(September 1, 2002) This page gives the full story of how the Gun Safety Act cleared the Maryland Senate, as enabled by the supposedly pro-gun Senator Tim Ferguson. It is a must-read for students of grassroots activism, and any constituent of Ferguson’s district in Frederick and Carroll Counties, Maryland. – Editor.

Maryland's Gun Safety Act was a terrible defeat for conservatives.

Maryland's Senate Bill 211 in 2000, the so-called Gun Safety Act, represented a terrible defeat for conservatives and firearm owners alike. As a result of this law, the legal sale of handguns and some long guns is already dramatically down from pre-2000 levels, as few firearm manufacturers meet the law's ballistic registration requirement. The Act's final phase takes effect in January 2003, a ban on sale of handguns lacking an integrated mechanical safety device." Even though such devices have been in common use for decades, anti-gun bureaucrats interpret this as justification prohibiting sale of almost all handguns. No currently manufactured handgun meets example criteria cited by legislators at the time, so as it stands now a total handgun ban is on the way.

Gun owners worked hard in the 1998 election to establish a last line of defense against such extremist legislation. We achieved it, by electing a block of 20 pro-gun Senators who, collectively, could sustain a filibuster. With this core block of votes, the worst of any anti-gun legislation could be 'talked to death' by friends who, according to rules, need not yield the floor so long as at least 16 Senators agreed with our side.

If conservatives had such defenses in the Senate, then why did the Gun Safety Act become law?

A key hurdle to the Gun Safety Act was overcome by a stunning betrayal of the firearms community by Senator Tim Ferguson. This is as much a story of his betrayal as it is passage of SB 211.

Governor Glendening’s gun bill was already controversial by the time legislative leaders began work on it. The huge collection of measures (most of them experimental and speculative in nature) were drafted by gun control lobbyists in liberal think tanks. Senate President Mike Miller also wanted a gun control bill but lacking the most extreme of the social experiments, a ban on any but so-called "smart guns" (firearms having a computer to decide when the gun should discharge.) Miller and Glendening ended their debate the second week of April by agreeing to omit smart guns and move the rest of the package forward largely unchanged.

With leadership united behind one bill, all eyes turned to Senator Walter Baker, in whose committee the bill sat. Leadership needed a way to advance the bill without exposing the ostensibly pro-gun Baker to political damage back in his very pro-gun district. Their first plan was to move the bill through another committee. This idea was abandoned when news broke that the state's Court of Appeals had just nullified another law because of irregularities in how it passed the legislature. Nobody wanted to give pro-gun lawyers an easy way to knock out their plan in the following year.

After a week of behind-the-scenes posturing and with time slipping, the only option left to leadership as to invoke the now legendary "Rule 43" vote: they mustered a majority of the Senate to vote to bring SB 211 directly to the floor for consideration, violating a host of other Senate rules in the process but avoiding the need for Baker to vote the bill in his own committee.

This Rule 43 vote -- named for the rule that Mike Miller invoked to bring SB 211 to the floor -- occurred late in the day on Thursday, March 23, 2000. Debate on the bill was set to start the next day, so pro-gun senators met after the Thursday session to plan strategy for what all concerned believed would be the start of a filibuster. Senator Tim Ferguson was designated the floor leader to speak for pro-gun Senators in this matter.

Pro-gun advocates collected documents and talking points, and re-convened early on the morning of Friday, March 24, to distribute them among Senators who would need them in the anticipated several days of filibuster.

The Ferguson bombshell is dropped.

This is where the bombshell dropped: Senator Tim Ferguson arrived late to the Friday meeting and announced to all that he had approached the administration with a proposal to avoid the filibuster. In return, he claimed he would get two vague changes in the bill's language, which he did share with the group at that point. He indicated he would know within minutes if the administration would agree, and if so, the filibuster would be off.

Other Senators were shocked, and all firearm group advocates present strongly objected. Ferguson had described no fundamental change to the package, but in return gave up the strongest form of opposition we had worked for years to enable. The NRA lobbyist in particular had specific commitments from Senators as to their willingness to filibuster. Time was our friend at this point in the session, so even a few days of bottling up all bills -- especially left wing priorities -- would make it harder for the gun bill to survive intact.

All gun advocates in the room asked Tim Ferguson to fight, not fold. Ferguson refused in a vulgar tirade. Other pro-gun Senators, having agreed to follow Ferguson as floor leader and lacking details of the deal, had little choice but to go along. Pro-gun senators did not know what they agreed to until after the deal was done.

Legislative session resumed the morning of Friday, March 24, with Tim Ferguson in the position of having to sell his deal on the floor of the Senate. The record shows what pro-gun advocates were shocked to see: Tim Ferguson working closely with anti-gunners to fine tune a gun control package for enactment. Senator Chris Van Hollen was designated floor leader for the bill's proponents, and you can call Legislative Services in Annapolis to read for yourself material like SB 211's "Van Hollen - Ferguson Amendment." (Van Hollen is currently campaigning for Congress on his record of enacting gun control. The bill streamlined by Tim Ferguson could end up as a deciding factor in Van Hollen's race against Connie Morella, and in turn flipping control of Congress to anti-gun Democrats.)

