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Obama linked to gun control efforts
April 20, 2008
Barack Obama's presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners
that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn't
want to take away their guns.
But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a
Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly
$2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions.
The foundation funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the Second
Amendment does not protect individual gun owners' rights, as well as two
groups that advocated handgun bans. And it paid to support a book called
"Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns."
Obama's eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him
more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his
campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman
for Obama's presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to
Politico this week.
LaBolt stressed that the foundation, which has assets of about $935 million,
doesn't take "detailed policy positions," but rather uses its grants to
"fuel a dialogue about how to address public policy issues like reducing gun
violence."
As with most foundations, Joyce did not record how individual board members
voted on grants, but former Joyce officials told Politico that funding was
typically approved unanimously.
LaBolt said Obama, an Illinois senator, "does not remember each of the over
1,500 individual grant requests and his assessment of their merits, but he
considered all requests in light of the foundation's goal of developing a
robust public dialogue around reducing gun violence."
Obama joined the board in the summer of 1994 as a 32-year-old lawyer who had
yet to run for public office, but he already had a reputation in Chicago as
an up-and-comer, particularly on issues related to low-income communities -
a key foundation focus.
By the time he left the board in the winter of 2002, as he was gearing up
for his 2004 U.S. Senate bid, Obama had served six years in the Illinois
state Senate and had also considered leaving politics to become the group's
full-time president, by his own acknowledgment.
Obama's service on the board of the Joyce Foundation and a few other
Chicago-based nonprofits including the Woods Fund of Chicago remains one of
the least scrutinized parts of his career. But it's one that could hamper
his efforts to woo populations of rural pro-gun voters in Pennsylvania,
which votes April 22, and in a general election match-up with the
presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.
In his appeal to gun owners, Obama has not emphasized his own legislative
record, which includes supporting a ban on semiautomatic weapons and
concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. He has
blamed his staff for indicating on a questionnaire filled out during his
1996 state Senate bid under his name that he supports banning "the
manufacture, sale and possession of handguns."
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and served
as president of the Harvard Law Review, has instead focused on his respect
for what he contends are constitutionally guaranteed gun owners' rights, the
"passion" of hunters and the "tradition" of handgun ownership.
In February, he told an Idaho audience "I have no intention of taking away
folks' guns." Days later, when Politico asked him about the comment, he
said, "It's important for us to recognize that we've got a tradition of
handgun ownership and gun ownership generally."
Pressed to clarify his stance during a debate Wednesday evening in
Philadelphia, Obama told ABC News anchor Charles Gibson, "I have never
favored an all-out ban on handguns. What I think we can provide is
common-sense approaches to the issue of illegal guns that are ending up on
the streets."
A white paper on his website states: "As a former constitutional law
professor, Barack Obama . greatly respects the constitutional rights of
Americans to bear arms" as well as "the passion that hunters and anglers
have for their sport." It says: "He will protect the rights of hunters and
other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport and use guns for the
purposes of hunting and target shooting."
And, in a memo to reporters this week defending Obama's much-criticized
assertion that down-on-their luck small-town voters "get bitter" and "cling
to guns or religion" or isolationism, his campaign touted his position on
guns and blasted New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's.
Obama supported a 2002 amendment to bar the use of federal homeland security
funds to seize firearms during states of emergency, while the memo pointed
out she opposed it. The memo adds: "Sen. Obama has consistently stated that
the Second Amendment contains an individual right and has been consistent in
his support of common-sense gun laws that do not abridge that right because
it is a matter of defending the Constitution."
But the Joyce Foundation in 1999 awarded $84,000 to the Chicago-Kent College
of Law for a symposium on the theory that the Second Amendment does not
protect an individual's right to bear arms, but rather only a state's right
to arm its militia.
"No effort was made to include the individual right point of view," its
organizer, Carl T. Bogus, a Roger Williams University School of Law
professor, wrote in one of several law review articles stemming from the
symposium. "Full and robust public debate is not always best served by
having all viewpoints represented in every symposium. Sometimes one point of
view requires greater illumination."
The Chicago-Kent Law Review edition that resulted from the symposium has
been influential in Second Amendment jurisprudence. It was cited several
times in a 2002 federal court decision upholding most of a tough California
gun control law on the basis that the Constitution doesn't protect
individual gun owners' rights. It was also cited in a 2001 federal court
decision out of New Orleans that took the opposite view.
