The N.R.A. Lobbyist Behind Florida’s Pro-Gun Policies
Marion Hammer’s unique influence over legislators has produced laws that dramatically alter long-held American norms.
In the past two decades, some thirty of Marion Hammer’s bills have become law.
Jared
Moskowitz, a Democratic member of the Florida House of Representatives,
was debating tax policy on the chamber floor, in Tallahassee, last
week, when he received a call from his wife, Leah. He was surprised to
hear her crying. She was trying to pick up their four-year-old son, Sam,
who attends a preschool in Moskowitz’s district, which encompasses two
affluent communities about an hour north of Miami—Parkland and Coral
Springs. Leah had seen a number of police officers outside the building.
Moskowitz called the local sheriff’s office and learned that the
preschool was on lockdown, because there was an active shooter at the
nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Moskowitz,
who graduated from Douglas in 1999, called Leah back, then walked over
to Richard Corcoran, the speaker of the House, and explained that he had
to leave. “I think people were still getting killed while we were
talking,” Moskowitz told me.
Parkland is almost
five hundred miles south of Tallahassee; by the time Moskowitz’s flight
landed, he knew that nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who had been
expelled from Douglas, had used a legally purchased AR-15 semiautomatic
rifle to kill seventeen students and staff members and seriously wound
more than a dozen others. Moskowitz drove to the Marriott Hotel in Coral
Springs, a few minutes from Douglas. Law-enforcement officials had
directed parents and family members of missing children to a ballroom
there.
Some mothers and fathers were praying;
others grew exasperated. “Just tell me!” one parent yelled at the F.B.I.
agents and the police officers who were in the room. “Is he in the
school?” After midnight, officials began to take families to an
adjoining room, one at a time, where they were told whether their child
was dead or in the hospital. “You could hear them screaming through the
wall,” Moskowitz recalled.
Two days later, I
joined Moskowitz on Coral Springs Drive, which runs alongside Douglas.
The area was closed to traffic, and cordoned off by a length of police
tape. TV-news reporters had camped out there, and Douglas students
walked among them, placing flowers on an improvised memorial and
demanding that lawmakers pass new gun-safety laws. One student, a solemn
seventeen-year-old named Demitri Hoth, shared footage on his phone of
his classmates just after the shooting. They were walking single file
down Coral Springs Drive, with their hands over their heads. “I wanted
to show the American public the true failure of our politicians,” Hoth
said. “We all lost something—our friends, our loved ones, our security,
our innocence.”
On the other side of the tape,
public officials congregated. Normally, Moskowitz moves with the jumpy
energy of a Hollywood agent, but now he was subdued. He wore a charcoal
suit, and his hazel eyes were raw and red-rimmed. He had come from the
funeral of Meadow Pollack, a senior at Douglas.
Moskowitz
shook hands with Dan Daley, a young city commissioner in Coral Springs.
“I was talking to one of the Douglas students,” Daley said. “His only
words to me were ‘Do something.’ I had to tell him that I legally can’t
do anything, because the governor could take away my job if I tried.”
Moskowitz turned to me. “That’s the legacy of Marion Hammer,” he said.
Hammer
is the National Rifle Association’s Florida lobbyist. At seventy-eight
years old, she is nearing four decades as the most influential gun
lobbyist in the United States. Her policies have elevated Florida’s gun
owners to a uniquely privileged status, and made the public carrying of
firearms a fact of daily life in the state. Daley was referring to a law
that Hammer worked to enact in 2011, during Governor Rick Scott’s first
year in office. The statute punishes local officials who attempt to
establish gun regulations stricter than those imposed at the state
level. Officials can be fined thousands of dollars and removed from
office.
Legal papers filed by the N.R.A. assert
that the organization was “deeply involved in advocating” for the
legislation. Hammer oversaw its development. When government policy
analysts suggested even minor adjustments to the bill’s language, they
made sure to receive Hammer’s approval. In an e-mail to Hammer about
three draft amendments, an analyst wrote, “Marion, I’ve spoken with you
about the first one,” and went on to note that a different staffer “said
she’d spoken with you about the others.” The e-mail concluded, “Let me
know what you think.” The amendments addressed matters such as where
fines should be deposited.
The sponsor of the
bill was Matt Gaetz, at the time a twenty-eight-year-old Republican
state representative. “That’s the sequence of how each piece is done,”
Representative Dennis Baxley, a close ally of Hammer, told me. On bills
that he sponsors, he said, “she works on it with the analyst. Then I
look it over and file it. I’m not picky on the details.” (Gaetz
acknowledges that Hammer was a “significant contributor” to his bill but
denies that she oversaw its drafting.)
