Legacy of 1993 SF rampage The mass shooting at 101 California has shaped gun politics and policies for decades

Legacy of 1993 SF rampage The mass shooting at 101 California has shaped gun politics and policies for decades

Lying with her face pressed against an office floor, Michelle Scully squinted and saw the gunman’s shoe. Then, a flash of metal, the stench of barrel oil, and the steady sputter of a semiautomatic pistol. She closed her eyes.

Twenty-five years later, Scully — now Michelle Scully Hobus — remembers the massacre at 101 California St. in crisp fragments. How her husband, John Scully, pulled her to the floor and shielded her with his rangy, 6-foot-4 body. How she dialed 911 with her left hand because her right arm and hand were limp from a bullet wound. How Scully gazed at her as blood ran from his nose and chest.

“Michelle,” he said, “I’m dying. I love you.”

He was one of eight people slain when a heavily-armed man stormed into a downtown San Francisco law firm in 1993 and opened fire. The killings, which stand as the worst mass homicide in modern San Francisco history, stunned the city and reshaped the politics of guns.

The effects of the 101 California shooting reverberate today, yet its legacy is complicated. The gun control activism that rose from that Financial District office building has claimed many legislative victories at the state level, particularly in California. But nationally, the barriers to passing gun laws have proved far more difficult to overcome.

Statistics show that ownership of firearms has nearly tripled across the U.S. since the late 1990s, and shootings at schools, night clubs and workplaces have become a grim routine. The most recent attack happened last week, when a Maryland man entered a small newsroom in Annapolis. He carried a pump-action shotgun and a grudge.

“Honestly, I feel really sad that not a whole lot has changed,” said Hobus, who now lives in Hawaii.

“These kids from Parkland are trying to pass the same things that we were trying to pass 25 years ago,” she said, referring to students at a high school in Florida, who mobilized after a 19-year-old man entered their campus with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle in February. He shot and killed 17 students and staff members, wounding 17 others.

In many senses, Parkland is a mirror image of the July 1, 1993, rampage at 101 California St., which was supposed to be a catalyst for gun law reform.

“It happened in a place where people weren’t expecting a shooting — a law firm in a fancy downtown office building,” said Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, an organization formed by survivors of the shooting and their friends.

“It shocked the leaders of the legal community into action,” she added. “They realized that we are all threatened by gun violence.”

For anyone working in a downtown high-rise at the time, the details were terrifying.

A disgruntled businessman, Gian Luigi Ferri, marched into the glass-and-granite skyscraper with two military-style assault weapons and a handgun beneath his suit jacket. He took the elevator to Pettit & Martin, a law firm where Scully worked as an attorney, and Hobus, who is also an attorney, was visiting for the day.

Ferri got off the elevator on the 34th floor, opened his jacket and removed his two TEC-DC9 pistols. For 15 minutes he walked down four flights of stairs, shooting anyone who crossed his path.

By the time police caught him on a stairwell, eight people were dead and six injured. He put the handgun to his chin and shot himself.

“I can’t tell you how shocking it was back then,” said Alan Koschik, who worked as an associate at Pettit & Martin. He was reading a newspaper in the firm’s 35th-floor library when the gunfire began. Koschik escaped by climbing an interior staircase to the 37th floor and jumping into an elevator.

Survivors of the shooting channeled their fear and anguish into political activism. Their nonprofit Giffords Law Center assists with lawsuits against firearm manufacturers and promotes bills to enhance gun control. The center is named for former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who became a spirited advocate for gun law reform after she was shot in the head by an antigovernment constituent in 2011.

Two significant federal laws passed in quick succession after 101 California. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which was already in motion, required federal background checks for gun buyers. It passed in the fall of 1993, propelled in part by the outcry in San Francisco. The next year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pushed a 10-year assault weapons ban through Congress.

In an email to The Chronicle last week, Feinstein described how shattered she was by the mass shooting in her city. She deemed it “a tipping point.”

But that momentum receded. Feinstein’s law helped spur a conservative backlash and a Republican takeover of the House in the 1994 midterm elections. The carefully orchestrated “Republican revolution” was fueled in part by lobbying from the National Rifle Association. The Republicans have had a good showing in Congress ever since.

“It was a moment that definitely inspired more gun-control advocacy, but in the perspective of a 25-year look, the story is not good for the gun-control movement,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and gun policy expert.

This year, Feinstein is pressing a new assault weapons ban, but now she needs a filibuster-proof majority — 60 votes — and she’s facing a more starkly partisan, Republican-controlled Congress.