The Supreme Court denied review of both cases, but it will address the issue
in a forthcoming decision in a closely watched case challenging the D.C.
handgun ban.
Obama hasn't taken a firm stand on the ban or on the case before the high
court. "I confess I obviously haven't listened to the briefs and looked at
all the evidence," he told Gibson during Wednesday's debate. "As a general
principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to
bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that
the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right."
During Obama's time on the Joyce board, though, the foundation gave seven
grants totaling more than $2.5 million to a group that wants Congress to
take much more proactive action: the Violence Policy Center.
The D.C.-based nonprofit, which calls itself "the most aggressive group in
the gun control movement," for years has argued for a national handgun ban.
In a 2000 study called "Unsafe in Any Hands: Why America Needs to Ban
Handguns," the group concluded that Congress could and should ban handguns
nationwide "soon" and allocate $16.25 billion to buy back the 65 million
handguns it estimated were then owned by civilians.
The study dismissed as "pure myth" the theory that the Second Amendment bars
such strict gun control laws.
The study was funded partly by the Joyce Foundation, said Josh Sugarmann,
the center's executive director. "The Joyce Foundation gives us general
support," he said, though he added that the foundation's continued funding
of his group is primarily for efforts to study the public health effects of
gun violence.
That appears to be the purpose of a majority of the 83 gun-violence grants
totaling nearly $24 million approved by Joyce's board from 1997 (the first
year for which the foundation has posted its annual report online) through
2002.
But in 2000, the foundation also awarded a $20,000 grant to a publishing
group to support Sugarmann's book, "Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case
for Banning Handguns."
And in 2002, Joyce gave $10,000 to a nonprofit group called Handgun-Free
America. The purpose of the grant was "to support a student grass-roots gun
violence prevention campaign." But the organization billed itself as
"dedicated to ending the handgun epidemic in America through the sensible
act of banning private handgun ownership."
Sugarmann's group filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting the D.C.
handgun ban, while Bogus is the lawyer for a group of scholars who also
filed an amicus brief taking D.C.'s side in the case. Still another amicus
brief supporting the ban was signed by a half dozen anti-gun-violence groups
to which Joyce gave 14 grants totaling $3.2 million while Obama was on the
board. Joyce's grants to the groups - Freedom States Alliance, Illinois
Council Against Handgun Violence, Iowans for the Prevention of Gun Violence,
the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence and Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort -
were mostly for state-based activities.
Though both Sugarmann and Bogus disagree with Obama's interpretation of the
Second Amendment, they also contend that Obama should not be held to account
for grants made by Joyce.
"To think that every board member of a foundation is somehow responsible for
not just every grant made but the end product displays a lack of
understanding of the ways foundations operate and is unrealistic," Sugarmann
said.
It's "absurd," Bogus said. "Even in our hyperventilating world, it seems to
me that there is nothing wrong with a board member of a particular charity
voting to dispense funds to organizations that hold a different view than he
happens to hold, at least in part."
The Joyce Foundation's board is comprised of a dozen people. Though it has
included individuals active in both political parties, the foundation is
strictly nonpartisan. At meetings, directors are expected to be prepared to
discuss the contents of binders that sometimes contain hundreds of
single-spaced, double-sided pages describing more than 100 grant proposals.
"Not every [grant] got discussed," said Carin Clauss, a professor at the
University of Wisconsin Law School who served on the board with Obama. "Some
were just: 'Yeah, we don't have any problem with that.' The primary function
of the board was to identify the public policy issues that were going to be
the subject of grants."
There was "typically consensus" on funding blocks of grants, recalled
Deborah Leff, who was president of the foundation during most of Obama's
tenure. But she said "there were certainly times when grants were rejected.
This was not rubber-stamped. This was a fairly thoughtful process."
Clauss and Leff remember Obama being very well-prepared and engaged on all
issues. But both recall Obama being most active on issues related to welfare
reform and expanding employment and educational opportunities for low-income
populations.
Neither Clauss nor Leff recollect Obama objecting to, or otherwise
discussing, grants related to Second Amendment scholarship or to groups
interested in banning handguns nationwide.
"Chances are that I would recall it," said Leff, adding that she also did
program work on gun violence for the foundation. "So I think that would have
stuck with me."
Clauss, who contributed $250 to Obama's 2004 Senate campaign and $500 to his
presidential bid, recalled that Obama indicated an interest in becoming
president of the foundation after he lost his 2000 congressional primary
challenge to incumbent Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.).