Hammer
is not an elected official, but she can create policy, see it through to
passage, and use government resources to achieve her aims. These days,
Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature almost never allows any bill
that appears to hinder gun owners to come up for a vote. According to
Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Florida Republican strategist and lobbyist,
Hammer is “in a class by herself. When you approach a certain level,
where the legislator is basically a fig leaf, well, that’s not the rule.”
Hammer
is less than five feet tall and wears her hair in a pageboy style. She
carries a handgun in her purse, and, when she conducts business, she
usually dresses in a red or teal blazer. She once told an interviewer at
the Orlando Sentinel, “If you came at me,
and I felt that my life was in danger or that I was going to be injured,
I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot you.”
Hammer
works in Tallahassee, on a quiet downtown strip a few blocks from the
capitol. Don Gaetz, Matt Gaetz’s father, who was a Republican state
senator between 2006 and 2016, said that Hammer rejects the upscale
trappings of other lobbyists’ offices. “There’s no fancy reception area,
leather-covered chairs, or brandy decanters,” he said. “Just two or
three rooms filled with paper, files, magazines, and a couple of older
ladies clipping newspaper stories.”
From this
office, Hammer has shepherded laws into existence that have dramatically
altered long-held American norms and legal principles. In the eighties,
she crafted a statute that allows anyone who can legally purchase a
firearm to carry a concealed handgun in public, as long as that person
pays a small fee for a state-issued permit and completes a rudimentary
training course. The law has been duplicated, in some form, in almost
every state, and more than sixteen million Americans now have licenses
to carry a concealed handgun.
In
the early two-thousands, Hammer created the country’s first Stand Your
Ground self-defense law, authorizing the use of lethal force in response
to a perceived threat. Some two dozen states have adopted a version of
Stand Your Ground, giving concealed-carry permit holders wide discretion
over when they can shoot another person.
In a
recent book, “Engines of Liberty,” David Cole, the national legal
director of the American Civil Liberties Union, devoted an admiring
chapter to Hammer and the N.R.A. As recently as 1988, Cole notes, a
federal court maintained that “for at least 100 years [courts] have
analyzed the second amendment purely in terms of protecting state
militias, rather than individual rights.” The subsequent shift toward
individual rights can be traced back to Hammer. “Florida is often the
first place the N.R.A. pursues specific gun rights protections,” Cole
explains, “relying on Hammer and her supporters to set a precedent that
can then be exported to other states.”
This
strategy is far more effective than trying to overhaul federal laws, a
complicated process that draws the scrutiny of the national media. Since
1998, Republicans have had total control over Florida’s legislature. In
that time, the state has enacted some thirty of Hammer’s bills.
“Democrats don’t have anything close to combat her,” Moskowitz told me.
In the executive and legislative branches, Republicans have been eager
to work with her. Steve Crisafulli, a Republican who, between 2014 and
2016, served as House speaker, said, “Members will go to Marion. They’ll
say, ‘I want to carry a bill for the N.R.A. this year. What are you
working on? What are your priorities?’ ”
Moskowitz
hoped that the shooting at Douglas might be a turning point. During an
interview with CNN, Governor Scott, a Republican who has never taken a
position contrary to that of the N.R.A., said, “Everything’s on the
table.” Still, Moskowitz was keeping his expectations within reason.
“They’re not going to ban assault weapons,” he said. “But I have to
bring these parents something. I have to show them we didn’t ignore what
happened.” Survivors of the shooting, along with thousands of other
protesters, have travelled to Tallahassee to urge the governor and other
elected officials to pass gun-control legislation. At a town hall
convened by CNN, Senator Marco Rubio, who has received a grade of A-plus
from the N.R.A., refused to stop accepting donations from the
organization. He was loudly jeered. Some lawmakers questioned whether
Florida was beginning to change, and if Hammer’s dominance might be
threatened.
According
to court documents filed by the N.R.A. in 2016, the group has roughly
three hundred thousand members in Florida. They are a politically active
voting bloc with whom Hammer frequently communicates through e-mail.
Using supercharged, provocative language, she keeps her followers
apprised of who has been “loyal” to the Second Amendment and who has
committed unforgivable “betrayals.” “If you’re with Marion ninety-five
per cent of the time, you’re a damn traitor,” Matt Gaetz said.
Gaetz
said that one of her e-mails “packs more political punch than a hundred
thousand TV buys from any other special interest in the state.” Hammer
demonstrates a keen understanding of group identity. She and her
followers are defending a way of life that is under threat. When a
public official breaks ranks, Hammer exposes his “treacherous actions”
and “traitorous nature.” She then invites her supporters to contact the
official. “Tell him how you feel,” she advises. “PLEASE DO IT TODAY—time is short!!!”
Greg
Evers, a former Republican state senator who, before he died last
August, worked closely with Hammer, estimated that her e-mails reach
“two or three million” people. Florida has issued around 1.8 million
concealed-carry permits, by far the most in the country, and there are
4.6 million registered Republican voters in the state. “The number of
fanatical supporters who will take her word for anything and can be
deployed almost at will is unique,”
Stipanovich, the strategist and lobbyist, told me. For many
Republicans, her support tends to be perceived as the difference between
winning and losing.
Governor Scott is in the
final year of his second term, and is expected to run for the Senate in
November. Polls have him in a virtual tie with the Democratic incumbent,
Bill Nelson. In order to win, Scott will need ample monetary and
grassroots support from the N.R.A. In October, 2014, he trailed in the
polls for his reëlection, running behind the former governor Charlie
Crist. According to a Web site with connections to the governor’s
office, Hammer steered two million dollars toward the contest. The
organization helped in less public ways as well. Curt Anderson, Scott’s
chief political strategist, runs a consulting firm that exclusively
services the N.R.A.; in the past two election cycles, campaign-finance
records show, the N.R.A. paid Anderson’s company more than thirty-five
million dollars to produce ads in support of Republican candidates.
Scott eventually won reëlection by a single percentage point.
“If
you’re the governor, and you’ve won by a handful of votes, and you’ve
got great political ambitions, you’re going to take Marion’s call in the
middle of the night,” Don Gaetz said. “And, if she needs something, you
do it, and if you don’t think you can do it you try anyway.”
In
the course of a year, in addition to interviewing dozens of Hammer’s
allies and opponents, I obtained, through public-records requests,
thousands of pages of e-mail correspondence and other documents that
detail her relationships with officials in the highest levels of the
state’s government. The breadth of Hammer’s power in Florida can be seen
in the ways that state employees, legislators, and the governor defer
to her—she gives orders, and they follow them. (Hammer refused to be
interviewed for this story, but in response to queries she stated that
“facts are being misrepresented and false stuff is being presented as
fact.”)
“Elected officials have allowed her to
own the process,” Ben Wilcox, the research director of Integrity
Florida, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said after reviewing the
documents. “It’s an egregious example of the influence that a lobbyist
can wield.”
When
Marion Hammer was five years old, her father was killed in Okinawa,
while fighting in the Second World War. Her mother sent her to live on
her grandparents’ farm, in South Carolina, where she milked cows and fed
the other animals. Within a year, Hammer’s grandfather decided that she
was old enough to shoot a gun. He set up a tomato can on a fence post
about twenty-five feet away and then handed her a .22-calibre rifle.
Hammer has said that she hit the can on her first try.
According to the Miami Herald,
Hammer attended college for a year but dropped out after she met a man
she later married. After he got out of the Coast Guard, they moved to
Gainesville, where they had three daughters. Her husband got a degree in
building construction, and for a while the family bounced around the
country, following jobs to Atlanta and Chicago, among other cities.
Hammer became a life member of the N.R.A. in 1968, and the family
settled in Tallahassee in the mid-seventies.
In
1974, Florida lawmakers introduced a bill that sought to ban the
possession of black powder, which is used in muzzle-loading firearms.
Hammer joined a local N.R.A. volunteer in his successful fight against
the legislation. The campaign occurred just before the launch of the
Institute for Legislative Action, the N.R.A.’s lobbying arm, which
transformed the organization from one primarily concerned with sporting
and hunting into one that advocated for gun rights. In 1978, Hammer
became the executive director of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida, and
the N.R.A.’s top lobbyist in the state. Robert Baer, a former N.R.A.
board member, compared her tactics to those of Lyndon Johnson. “She’s
the same sort of operator,” he said. “She was a pro at political
infighting—she understood how to get power.”
In
the eighties, Hammer began to tell a story that she would repeat
frequently in the years to come. One night, after leaving her office,
she walked into a parking garage, where she was trailed by a carload of
men. “They were yelling some of the most disgusting things you can
imagine,” Hammer told the Houston Chronicle.
“One man had a long-necked beer bottle, and he told me what he was
going to do with it.” In those days, Hammer carried a Colt Detective
Special six-shot revolver. “I pulled the gun out, brought it slowly up
into the headlights of the car so they could see it, and I heard one of
them scream, ‘The bitch got a gun!’ ” She added, “I could have been
killed or raped, but I had a gun so I wasn’t. If the government takes
away my gun, what’s going to happen to me next time?”
N.R.A.
members elected Hammer to the organization’s board of directors in
1982. Five years later, Florida enacted her pioneering concealed-carry
law, turning Hammer into a gun-rights star. In the early nineties, the
board made her vice-president, and, between 1995 and 1998, Hammer served
as the N.R.A.’s president, the first woman to head the organization.
According to a former colleague at the Institute for Legislative Action,
Hammer, who still sits on the N.R.A.’s board, has a “direct line” to
Wayne LaPierre, the organization’s firebrand C.E.O.
“Marion could do anything she wanted, and whatever she wanted she got,”
the former colleague told me. “She would more or less single-handedly
make legislation and push it.” In 2016, the N.R.A. paid Hammer two
hundred and six thousand dollars, on top of the hundred and ten thousand
dollars she earned from the Unified Sportsmen of Florida.
In
Florida, when a gun-rights measure is introduced, it is often Hammer,
and not a lawmaker, who negotiates with committee policy chiefs, the
staffers who guide legislation through the House and the Senate. Chiefs
assess whether the language of a bill is constitutional, and how it
might affect the state economy. If there is a problem with the text,
chiefs will judge whether it can be remedied, and they are supposed to
work with lawmakers to make necessary adjustments. Chiefs are the right
hand of committee chairs, helping to decide which bills are brought up
for a vote and allowed to progress to the floor.
Katie
Cunningham was the policy chief of the House Criminal Justice
Subcommittee during Governor Scott’s first term in office, and she spoke
with Hammer often. When Cunningham discussed revisions to gun
legislation with other government staffers, she would send e-mails that
said things like “Would you like to call Marion and let her know you’ve
got another change to her bill?”
Other
lobbyists communicate with staffers, too. But Hammer consistently has
the most powerful voice in the room. In 2012, the subcommittee received a
bill establishing that a concealed-carry permit does not allow a person
to bring a gun into a range of government buildings or a child-care
center. Within days, Hammer had sent an e-mail to Cunningham, informing
her that the “N.R.A. is opposed” to the bill. She continued, “Hope that
it will not even be heard.” The legislation was left off the voting
calendar, and died two months later.
In March,
2011, shortly after Scott took office, Hammer e-mailed Cunningham about a
bill called the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act, one of Hammer’s top
legislative priorities for the year. Later dubbed Docs vs. Glocks, it
prohibited doctors from asking patients if they owned guns. The question
is one that some physicians pose, especially to parents of small
children, when assessing potential health hazards. On an N.R.A. talk
show, Hammer said that doctors were “carrying out a gun-ban campaign.”
Hammer reprimanded Cunningham for making a change to the legislation. “We NEED
the bill to continue to say that asking the question is a violation of
privacy rights,” Hammer wrote. “You are changing the whole thrust of the
bill by gratuitously removing language that is important to purpose of
the bill. Please, put the first section back as it was and amend it as I
suggested.” Hammer did not copy any lawmakers on the e-mail—not even
the chair of the subcommittee or the bill’s lead sponsor, Representative
Jason Brodeur, a thirty-five-year-old Republican in his first term.
Cunningham
was contrite. “Believe me—I had no intent to change the thrust of
anything,” she replied, adding, “See attached and let me know if that’ll
work.”
Ray Pilon was one of the Republicans on
the Criminal Justice Subcommittee. He called the interactions between
Hammer and Cunningham “improper.” (Cunningham could not be reached for
comment.) “I had no idea they were working together,” he told me. “When
we discuss a bill in committee, what the staffer says to members—what
Katie would have said—winds up looking like a recommendation. In a vote,
the analysis weighs heavily.”
Within weeks,
the bill had cleared the subcommittee and the legislature and was headed
to the desk of Governor Scott. On May 1st, Hammer prepared to
celebrate. She e-mailed Diane Moulton, the director of Scott’s executive
staff. “Please ask Governor Scott if we can have bill signing
ceremonies for the following bills with the invitees listed,” Hammer
wrote.
The next day, Hammer sent a follow-up
e-mail about the event. “Please remember that since we use these photos
in N.R.A.’s magazines, only the best quality photo can be used,” she
wrote. “That’s why we ALWAYS request E.T.”—a local photographer named Eric Tourney.
Tourney
was hired. In photographs from the event, Hammer, dressed in one of her
signature blazers, stands over Scott’s right shoulder as he signs her
bill into law. Since then, at least ten states have introduced their own
version of Hammer’s Docs legislation. In 2017, a federal court ruled
Florida’s law unconstitutional.
Stand
Your Ground was introduced in the Florida legislature in December,
2004. Though no one realized it at the time, it would become the
N.R.A.’s most controversial law. “Marion was the ringmaster,” Dan
Gelber, then the House Democratic minority leader, said. “It was her
circus. She was telling everyone where to go and what hoops to jump
through.” Before Stand Your Ground, Americans were forbidden to use
force in potentially dangerous public situations if they had the option
of fleeing. The new law removed any duty to retreat, justifying force so
long as a shooter “reasonably” believed that physical harm was
imminent. It was a radical break with legal tradition. Now a person’s
subjective feelings of fear were grounds to shoot someone even if there
were other options available.
The statute was
supposed to be a bulwark against overzealous state attorneys, but Hammer
and the Republican sponsors of Stand Your Ground could not point to a
single instance in which a person
had been wrongfully charged, tried, or convicted after invoking
Florida’s traditional self-defense law. “There was no problem,” Mary
Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami, who has
extensively studied Stand Your Ground, said. “There wasn’t a terrible
epidemic of people getting prosecuted or harassed.”
Gelber
said, “There were Republicans who, throughout the process, were
expressing reservations to me about the bill. But their entire
rationalization was that the legislation won’t have any impact, so we
might as well just please the N.R.A.”
In April,
2005, Stand Your Ground passed easily; only twenty lawmakers voted
against it, all of them House Democrats. Later that month, Jeb Bush,
then the governor of Florida, signed Hammer’s proposal into law. He
called the bill “common sense.”
On February 26,
2012, in Sanford, Florida, George Zimmerman, a twenty-eight-year-old
neighborhood-watch volunteer, confronted Trayvon Martin, an unarmed
black seventeen-year-old. After a scuffle, Zimmerman, who had a
concealed-carry permit, pulled out a 9-millimetre pistol and fatally
shot Martin. In April, after Governor Scott appointed a special
prosecutor, Zimmerman was charged in Martin’s death.
Scott
faced public pressure to reëvaluate Stand Your Ground, and two months
later he unveiled the Task Force on Citizen Safety and Protection, which
would hold public hearings across the state and publish an analysis of
its findings. Its nineteen members included Dennis Baxley, the Hammer
ally, who was one of Stand Your Ground’s primary sponsors, and four
other legislators who had voted in favor of the law, including Jason
Brodeur, who sponsored the Docs bill.
During the first week of June, just before public hearings got under way, the Tampa Bay Times
published the results of its own investigation into Stand Your Ground.
The paper found that, since the law had taken effect, nearly seventy per
cent of those who invoked it as a defense had gone free. There was a
racial imbalance: a person was more likely to be found innocent if the
victim was black. Four days later, Hammer e-mailed John Konkus, the
chief of staff for Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll, who was the
chair of the task force. Hammer sent him contact information for seven
pro-gun academics who she thought would make good expert witnesses. (She
says she did this at his request.) She pointed out that two of the
professors “are black.” Governor Scott’s office told me that it “took
input from a variety of stakeholders” when selecting witnesses.
Though
none of the people whom Hammer suggested appeared before the task
force, Konkus did invite her to make a presentation of her own. On
October 16th, in Jacksonville, Hammer delivered a long, vigorous defense
of Stand Your Ground. She claimed that, before the law was enacted,
innocent people were “being arrested, prosecuted, and punished for
exercising self-defense that was lawful under the Constitution and
Florida law.” Later, Hammer addressed the statute’s critics. “There have
been claims that some guilty people have or may go free because of the
law,” she said. “That may be an unintended consequence of the law, but
history accepts that fault.”
In an e-mail, I
asked Hammer if she could provide examples of people who had been
wrongfully dragged through the legal system before Stand Your Ground.
“Not relevant,” she responded. “And no.” Still, Hammer maintains that
“there was a list of victims of overzealous prosecutors.”
In
February, 2013, the task force released its report. It made some minor
suggestions for improving Stand Your Ground, but it unequivocally
reaffirmed the statute’s core principle: “All persons who are conducting
themselves in a lawful manner have a fundamental right to stand their
ground and defend themselves from attack with proportionate force in
every place they have a lawful right to be.”
Matt
Gaetz told me that the task force “was largely window dressing. It was
just an open-mike night for people’s views relating to gun laws.” Less
than five months after the report was published, George Zimmerman was
found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter.
Governor
Scott’s office maintains that it regards Marion Hammer no differently
from any other lobbyist or citizen in Florida. “Every governor’s office
in the country hears from stakeholders and advocates on issues,” Lauren
Schenone, Scott’s press secretary, told me.
But
the efforts to satisfy Hammer’s demands can be seriously disruptive to
the business of government. In 2014, when Scott was running for
reëlection, Hammer was pushing a bill that would allow people without
permits to carry concealed handguns during a mandatory evacuation. On
the morning of March 19th, Captain Terrence Gorman, the general counsel
for the Florida Department of Military Affairs (D.M.A.), testified at a
Senate committee hearing about the legislation. Like everyone who speaks
at a hearing, Gorman was required to fill out an appearance card. His
said that he was there to provide “information”—neutral input—as opposed
to lobbying for or against the legislation. “We are first responders to
a lot of emergency-management situations,” Gorman explained to
committee members early in his testimony.
Gorman
was thirty-eight, a Bronze Star-winning combat veteran who had served
multiple tours in Afghanistan. Throughout his career, he had received
glowing performance reviews. Gorman testified that Hammer’s bill
conflicted with “existing law.” He said that gun owners without
concealed-carry permits would likely be ignorant of the state’s
self-defense statutes; they wouldn’t know when they could and could not
fire their weapons. And he asked the legislators to “weigh out
the public-safety concerns for military and police as they respond and
as they have to engage people in a somewhat chaotic environment.” After
Gorman concluded his testimony, Senator Evers, the most pro-gun lawmaker
on the committee, told his colleagues, “I think he did a wonderful
job.”
Hammer did not. In the gallery, she
turned to Mike Prendergast, the head of the Department of Veterans
Affairs, who she incorrectly assumed was Gorman’s supervisor. “You’re on
my shit list,” she said.
In Florida, the
D.M.A. falls under the aegis of the governor’s office. A few hours after
the hearing, Hammer e-mailed Pete Antonacci, Scott’s general counsel.
She wrote that Gorman had lied on his appearance card and was “clearly
there to kill” the legislation. She demanded to know “who, specifically,
asked him to lobby against the bill,” and what was “being done to undo
the harm he has caused with his actions.”
Later
that day, Hammer met with Antonacci and Adam Hollingsworth, Scott’s
chief of staff. “Because it was an election year, there was heightened
sensitivity in the office,” a former administration staffer said. “The
campaign team wanted this resolved as soon as possible.”
On
March 20th, Antonacci informed Hammer that the governor’s director of
legislative affairs had been “dispatched to Senate to express Scott
administration support for the bill.”
The
governor’s office had also directed the office of Emmett Titshaw, then
Florida’s adjutant general, to write a letter to Thad Altman, the chair
of the Senate committee that oversaw the D.M.A. The letter was terse.
“Captain Terrence Gorman is not authorized to speak for the Department
of Military Affairs on legislative issues,” it said. “Department of
Military Affairs supports Senate Bill 296,” a reference to the numeric
title of Hammer’s legislation.
Titshaw, who was
on vacation with his family in British Columbia, notified a staffer
that he had “approved” the letter’s language but was still “trying to
[find] out why CPT Gorman appeared before the committee.”
Hammer
was unhappy with Titshaw’s letter. In an e-mail to Diane Moulton,
Scott’s executive staff director, and Melinda Miguel, his chief
inspector general, she called it “woefully inadequate,” adding, “I do
not accept this as part of the remedy to the damage done by Capt.
Gorman.” Hammer wanted the letter to go further, and “apologize for any
misrepresentations or inconvenience.”
“There
weren’t negotiations going back and forth,” the former Scott staffer
said. “It was one-sided. It was Marion saying, ‘Here’s what I want you
to do to fix this problem. You’re going to do this, this, and this, and
if you don’t do any of these things it’s going to be an issue.’ ” The
staffer went on, “It speaks to the worst of the process—it’s not what
you know, it’s who you know.”
On March 23rd,
Hammer sent Titshaw’s letter to her followers. The subject line
announced that the e-mail contained a letter from Florida’s adjutant
general in “support” of the bill.
But the
process of atonement was not yet complete. The bill was referred to the
House Judiciary Committee. On March 24th, after Titshaw returned early
from his vacation, he sent a letter to the committee’s chair, Dennis
Baxley. “Every member of the Florida National Guard takes an oath of
allegiance to the Constitutions of the United States and the State of
Florida to defend the constitutional rights of our citizens,” it said,
before stating that the D.M.A. “supports” Hammer’s legislation.
E-mails
show that Hammer wanted Gorman fired. (“When rogue staffers deceive
legislators, they should be fired,” she told me.) According to a former
D.M.A. official, Titshaw had a meeting in Tallahassee with Hollingsworth
and Antonacci. The official said that the two Scott administrators
pushed Titshaw to remove the captain from his position. They delivered
the instruction “without the input of the governor,” the official said,
“in order to keep the governor’s hands clean.” Hollingsworth told
Titshaw that “a head has to roll” and that Gorman had done “irreparable
damage,” the official recalled. Titshaw said that he would resign rather
than carry out such an order. Hollingsworth backed off, the official
said, but Antonacci kept “pressing the issue.”
Hollingsworth
did not reply to a request for comment for this story. Antonacci told
me, “I didn’t ask that Captain Gorman be fired. That’s my recollection.”
But, he said, Gorman “did not have permission from his chain of
command” to testify.
