—I’d go to Washington, D.C., or state capitols and have conversations about gun safety, and there was no question in my mind that elected officials from both parties were looking at their clocks, trying to figure out how quickly they could get me out of the room,” he told me recently. Feinblatt argues that Democrats mostly dropped gun control as a core position after taking a beating in the 1994 midterms; others point to Al Gore’s loss to George Bush, in the 2000 Presidential contest, which saw Gore lose his home state of Tennessee. But today, Feinblatt said, “Democrats are embracing this issue again.”
That has become more evident since February, when a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, killed seventeen people there. But Feinblatt maintains that the “sea change” in the South began last year, when Ralph Northam won the governor’s race in Virginia, beating the Republican Ed Gillespie, in part by emphasizing gun control. (Everytown spent $1.3 million in support of Northam’s campaign. The N.R.A. spent slightly more on ads in Virginia during the race, according to an estimate from the Northam campaign.) Northam beat Gillespie by nine points; after the race, Everytown conducted a poll, with the political analyst Doug Schoen, which found that Virginia voters ranked gun safety as their third most important issue, and that Gillespie’s A rating from the N.R.A. had actually driven voters to Northam by a two-to-one margin. Fifty-seven per cent of voters for whom gun safety was the primary concern voted for Northam. “So the ground started to shift significantly,” Feinblatt said. “Then Parkland happened, in Florida.” Since the Parkland shooting, the governors of at least eighteen states—including Florida and several other largely conservative ones, such as Kansas and Tennessee—have signed gun-control measures. “It’s less and less a partisan issue,” Feinblatt insisted.
“For a long time, there’s been wide support for stronger gun laws than what we have,” Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, told me. “What has changed is a commitment to making that a top issue, as opposed to, ‘Yeah, I care about stronger gun laws, but I really care about abortion, taxes, and school funding.’ ” Webster added, “If you look at polls now, what I find very remarkable and different is that gun violence and reforming gun laws is very much a motivating factor. That’s what we’re talking about now—more energy behind those general-polls numbers. People are seeing and hearing about gun violence everywhere, and they are just pissed.” That energy gives Abrams and McBath an advantage on the issue, Webster said. “Republicans have almost completely merged themselves with the N.R.A.—they’re nearly one and the same now,” he said. “So when you have a candidate who stands for something and has a backbone, and she’s doing it because it means something—as opposed to a political posture—that leads to voter energy. Lucy McBath’s story makes her position real. Stacey Abrams has in her favor a set of individuals who are outraged at where we are on guns and gun violence, too.”
Nonetheless, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor, the Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp, appears to believe that he’s on the winning side of the issue. (Abrams is tied with Kemp in recent polls.) He gained national notoriety and, arguably, an edge in Georgia’s Republican primary, with an ad that depicts him brandishing his shotgun while sitting across from a young man in his living room. This young man, “Jake,” is “interested in one of my daughters,” Kemp says, ostensibly justifying the setup, before asking Jake to explain why Kemp is running for governor. (“Take a chainsaw to regulations,” Jake stammers at one point.) Kemp, who is backed by GeorgiaCarry.org, has opposed recent gun-restriction proposals and said that he will support “constitutional carry” legislation that would allow gun owners to conceal and carry handguns without a permit.