Ferguson's flip-flop was widely reported at the time. For example, in a March 25, 2000, Sun article, Michael Dresser reported:

"By [Friday] morning, collegiality had returned to the Senate floor, where onlookers witnessed the unusual sight of liberal Montgomery Democrat Christopher Van Hollen Jr. and conservative Carroll Republican Timothy R. Ferguson jointly sponsoring amendments to a gun bill. Ferguson put the best face on the gun rights advocates' retreat. He pointed to the elimination of any "smart guns" mandate a concession Glendening and Miller had negotiated earlier in the week."

The world can know what Ferguson did that day because all proceedings on the floor of the Senate are recorded for everyone to hear. Far from serving as a pro-gun champion, Ferguson stated "in a perfect world we wish there was no such thing as guns."

Ferguson went on to twice characterize the amended bill as "a good compromise." (This is at odds with his claim in fund raising letters about making "no compromise.") On August 1, 2002, The Washington Post quoted NRA lobbyist Greg Costa as saying, "Ferguson negotiated what he called a compromise. To me it was a capitulation."

In much the same language as anti-gunners used to enact the 1988 "Saturday Night Special" gun ban, Ferguson endorsed the Handgun Roster Board, saying he wanted to add two engineers to the board to help the administration ban handguns based on electrical and mechanical features. "We can't let unsafe guns get into citizen hands."

Were there enough pro-gun Senators to sustain a filibuster?

Obviously yes, in spite of Ferguson's claims to the contrary. We know this from the Rule 43 question (bringing SB 211 to the floor.) This was the key vote, for which leadership pulled out all the stops. Conservatives got 19 votes against it. This was a few votes short of the majority needed to kill the bill outright but well more than the 16 votes needed to sustain a filibuster. Any Senator willing to vote against the Rule 43 action would already have repelled the full weight of leadership's pressure on the vote that counted most. It would have made no sense to oppose the Rule 43 action, then immediately flip positions to kill a filibuster.

More revealing is the characterization of events from Ferguson himself. In more than one published letter to constituents, he claims "there were only 13 Republicans to oppose SB 211." This suggests Ferguson's story was concocted a year after his betrayal. During the 2000 legislative session there were 14 Republicans. We are reminded that Someone who tells the truth must only remember one version of a story.

Whether 13 or 14 Republican Senators were present, any focus on pro-gun Senators of only one party gives undue credibility to Ferguson's spin of events. He is always careful to say "there were not enough GOP senators for a filibuster." That is true and irrelevant. Ferguson's arithmetic fails to count the half dozen pro-gun Democrats who had already suffered the Governor's wrath to back gunowners on this issue. Several of these Senators have never given a bad gun vote in their decades in the legislature. There was no basis to believe they would change now, especially after having already voted with us on the key procedural measure.

The NRA lobbyist present, Greg Costa, confirms this count. "I had a firm commitment from well more than 16 Senators, and I knew what to expect. My plan was to filibuster into the start of the following week and see how the battlefield looked at that time. We wanted to back up critical budget matters behind the filibuster, and see what leadership wanted more, a budget or gun control. I asked Senator Ferguson to lead this filibuster, and he agreed, but then came back and surprised us all with his deal. His claim that we didn't have enough Senators is false."

Ferguson apparently wants to focus his constituents' attention on counts of Republican senators so as to distract them from the truth: that pro-gun lobbyists had pulled out all the stops to ensure that enough Senators from both parties were lined up to oppose the plan.

Ferguson's entire record is one of deception.

While Ferguson brags about annually submitting "Right to Carry" legislation, the record also shows he has killed it annually as well. When he sponsored his bill alone (and so had no chance to succeed), he let it get a vote and go down to defeat. However each year that he had enough votes to advance it and promote our issue on the floor of the Senate, he withdrew it rather than use the opportunity to teach others why our position is right. This pattern continued throughout his career on all gun bills. More than once, he had a majority of members of the key committee as right to carry co-sponsors, yet he withdrew the bill to avoid having to make a case for us. In one year he actually voted against his own bill in committee to kill it, then worked in the office to get its official status changed to "withdrawn." Ferguson's grandstanding with this bill without using it to teach others about Right to Carry trivializes our interest, and teaches other legislators this goal is not for real.

Ferguson claims that withdrawing the bills was necessary to avoid them becoming a "Christmas tree" laden with anti-gun amendments. But pro-gun legislation having other sponsors has advanced and even become law without this effect. In fact, in 2001 he co-sponsored SB 901, to give protection to business owners who use deadly force. The bill cleared the Senate easily. What made this gun bill different? It excluded ordinary firearm owners from its protection.

Bottom line: Ferguson was the weak link.

Ultimately, the way we learn whether we have enough votes is to have a vote. Senator Ferguson denied this. Ferguson published unspecific claims that he knows other Senators would have folded on a filibuster contrary to their promises to us. But if others would not have been true, then the way to expose them is to vote. Let those who vote wrong be the focus of our community's wrath. As it is, only Ferguson is on record breaking the faith.