Antonacci’s statement is
contradicted by an internal D.M.A. memo, written by Gorman. According to
the document, Glenn Sutphin, then serving as the director of the
D.M.A.’s legislative-affairs office, had planned to represent the agency
at the Senate committee meeting. The day before the hearing, he asked
Gorman to analyze Hammer’s bill, flag any issues that he found, and
report back to him.
The morning of the hearing,
Sutphin determined that, owing to a scheduling conflict, he would not
be able to attend the Senate meeting. “It’s standard operating procedure
for the D.M.A. to attend all military subcommittees in the House and
Senate,” he told me recently. “Since I was gone, I asked Gorman to
attend the meeting. That’s it.”
The governor’s
office told me that it was not influenced by Hammer or by Scott’s
election campaign. But the former Scott staffer said, “This incident
will go down as the worst I’ve ever witnessed by way of government. This
is how important the N.R.A. is in an election year for statewide
office. The administration got
prostituted to keep Marion Hammer happy.” Six months later, the
governor signed into law the bill allowing people without permits to
carry concealed weapons during emergencies.
Unlike
elected officials, who are limited to eight years in office, Hammer
takes a long view of the legislative process. In the past few years, the
Senate Judiciary Committee has been a persistent nuisance to her.
Several of its legislators are Republicans from Miami, where an N.R.A.
endorsement does not mean much, and may even harm a candidate. These
lawmakers have blocked legislation that would sanction the open carrying
of firearms in public and require state universities and colleges to
allow guns on campus. Hammer sees such developments as temporary
setbacks. “Eventually, everything passes,” she has said. “That’s why,
when folks keep asking, ‘What if these bills don’t pass?’ Well, they’ll
be back. If we file a bill, it will be back and back and back until it
passes.”
Oscar
Braynon, the Democratic minority leader in the Florida Senate, said,
“Marion’s just waiting us out. When the committees change, she’ll be
there to pass that bill.”
Hammer often
shepherds legislation over several sessions. In the summer of 2015, the
Florida Supreme Court addressed one of Stand Your Ground’s core
provisions, which provides a path to immunity from the legal proceedings
that typically follow a charge of murder or assault. Under the law, a
defendant is entitled to a special pretrial hearing, during which a
judge can dismiss the case. The court ruled that in these hearings the
burden of proof was on the person claiming the statute’s protections. To
shift the onus in the other direction, the court said, would
essentially require prosecutors to prove a case twice.
Later
that year, Hammer began to push a bill that would place the burden on
the state, making Stand Your Ground defenses nearly impregnable. In
September, the legislation was referred to the House Criminal Justice
Subcommittee, where Representative Dave Kerner, a Democrat, proposed two
amendments that would gut the bill. Hammer knew that the committee’s
chair, Representative Carlos Trujillo, a Miami Republican, was against
the measure; he felt that it would make the jobs of prosecutors
excessively difficult. When the committee voted on the amendments, two
Republicans were missing. Hammer believes that Trujillo had sent them
out of the room to insure that the amendments would pass. She e-mailed
her network to share her theory. “It is important to recognize and
remember the committee members who were loyal to the Constitution and
your right to self-defense—as well as it is the betrayers,” Hammer
wrote.
One of the absent lawmakers was Ray
Pilon, who was in his third term in the House. During his previous
reëlection campaign, in 2014, he had received the N.R.A.’s endorsement
and a grade of A-plus. He supported Hammer’s Stand Your Ground expansion
but missed the vote on Kerner’s amendments because he had to attend a
different committee meeting, where a health-care-related bill that he
was sponsoring was coming up for a vote. According to Ben Wilcox, the
Florida ethics watchdog, it would have been “really strange” for Pilon
not to present his bill. “That’s part of the essential work of
government that has to get done,” Wilcox said. “It’s standard.” Pilon
tried to explain the situation to Hammer, but she wouldn’t hear it.
“Marion crucified me,” he told me. “I said I would have voted against
the amendments, but she didn’t believe me. She called me a liar. She
said I did it on purpose, and that I had a choice. But I didn’t, unless I
wanted to let my own bill go down in flames.”
The
following winter, Hammer revived the enhanced Stand Your Ground
legislation. The bill cleared the Senate and went back to the House,
where it was assigned to the Judiciary Committee. The chair was
Representative Charles McBurney, a Republican, who had been a loyal ally
to Hammer and, like Pilon, had received an A-plus during his most
recent reëlection campaign. A lawyer by trade, he had reservations about
the bill. In November, two months before the bill was resurrected in
the Senate, Hammer had written to him that she was “distressed” to hear
that he’d been working to undermine her efforts. McBurney told Hammer
that the “rumors are untrue,” and that, while he had “concerns about
aspects of that bill,” he had “too much respect” for her not to discuss
them with her. But, in late February, 2016, with the bill back in the
House, McBurney told the press that he did not plan to call it up for a
vote. “I was concerned about the policy,” he explained to reporters, and
thought it best to press “the pause button.”
