Tornado Alley (PROG)

[ergo sum]

WARREN, N.H. — It was 45 minutes into Senator Kelly Ayotte’s town hall-style meeting here on Tuesday, and the local Republican official screening question topics had allowed just one query on gun control. A few in the crowd of about 150 started to get agitated.



“You like to regulate that,” shouted Eric Knuffke, 72, a resident of nearby Wentworth who rose to complain about the way speakers were being cherry-picked. “But you don’t want to regulate guns.”

The outburst reflected how central Ms. Ayotte (pronounced eh-AUGHT), the first-term New Hampshire Republican, is to the resurgent debate over gun control. As one of the senators who two weeks ago helped scuttle a bill that would have imposed a new standard for background checks, she has become a focus of gun control supporters looking to persuade a handful of senators to switch their votes.

With lawmakers back home for the first time since the defeat of the gun legislation backed by President Obama, the experience of Ms. Ayotte is being watched by both sides in the debate.

In an effort to settle the room down, Ms. Ayotte turned to Erica Lafferty, whose mother was one of the 27 people who were killed in the shootings in Newtown, Conn. Ms. Lafferty, 27, asked the senator about a previous remark that background checks could burden gun stores. “I’m just wondering,” she said, her back stiffening, “why the burden of my mother being gunned down in the halls of her elementary school isn’t as important?”

The senator, her hoarse voice growing soft, said, “Erica, certainly let me first say, obviously, I’m so sorry.”

But her position on new gun laws, she explained, had not changed. “As you and I both know, the issue wasn’t a background check system issue in Sandy Hook. Mental health, I hope, is the one thing we can agree on going forward.”

Gun control supporters focusing on a handful of Republican senators from Alaska to Arizona to Nevada see Ms. Ayotte as a natural if reluctant ally and are pushing her hard to flip. Second Amendment rights groups, meanwhile, are working to keep her where she is.

Gun rights advocates need point no further than to Dick Swett, whose story still haunts New Hampshire politics after 20 years.

Mr. Swett was a third-term Democratic congressman from the state when he cast one of the deciding votes for the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons. He would never see a fourth term.

“It was the worst experience of my life,” Mr. Swett said, recalling the furious campaign carried out against him. He received death threats and started wearing a bulletproof vest.

Ms. Ayotte, a former state attorney general, aggressively prosecuted some of the state’s most notorious murder cases, including one in which she won the state’s first capital conviction in nearly half a century.

She is also a mother who represents a state that has become more diverse, more affluent and less Republican. She is the only Republican among the five people — all women — who hold statewide office.

“She was elected by these women voters from suburban bedroom communities, some of the people who care the most about this issue,” said Jen Bluestein of Americans for Responsible Solutions, the group run by former Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and her husband, Mark Kelly. The group has been running a radio ad here in which two women express dismay over Ms. Ayotte’s vote.

“Are you serious?” the ad says, “89 percent of the people in New Hampshire support universal background checks. She just ignored us?”

Michael R. Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns released a new television ad on Tuesday that attacks Ms. Ayotte’s strongest asset: her law enforcement credentials. “Senator Ayotte is giving criminals a pass,” an older man says.

Organizing for Action, President Obama’s nationwide political organization, and other left-leaning advocacy groups, are helping to recruit people to rallies across the state and urging them to show up in protest at Ms. Ayotte’s town meetings this week. Ms. Lafferty was part of that effort on Tuesday.

It is unclear whether Ms. Ayotte will yield to pressure or continue, as she and her supporters have so far, to write it off as noise kicked up by a well-organized coalition of liberal groups.

Through a spokesman, she declined a request for an interview. Though her office organized a series of town meetings across the state this week, it barely publicized them. On her way out of the meeting here, she ignored reporters’ questions.

Ms. Ayotte has powerful allies in state and national gun owners’ groups, two of which are running ads countering the message coming from gun control advocates.

“Kelly Ayotte is not just a senator,” says a woman in one radio spot from the National Rifle Association’s New Hampshire chapter, “she’s also a mom who cares about protecting our kids. She knows the only way to prevent tragedies like Sandy Hook is to fix our broken mental health system.”

Another radio ad from the National Shooting Sports Foundation urges residents of this proudly libertarian state to call their senator and express gratitude, as it jabs at Mr. Bloomberg of New York as “a big-city mayor who thinks he knows what’s best for the rest of us.”

Gun control has never been an easy sell in this state, where low crime and small government are prized.

“We don’t have the large number of those types of crimes, so therefore it’s not on our front burner all the time,” said Russell Lary, a former police chief for the Town of Grantham and, like many current and former law enforcement officials in New Hampshire, an Ayotte supporter.

Ms. Ayotte is, for now, resisting expanding background checks while talking with Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, about a bill to create a federal gun trafficking statute.

Yet there is precedent for a Republican New Hampshire senator having a change of heart on gun control. Judd Gregg, whom Ms. Ayotte succeeded in 2011, initially voted against the assault weapons ban in 1994. He supported it 10 years later when it came up for renewal, though it ultimately never became law.

Mr. Gregg, who won re-election after that 2004 vote, said he doubted Ms. Ayotte would suffer for her stance, especially given solid law enforcement credentials.

“In New Hampshire, if you’re viewed as a person of integrity and you vote for what you think is right, people will give you a lot of running room,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/us/politics/ayotte-supported-criticized-in-new-hampshire-on-gun-vote.html?hpw&_r=0