And nationally, the number of gun sales has ballooned since Brady background checks took effect in fall 1998. The next year, there were 9.14 million checks, according to FBI records. By 2017, that number had nearly tripled, to 25.2 million.

While the FBI warns there is no one-to-one correlation between checks and sales because state laws and purchasing scenarios vary, Winkler and other experts view these numbers as a barometer for how many guns are on the street.

Advocates on the gun-rights side say the spike in gun ownership is a reaction to the Democrats’ calls for stricter gun control. Although Congress has done little to address the issue, President Barack Obama signed several executive orders to improve background check systems and research causes of gun violence, among other things. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016, made gun safety a plank of her campaign, sending gun buyers into a frenzy.

“It’s a funny thing about American consumers — when they think they’re not going to be able to get something, they’ll rush out and buy it,” said Dave Workman, senior editor at TheGunMag, an online publication of the Second Amendment Foundation.

Yet gun reform activists have hope after the shootings in Parkland that seemed to hit a raw nerve among Americans and catapulted the school’s students to the national stage.

“We’re seeing progress in the political arena,” Thomas said. “This was not an issue that candidates were willing to run on in the past. Now they’re seeing it will get votes.”

She pointed to 52 gun-safety bills passed in 25 states in Parkland’s aftermath, ranging from bans on devices known as bump stocks that turn semiautomatic rifles into machine guns to firearm restrictions for domestic violence abusers. They include tighter background checks in Vermont, a rural state that for generations has put few limits on firearms. And in Florida, a Republican Legislature passed reforms to outlaw bump stocks and raise the minimum age to buy firearms to 21. The state has long been a leader in the gun rights movement.

101CALIF-2/C/01JUL98/MN/BW--101CALIF-2/01JUL98/MN/BW--Children of friends and victims of those lost in the 101 California Street shootings five years ago looked over the array of flowers left during a ceremony Wednesday in front of the building. By Brant Ward/Chronicle less 101CALIF-2/C/01JUL98/MN/BW--101CALIF-2/01JUL98/MN/BW--Children of friends and victims of those lost in the 101 California Street shootings five years ago looked over the array of flowers left during a ceremony ... more Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle 1998 Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle 1998 Image 1 of / 6 Caption Close SF’s ’93 rampage at 101 California continues to shape gun politics, policies 1 / 6 Back to Gallery

Cities and counties throughout the U.S. have also enacted gun regulations, and San Francisco, in particular, has been a model, Thomas said. The city’s Board of Supervisors has passed ordinances to prohibit large-capacity magazines and keep guns out of public parks or rallies.

In May, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced a bill to end gun shows at the Cow Palace in Daly City. The venue holds five gun shows a year, and three previous attempts to ban them have failed.

San Francisco’s efforts, combined with those of state lawmakers, encourage Stephen Sposato, a Lafayette engineering consultant whose wife, Jody, was killed in the 101 California gunfire.

He recalls the day vividly. Jody was at Pettit & Martin giving a deposition for a lawsuit when Ferri got off the elevator. Sposato would learn of her death hours later, after he arrived home from work. He said he was with the couple’s toddler, watching television news “as the bodies were being brought out.”

“We were both watching, looking for mommy,” Sposato said.

Sposato and Hobus became active proponents of gun control, supporting, among other measures, Feinstein’s 1994 law and another comprehensive assault weapons ban in California that then-Gov. Gray Davis signed into law in 1999. During the signing ceremony in San Francisco, Davis handed Sposato the pen.

Looking at the gun debate nationally, Sposato and Winkler, the UCLA expert, are not optimistic about Feinstein’s new iteration of the assault weapons ban. Power in the Senate is skewed toward rural states, and they tend to favor lax gun laws, Winkler said.

And while polls show that most voters in the U.S. would support universal background checks for gun owners, such proposals have hit resistance from a small, ardent minority.

“The people who want background checks are diffuse and less passionate,” Winkler said. “All the passion is on the pro-gun side.”

Given the political climate, it’s unclear whether the fervor ignited by Parkland will endure — or whether it will have a significant bearing on electing gun-reform-minded Democrats to federal and state offices in November.

Thomas, head of the Giffords Law Center, is hopeful. She noted that Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic front-runner in the governor’s race, “really emphasizes gun regulation.”

“It’s clear that voters and constituents really want change on this issue,” she said.

But Winkler said the political winds could shift either way, heading into a November election where both the Democrats and the Republicans think the gun issue is on their side.

The uncertainty rattles Sposato, who is a gun owner and a Republican.

“I’m here to tell you that the party has failed me,” he said. “It’s failed the Parkland kids. It’s failed the Columbine kids. And it’s going to fail the victims of the next 150 shootings, too.”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan