Phony gun groups, Part 2: ‘Americans for Gun Safety’

February 9, 3:33 PMCharlotte Gun Rights ExaminerPaul Valone

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In this segment, we will examine how “Americans for Gun Safety” introduced the tactic of using phony gun groups to fool American gun voters in 2006 and 2008.

Imagine my surprise: While addressing the North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force against proposed gun control legislation, lobbyist Bruce Thompson showed up to represent a new client, “Americans for Gun Safety” (AGS). 

Having previously lobbied, on behalf of preeminent law firm Parker, Poe, Adams & Bernstein, for North Carolinians “Against Gun Violence” (NCGV), Thompson had a new sugar daddy.

Now imagine how my surprise compounded upon discovering that Thompson was not, in fact, registered as a lobbyist for AGS, but instead for an entity called, aptly enough, the “Tsunami Fund.” Thanks to an endorsement by then-Governor Michael Easley, we learned the fund had funneled $60,000 to lobby for gun control in NC.

‘Third way’ is the old way

“The Americans for Gun Safety Foundation,” a project of the Tides Center, a Section 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, seeks to educate Americans on existing gun laws and new policy options for reducing access to guns by criminals and children and to promote responsible gun ownership. The AGS Foundation supports the rights of individuals to own firearms.” – Americans for Gun Safety website, 2002.

Although AGS professed a “third way” of “responsible gun ownership,” it actually promoted good, old-fashioned gun control: Tides’ IRS Form 990 revealed $7.5 million doled out to state-level gun control organizations just like NCGV in North Carolina. Moreover, AGS funded ballot initiatives in Oregon and Colorado which successfully ended private gun sales at gun shows, effectively registering those sales with the FBI.

Political money laundering

Despite being referred to as a “foundation” by national media, however, AGS was no such thing. In fact, it didn’t exist at all. Instead, it was one of 260-odd projects and “donor-advised funds” agitating for left-wing causes such as needle exchange programs, radical environmentalism, and gay advocacy programs for children.

Pulling the strings behind the shadowy labyrinth of projects which hail from the Thoreau Center, headquartered (ironically enough) in San Francisco’s Presideo is none other than left-wing activist Drummond Pike.

Since 1976, Pike’s forte has been non-profit money laundering in which his many organizations, including the Tides Foundation, the Tides Center, and the Tsunami Fund, “partner” with wealthy donors who don’t want their names associated with the extremist projects they fund.

“Few nonprofit organizations in the country are as successful as the Tides Foundation at obscuring where millions in tax-exempt dollars are coming from and how they are really being used.” – “Tax-exempt secrecy,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 8, 1997.

Although “lending” tax exempt status is a violation of IRS regulations, as is using charitable money for political advocacy, Tides has taken money from most of the usual suspects: The Pew Charitable Trust, the Heinz foundations (as in Teresa Heinz, wife of Senator John Kerry) and last, but by no means least, billionaire leftist George Soros.

In the case of AGS, the sugar daddy was Andrew J. McKelvey, self-made multi-billionaire and founder of Monster.com who had also sat on the board of Handgun Control, Inc. “I told them that Handgun Control was the wrong name. I thought what they were doing was great but I thought it could be done differently,” McKelvey was reported to have said.

Gone but not forgotten

AGS is now defunct, having apparently been folded into a less vocal entity called “The Third Way.” Its impact, however, remains. However, primitive its camouflage may have been (few gun owners bought into its “third way” feint), AGS was the first to begin training politicians to disguise anti-gun positions, and it paved the way for the more sophisticated operations of the “American Hunters and Shooters Association” which so successfully neutralized NRA efforts in the 2008 election.

The last segment in the series will document the effectiveness of the "American Hunters and Shooters Association in neutralizing the gun vote in the 2008 elections.

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