Gun Advocate Trains Sights On I-676 Disarming Personality Conceals Steely Resolve Of National Figure

Tucked away in an office littered with boxes of live ammunition and a brace of shredded targets on the door, Alan Gottlieb is waging war for gun rights.

His national group, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, is a leading force against Initiative 676, a handgun control measure on Washington state’s November ballot.

The committee will spend about $250,000 on the initiative fight, Gottlieb said, and has spent about $90,000 so far.

He runs a constellation of organizations based in a suburban office park that bring in millions of dollars every year for a variety of causes, from gun rights to Wise Use crusades.

His flame-red corvette is parked out front, with a vanity plate frame that says: “Too Close for Missiles. Switching to Guns.” He sums up his passion for gun rights in a single sentence: “To me, gun control is being able to hit your target.”

Art on his office walls includes a picture of a clutch of pistols nestled in a Confederate flag, and a print of a cowboy dwarfed by a giant gun barrel. The shelf behind his desk features a neon sign in the shape of a smoking gun, a gift from his mom.

A balding, 50-year-old native of Los Angeles with soft white hands, Gottlieb has a blood lust for what he calls “guerrilla marketing.”

His citizens committee, formed in 1971, has a mailing list of more than 400,000 in Washington state alone, and an annual budget of $2.5 million raised from contributors around the country. The organization has offices in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, Calif.

Other Gottlieb enterprises - including a marketing firm, a publishing house, a data processing and telemarketing business, two radio stations, a radio network and political fund-raising groups - together gross more than $12 million a year, he estimates.

More than 100 employees work at his Bellevue complex. The heart of the operation is in a locked room with motion detectors, where Gottlieb keeps a computerized mailing list of more than 20 million gun owners across the country.

He said he sends out fund-raising solicitations to everyone on the list at least twice a year.

Down the hall are 20 people working a phone bank 12 hours a day, seven days a week to dispatch legislative alerts on gun-rights issues.

Technology allows him to e-mail 30 million gun activists around the country in 36 hours. “It creates a lot of pressure on Congress,” Gottlieb says with a smile. His fax lists include 80,000 gun activists, and he’s tapped into a network of 200 gun-rights phone trees around the country.

Gottlieb’s companion organization, the Second Amendment Foundation, has 550,000 members and contributors. It’s an education and legal defense fund that also publishes newsletters with catchy titles, such as Point Blank.

His wife, Julianne Versnel, publishes Women and Guns Magazine, a slick monthly. A recent issue shows a lipsticked blonde on the cover, wearing a leopard-print body suit and cuddling a shotgun.

Inside are articles about finding hunting boots that fit and reviews of recent gun shows.

Gottlieb also runs an advertising and direct-sale marketing firm that sells everything from ladders to magazine subscriptions, as well as a press that publishes Gottlieb’s books. His titles include “The Gun Grabbers” and “Politically Correct Guns,” which features “Alan’s Dictionary.” It defines “stupid” as:

“Slow of mind; given to unintelligent decisions or acts; unimaginative, obtuse, unfeeling, like the gun control crowd that can’t see the results of disarming law-abiding citizens in a world that always produces a few bad apples who use guns and commit crimes.”

Despite his fierce Second Amendment rhetoric, Gottlieb is a sunny raconteur, delighted to talk about his business and its beginnings.

When most college students his age were marching against the Vietnam War, Gottlieb was camped out in the library at the University of Tennessee, noting the names of people who wrote letters to the editor in newspapers around the state.

He’d look up their address in the phone book and bang out a letter on a typewriter, asking for money to support the Young Americans for Freedom club at his college, a conservative political group.

Gottlieb had found his future: The letters brought in several hundred dollars a week.

His big break came from a retired eye surgeon who sent him $10,000. That outfitted Gottlieb with his first office, electric typewriter and fax machine.

Now Gottlieb has branched out to broadcasting, buying radio stations KBNP radio in Portland and KSBN in Spokane. A deal is in the works for a third station in Las Vegas.

And while other gun groups focused solely on firearms issues, Gottlieb was the first to realize gun-rights advocates shared many of the same views with property-rights groups and anti-environmentalists. He mixed the three and the Wise Use movement was born.

“He created a political movement out of whole cloth,” said Dan Barry, director of the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research in Washington, D.C. “Lots of people hate the government, or had trouble getting a building permit, but there was never a movement like this before he put it together.”

Gottlieb’s Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, run by his partner, Ron Arnold, has become a force to be reckoned with on mining, timber, grazing, and property-rights issues across the country.

A felony tax conviction in 1984 did nothing to sweeten Gottlieb’s regard for the U.S. government. He served time in a Spokane work-release center for filing a false income tax return.

It wasn’t Gottlieb’s first grudge. He traces his conservative activism to frustration at not being able to find a job as a nuclear engineer.

“Here I go to college to become a nuclear engineer, and all the environmental lawsuits are shutting down the power plants and shutting down construction. So the opportunities weren’t there after I’d busted my tail off through four years in college,” he said.

While his views are ironclad, they aren’t predictable. Gottlieb broke ranks with gun groups around the state last year, sticking out his neck in Olympia to back a bill promoting trigger locks and safe storage of guns.

The bill - which Gottlieb said wasn’t nearly as far reaching as the current initiative - didn’t get out of committee. But Gottlieb got in plenty of trouble with gun-rights activists who disagreed with his stand.

“I talked to a lot of grass-roots gun owners not happy with him at all,” said Brian Judy, lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, which fought the measure. “They felt he turned his back on law-abiding gun owners. They took it personally.”

Among gun-control activists, Gottlieb’s reputation is mixed.

“He’s recognized there’s money to be made in right wing issues, and guns is one of them,” said Josh Sugarman, director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C. “But on the national level he’s not that much of a force.”

Pam Eakes of Mothers Against Violence in America, a national anti-violence group headquartered in Seattle, worked with Gottlieb on the trigger lock bill that failed in Olympia. “I respected his guts to come join us.”

No one doubts Gottlieb’s business acumen. “Alan has a unique ability. He’s one of the best people in the country on direct mail,” said Chuck Cushman, who runs a national property-rights advocacy group in Battleground, Wash.

His steadfast defense of gun rights has created a loyal following of gun activists across the state who are now joining the citizens committee in the fight against I-676.

William Nerud of Colbert is a life member of Gottlieb’s citizens committee and has sent the organization thousands of dollars over the years.

“He’s one of my personal heroes,” Nerud said. “He’s exposing the gun-grabbers.”

Gottlieb sees his fight against I-676 as nothing less than a defense of individual liberty.

“The Second Amendment is where the battle is. It’s the cutting edge of the freedom fight. It doesn’t matter if it’s this country or another country. If you disarm the populace, you can do other things to them.”

, DataTimes MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. Alan Gottlieb Age: 50 Profession: An activist supporting gun rights and opposing environmentalist causes. Genius: Direct mail marketing. Runs a host of marketing, publishing, and political organizations that gross more than $12 million a year. Personal: Drives a flame red Corvette and takes his french poodle Winston to work in his Bellevue office complex. Causes: A founder of the Wise Use movement and a key backer of the opposition campaign to I-676, a handgun control initiative on the November ballot.

2. Initiative 676 Requires an operable trigger lock to be provided with every handgun sold, loaned, delivered, or transferred in any way to another person. Requires gun owners to pass a test to obtain a safety license to lawfully own their gun. Allows police to confiscate handguns that are not legally owned. Requires the license to be renewed every five years. Releases confidential medical records to police or courts to determine a person’s fitness to own a gun.