In an interview last year with The Boston Globe, Obama played down the
seriousness of his discussions with the Joyce Foundation about becoming its
president.
The foundation presidency is a full-time job, which paid Leff's successor
$232,000 in 2000. But Clauss said many board members "would have advised
Obama not to [take it], since it would have taken him out of the activist
political role."
Politico attempted to contact seven other current and former foundation
board members who served with Obama, seeking their recollections about his
stances on gun control and the Second Amendment. Four did not return calls
or e-mails, one said he had no recollection of Obama's stances, and two
deferred to Ellen Alberding, the current board president.
She acknowledged that the board decided collectively not to comment on Obama's
tenure.
"They're letting me handle it," Alberding said. "We figured that it'd
probably be better to have one voice."
Alberding said Sugarmann's group is "the only organization that we fund that
explicitly has that goal" of a national handgun ban. The foundation's cash
can't be used to lobby, she pointed out. And she stressed that when Obama
was on the board, the focus of the foundation's gun violence program was
almost exclusively on studying the issue from a public health perspective.
With all the group's grants, though, Alberding said, "We're not promoting a
particular solution. We're promoting really smart people to think about
problems and come up with ideas on how to solve them."
For instance, she pointed out that the foundation also has funded the Ohio
State University's Second Amendment Research Center. Its website says it
strives to address gun violence, while also recognizing "equally the
widespread private ownership of firearms in the United States, the many
legitimate uses of firearms in American society, and the high levels of
firearm violence in our country."
But the center's director, Saul Cornell, joined Bogus' Supreme Court brief
supporting D.C.'s gun ban.
The center got $525,000 from Joyce during Obama's time on the board.
Alberding pointed out that gun violence is not among the biggest of the six
broad areas in which the foundation issues grants to shape public policy.
Its three primary interests are protecting the environment and increasing
poor people's access to education and jobs.
The other areas in which the foundation issues grants include reducing the
influence of money in politics and boosting high culture in Chicago.
Of the $219 million in grants approved from 1997 through 2002 - the years of
Obama's tenure for which the foundation has posted its annual reports
online - the environment received $57 million, followed by education ($56
million), employment ($41 million), gun violence ($21 million), money and
politics ($17 million) and culture ($6.5 million).
Obama linked to gun control efforts
April 20, 2008
Barack Obama's presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners
that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn't
want to take away their guns.
But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a
Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly
$2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions.
The foundation funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the Second
Amendment does not protect individual gun owners' rights, as well as two
groups that advocated handgun bans. And it paid to support a book called
"Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns."
Obama's eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him
more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his
campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman
for Obama's presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to
Politico this week.
LaBolt stressed that the foundation, which has assets of about $935 million,
doesn't take "detailed policy positions," but rather uses its grants to
"fuel a dialogue about how to address public policy issues like reducing gun
violence."
As with most foundations, Joyce did not record how individual board members
voted on grants, but former Joyce officials told Politico that funding was
typically approved unanimously.
LaBolt said Obama, an Illinois senator, "does not remember each of the over
1,500 individual grant requests and his assessment of their merits, but he
considered all requests in light of the foundation's goal of developing a
robust public dialogue around reducing gun violence."
Obama joined the board in the summer of 1994 as a 32-year-old lawyer who had
yet to run for public office, but he already had a reputation in Chicago as
an up-and-comer, particularly on issues related to low-income communities -
a key foundation focus.
By the time he left the board in the winter of 2002, as he was gearing up
for his 2004 U.S. Senate bid, Obama had served six years in the Illinois
state Senate and had also considered leaving politics to become the group's
full-time president, by his own acknowledgment.
Obama's service on the board of the Joyce Foundation and a few other
Chicago-based nonprofits including the Woods Fund of Chicago remains one of
the least scrutinized parts of his career. But it's one that could hamper
his efforts to woo populations of rural pro-gun voters in Pennsylvania,
which votes April 22, and in a general election match-up with the
presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.
In his appeal to gun owners, Obama has not emphasized his own legislative
record, which includes supporting a ban on semiautomatic weapons and
concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. He has
blamed his staff for indicating on a questionnaire filled out during his
1996 state Senate bid under his name that he supports banning "the
manufacture, sale and possession of handguns."
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and served
as president of the Harvard Law Review, has instead focused on his respect
for what he contends are constitutionally guaranteed gun owners' rights, the
"passion" of hunters and the "tradition" of handgun ownership.
In February, he told an Idaho audience "I have no intention of taking away
folks' guns." Days later, when Politico asked him about the comment, he
said, "It's important for us to recognize that we've got a tradition of
handgun ownership and gun ownership generally."
Pressed to clarify his stance during a debate Wednesday evening in
Philadelphia, Obama told ABC News anchor Charles Gibson, "I have never
favored an all-out ban on handguns. What I think we can provide is
common-sense approaches to the issue of illegal guns that are ending up on
the streets."
A white paper on his website states: "As a former constitutional law
professor, Barack Obama . greatly respects the constitutional rights of
Americans to bear arms" as well as "the passion that hunters and anglers
have for their sport." It says: "He will protect the rights of hunters and
other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport and use guns for the
purposes of hunting and target shooting."
And, in a memo to reporters this week defending Obama's much-criticized
assertion that down-on-their luck small-town voters "get bitter" and "cling
to guns or religion" or isolationism, his campaign touted his position on
guns and blasted New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's.
Obama supported a 2002 amendment to bar the use of federal homeland security
funds to seize firearms during states of emergency, while the memo pointed
out she opposed it. The memo adds: "Sen. Obama has consistently stated that
the Second Amendment contains an individual right and has been consistent in
his support of common-sense gun laws that do not abridge that right because
it is a matter of defending the Constitution."
But the Joyce Foundation in 1999 awarded $84,000 to the Chicago-Kent College
of Law for a symposium on the theory that the Second Amendment does not
protect an individual's right to bear arms, but rather only a state's right
to arm its militia.
"No effort was made to include the individual right point of view," its
organizer, Carl T. Bogus, a Roger Williams University School of Law
professor, wrote in one of several law review articles stemming from the
symposium. "Full and robust public debate is not always best served by
having all viewpoints represented in every symposium. Sometimes one point of
view requires greater illumination."
The Chicago-Kent Law Review edition that resulted from the symposium has
been influential in Second Amendment jurisprudence. It was cited several
times in a 2002 federal court decision upholding most of a tough California
gun control law on the basis that the Constitution doesn't protect
individual gun owners' rights. It was also cited in a 2001 federal court
decision out of New Orleans that took the opposite view.
The Supreme Court denied review of both cases, but it will address the issue
in a forthcoming decision in a closely watched case challenging the D.C.
handgun ban.
Obama hasn't taken a firm stand on the ban or on the case before the high
court. "I confess I obviously haven't listened to the briefs and looked at
all the evidence," he told Gibson during Wednesday's debate. "As a general
principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to
bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that
the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right."
During Obama's time on the Joyce board, though, the foundation gave seven
grants totaling more than $2.5 million to a group that wants Congress to
take much more proactive action: the Violence Policy Center.
The D.C.-based nonprofit, which calls itself "the most aggressive group in
the gun control movement," for years has argued for a national handgun ban.
In a 2000 study called "Unsafe in Any Hands: Why America Needs to Ban
Handguns," the group concluded that Congress could and should ban handguns
nationwide "soon" and allocate $16.25 billion to buy back the 65 million
handguns it estimated were then owned by civilians.
The study dismissed as "pure myth" the theory that the Second Amendment bars
such strict gun control laws.
The study was funded partly by the Joyce Foundation, said Josh Sugarmann,
the center's executive director. "The Joyce Foundation gives us general
support," he said, though he added that the foundation's continued funding
of his group is primarily for efforts to study the public health effects of
gun violence.
That appears to be the purpose of a majority of the 83 gun-violence grants
totaling nearly $24 million approved by Joyce's board from 1997 (the first
year for which the foundation has posted its annual report online) through
2002.
But in 2000, the foundation also awarded a $20,000 grant to a publishing
group to support Sugarmann's book, "Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case
for Banning Handguns."
And in 2002, Joyce gave $10,000 to a nonprofit group called Handgun-Free
America. The purpose of the grant was "to support a student grass-roots gun
violence prevention campaign." But the organization billed itself as
"dedicated to ending the handgun epidemic in America through the sensible
act of banning private handgun ownership."
Sugarmann's group filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting the D.C.
handgun ban, while Bogus is the lawyer for a group of scholars who also
filed an amicus brief taking D.C.'s side in the case. Still another amicus
brief supporting the ban was signed by a half dozen anti-gun-violence groups
to which Joyce gave 14 grants totaling $3.2 million while Obama was on the
board. Joyce's grants to the groups - Freedom States Alliance, Illinois
Council Against Handgun Violence, Iowans for the Prevention of Gun Violence,
the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence and Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort -
were mostly for state-based activities.