McBurney,
who was in his final term, was seeking an appointment to a
circuit-court judgeship in the Jacksonville area. In the spring, just a
few months after McBurney killed Hammer’s bill, a nominating commission
placed him on a list of six finalists for the job. The list was
forwarded to Governor Scott, who would decide which candidate should
fill the vacancy. Shortly thereafter, Hammer warned her supporters that
McBurney had “proved himself to be summarily unfit to serve on the bench
of any Court anywhere.” She accused him of trying to “gain favor with
prosecutors,” and claimed that he “traded your rights for his own
personal gain.” Hammer ended her missive with a set of directions. “E-mail Governor Rick Scott RIGHT AWAY,” she wrote. “Tell him PLEASE DO NOT APPOINT Charles McBurney to a judgeship.”
Thousands
of people complied with Hammer’s request, and, in early summer, Scott
gave the job to one of the other candidates. (Scott’s office told me
that he appointed the best candidate: “Any inference that he was
influenced is false.”) Don Gaetz told me, “When Marion launched her
campaign to pay McBurney back, whatever chances he had for that
judgeship melted immediately.”
Meanwhile, Pilon
was engaged in a highly competitive primary for an open seat in the
state Senate. Hammer dropped his grade to a C and supported one of his
House colleagues, a young, ardently conservative Republican named Greg
Steube. In August, Steube won the primary. “She sent out thousands of
cards telling people to vote for him,” Pilon, who is now retired, said.
“She did for him what she once did for me.”
In
January, 2017, Hammer returned to the business of legislating. The new
session would not begin until March, but her Stand Your Ground bill had
already been refiled. She sent out blast texts and e-mails to Republican
lawmakers, urging them to co-sponsor it. One legislator who received a
text was Representative Randy Fine, a Republican in his first year of
office. “OK,” he answered. “Let me read the bill and talk to
Bobby”—Bobby Payne, the primary sponsor in the House. He went on, “I’ve
barely been able to figure out how to file my first bill,” adding,
“Haven’t cosponsored anything yet.” Eventually, he joined forty-six of
his House colleagues in co-sponsoring the bill.
When
the legislature reconvened, the Stand Your Ground bill passed, despite
vehement objections from prosecutors across the state. In early June,
Scott signed it into law. Last fall, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine
revealed that, in Stand Your Ground’s first decade, the number of
homicides ruled legally justifiable had increased in Florida by
seventy-five per cent. In one notable instance, two boat owners got into
a fight and fell in the water; as one attempted to climb out, the other
fatally shot him in the back of the head. A jury found the killer not
guilty.
Mary Anne Franks, the law professor
from the University of Miami, told me that the number of justifiable
homicides is likely to continue to rise. “The new amendment makes it
even easier for killers who provide zero evidence of self-defense to
avoid not only being convicted but being prosecuted at all,” she said.
After
Charles McBurney learned that he’d been passed over for the judgeship,
he published an op-ed on Jacksonville.com, arguing that Hammer’s bill
had nothing to do with gun rights, and decrying her tactics. “It’s the
message being sent to our legislators and elected officials that ‘you
can be with me on virtually everything, but if you cross me once, even
if the issue doesn’t involve the Second Amendment, I will take you
out,’ ” he wrote. “It’s frightening for our republic.”
In
June, 2016, when a shooting occurred at the Pulse night club, in
Orlando, in which forty-nine people were killed and another fifty-eight
wounded, the Florida legislature was out of session. Using a long-shot
procedural maneuver, Democrats tried to convene a special session but
were rebuffed by Republicans. At the time, Hammer told the Tallahassee Democrat,
“I have not heard a single Republican say that they were interested in
spending the taxpayer’s money for a special session that would achieve
nothing but more publicity for Democrats.”
Months
later, Representative Carlos Smith, a Democrat from East Orlando,
introduced a bill that would have banned assault weapons. It never got a
hearing. “The power of Marion Hammer dictated whether we could even
have a conversation about what I was proposing,” he told me. “I lost
constituents at Pulse. I lost a friend.”
This
legislative session, he reintroduced the bill. On Tuesday, February
20th, as students from Douglas High School sat in the gallery, every
House Republican voted against bringing the legislation to the floor.
Smith said, “It was devastating to watch that happen, but the students
aren’t kids anymore, and it’s important that we don’t shield them from
harsh political realities.”
The next day,
students and other protesters descended upon the capitol. They
congregated outside the office of Governor Scott, chanting, “You work
for us!” But Scott was not there. He was attending a funeral for a
student. ♦
This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America.
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