Cover Story: Barack & Load

Gottlieb beats the pro-gun drums in fear that opponents are gaining a new foothold. One of Gottlieb's recent targets is Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who has proposed a ban on gun possession by anyone on the FBI's terrorist watch list. [This story has been changed since it was first posted. It originally gave an innacurate description of how Gottlieb "refers to" Lautenberg.]Yet gun-control hysteria clearly softened after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Washington CeaseFire president Ralph Fascitelli, who calls Gottlieb a "scoundrel," concedes gun control "on the federal level is stymied," though he says his Seattle-based group remains active. "Actually, the Supreme Court's [D.C.] ruling last year was one of the best things to happen to the gun-control movement," he says. "That slippery-slope argument, that any new gun law is just another step towards taking all guns away, is dead."

Ex–Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper says much of the debate now is just hyperbole, noting that "with few exceptions, politicians, for all their bluster, are timid, calculating souls. As with the drug war, the people are generally out ahead of their elected officials on gun control." Obama, he adds, has "too much on his plate, and too little political capital, to try to separate Americans from their guns."

Steven Dewall

Despite an abundance of firearm-themed decor, Gottlieb rarely packs heat in his Bellevue office.

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• Barack Obama
• Second Amendment Foundation
• National Rifle Association
• Politics
• Gun Control

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Peter Hamm, Communications Director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, says that, if anything, Obama has failed to meet his group's expectations. "We're not seeing the same thing [Gottlieb] and his friends are," Hamm says. "It's propaganda of the most ludicrous and misleading sort. They wanted to gin up their supporters before the election, and couldn't do it, so now ever since the guy got elected he's the Antichrist of guns. Yet Obama's done nothing." (Actually, he's done something—inking a bill that overturned a national-parks gun ban.)

But Gottlieb's tactics may be winning out. An October Gallup Poll concluded that 55 percent of gun owners believe Obama will attempt to ban gun sales. Another October poll by Rasmussen Reports found that just 39 percent of respondents think the country needs stricter gun laws, down from 43 percent six months earlier. Americans, say Gottlieb, "have had it with utopian gun bans that leave them defenseless against merciless thugs."

He's talking about firearms possessed by violent criminals, who take advantage of the mostly unchecked flow of legal and illegal handguns and assault weapons. He's not talking about armed white-collar felons, such as himself.

Gun control pulls everyone's trigger, and Gottlieb is usually happy to be the media bull's-eye. But he wasn't so fond of that role in the 1980s, when some of his own employees turned on him. In a lawsuit, they claimed he was wrongly using SAF funds for his personal benefit, and tried to wrest control of the nonprofit. (The disagreement even came to blows in 1984, when police were called to break up a scuffle between Gottlieb family members—his wife is also an SAF employee—and the rebelling workers.)

In a drawn-out court fight, Gottlieb countersued and ultimately prevailed: A judge dismissed the employees' suit and stuck them with $30,000 in damages. Acontented Gottlieb said he used the money to buy himself a black Corvette.

Adding to the spectacle, Gottlieb at the time had just finished serving a year-and-a-day prison term related to a tax-evasion investigation. He pled guilty to a federal charge of failing to pay a $29,396 tax debt (with penalties and interest) on his personal income five years earlier.

As a convicted felon, the man who advocated unrestricted gun ownership couldn't own a gun. But as an ex-con (he did his time in a Spokane work-release facility), Gottlieb discovered a little-known program administered by the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It allowed him to regain his gun rights in 1985, after an ATF review concluded he was a worthy nonviolent offender. (The restoration law still exists, but Congress has barred ATF from funding the program since 1992, effectively killing it).

In an ATF report obtained by the D.C.-based Violence Policy Center, which undertook a study of gun-reinstatement cases, Gottlieb told federal agents that it was "awkward for him not to handle firearms" when here he was the firearms nut. (Gottlieb's e-mail address, incidentally, is akagunnut@aol.com.) In recommending restoration, Gottlieb's investigating officer sympathetically described him as a "very devoted gun person...into conservative Right Wing stuff." It wasn't as though he shot anybody. And he never has, he says. (One night in a parking lot, he did draw on a man with a knife intent on robbing him, Gottlieb says. The suspect "left quickly.")

Gottlieb calls himself a responsible, if prolific, gun owner. At his Bellevue home he has at least 60 weapons, mostly collectors' firearms. He doesn't like to be photographed with his guns, and isn't demonstrative about them—he's no Stephen Colbert, fondling his "Sweetness." A black bag filled with the handguns Gottlieb takes to a nearby shooting range sits among the organized clutter of his office, which includes a portrait of a gunman shooting a bullet so large it requires a second portrait to capture it.

Personally, Gottlieb favors either a Detonics .45 or a Browning 9 mm. He doesn't always bear a weapon, he says, and hardly ever carries one around the office. "My employees [about a dozen] are armed enough to protect me," he notes with a smile. So when is Gottlieb most certain to be packing? "Whenever I go to Seattle," he says, still smiling.