Though both Sugarmann and Bogus disagree with Obama's interpretation of the
Second Amendment, they also contend that Obama should not be held to account
for grants made by Joyce.
"To think that every board member of a foundation is somehow responsible for
not just every grant made but the end product displays a lack of
understanding of the ways foundations operate and is unrealistic," Sugarmann
said.
It's "absurd," Bogus said. "Even in our hyperventilating world, it seems to
me that there is nothing wrong with a board member of a particular charity
voting to dispense funds to organizations that hold a different view than he
happens to hold, at least in part."
The Joyce Foundation's board is comprised of a dozen people. Though it has
included individuals active in both political parties, the foundation is
strictly nonpartisan. At meetings, directors are expected to be prepared to
discuss the contents of binders that sometimes contain hundreds of
single-spaced, double-sided pages describing more than 100 grant proposals.
"Not every [grant] got discussed," said Carin Clauss, a professor at the
University of Wisconsin Law School who served on the board with Obama. "Some
were just: 'Yeah, we don't have any problem with that.' The primary function
of the board was to identify the public policy issues that were going to be
the subject of grants."
There was "typically consensus" on funding blocks of grants, recalled
Deborah Leff, who was president of the foundation during most of Obama's
tenure. But she said "there were certainly times when grants were rejected.
This was not rubber-stamped. This was a fairly thoughtful process."
Clauss and Leff remember Obama being very well-prepared and engaged on all
issues. But both recall Obama being most active on issues related to welfare
reform and expanding employment and educational opportunities for low-income
populations.
Neither Clauss nor Leff recollect Obama objecting to, or otherwise
discussing, grants related to Second Amendment scholarship or to groups
interested in banning handguns nationwide.
"Chances are that I would recall it," said Leff, adding that she also did
program work on gun violence for the foundation. "So I think that would have
stuck with me."
Clauss, who contributed $250 to Obama's 2004 Senate campaign and $500 to his
presidential bid, recalled that Obama indicated an interest in becoming
president of the foundation after he lost his 2000 congressional primary
challenge to incumbent Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.).
In an interview last year with The Boston Globe, Obama played down the
seriousness of his discussions with the Joyce Foundation about becoming its
president.
The foundation presidency is a full-time job, which paid Leff's successor
$232,000 in 2000. But Clauss said many board members "would have advised
Obama not to [take it], since it would have taken him out of the activist
political role."
Politico attempted to contact seven other current and former foundation
board members who served with Obama, seeking their recollections about his
stances on gun control and the Second Amendment. Four did not return calls
or e-mails, one said he had no recollection of Obama's stances, and two
deferred to Ellen Alberding, the current board president.
She acknowledged that the board decided collectively not to comment on Obama's
tenure.
"They're letting me handle it," Alberding said. "We figured that it'd
probably be better to have one voice."
Alberding said Sugarmann's group is "the only organization that we fund that
explicitly has that goal" of a national handgun ban. The foundation's cash
can't be used to lobby, she pointed out. And she stressed that when Obama
was on the board, the focus of the foundation's gun violence program was
almost exclusively on studying the issue from a public health perspective.
With all the group's grants, though, Alberding said, "We're not promoting a
particular solution. We're promoting really smart people to think about
problems and come up with ideas on how to solve them."
For instance, she pointed out that the foundation also has funded the Ohio
State University's Second Amendment Research Center. Its website says it
strives to address gun violence, while also recognizing "equally the
widespread private ownership of firearms in the United States, the many
legitimate uses of firearms in American society, and the high levels of
firearm violence in our country."
But the center's director, Saul Cornell, joined Bogus' Supreme Court brief
supporting D.C.'s gun ban.
The center got $525,000 from Joyce during Obama's time on the board.
Alberding pointed out that gun violence is not among the biggest of the six
broad areas in which the foundation issues grants to shape public policy.
Its three primary interests are protecting the environment and increasing
poor people's access to education and jobs.
The other areas in which the foundation issues grants include reducing the
influence of money in politics and boosting high culture in Chicago.
Of the $219 million in grants approved from 1997 through 2002 - the years of
Obama's tenure for which the foundation has posted its annual reports
online - the environment received $57 million, followed by education ($56
million), employment ($41 million), gun violence ($21 million), money and
politics ($17 million) and culture ($6.5 million).