Mark Kelly is not averse to risk — his go-to Gulf War maneuver for dodging Iraqi SAMs was to flip, cockpit-down, in his A-6 Intruder and let the missile zip on past.

Yet even this former space shuttle pilot feels an icy waft of danger when he approaches the glowering gun-rights advocates who show up to protest his firearms control speeches.


After all, his wife, former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, was shot through the head five-plus years ago for chatting up her constituents outside a Tucson Safeway, and the couple have been the subject of numerous death threats over the years for their activism.

But Kelly, a former astronaut and military pilot, is also a Jersey guy, and he believes deeply in the idea of talking it out with people who want him to shut the hell up, or worse.

“One of my favorite things to do is — and it makes my staff a little nervous at times — is to go and talk to protesters,” said Kelly, who spoke to me for this week’s “Off Message” podcast, halfway through a countrywide bus tour to raise awareness for gun control.

“I'll walk across the street. I walked across the street to the gun show,” he added. “So, I mean, that's why I like to engage with them, and sometimes it usually doesn't go so well right in the beginning. But if I stand there and listen and then engage them in a positive way — and I understand these people, I own guns — usually, by the end, it's a pretty positive experience for all of us.”

Who talks like this in 2016? Kelly, like his beloved, mothballed shuttle, is a Kennedy-Reagan throwback. He clings to a clean-cut civility, optimism and commitment to a plant-the-flag-on-the-moon American exceptionalism that’s lost in this downer of a campaign. (So does his twin brother, Scott, also an astronaut, just returned from his third stint at the International Space Station.)

So Kelly walks around with a quizzical "WTF" expression, like he’s wandered out of “The Right Stuff” and onto the set of “Armageddon.”

That’s the point. If Kelly has devoted himself to a cause, he’s equally intent on projecting an air of respect to people who don’t agree with him, on an issue — gun control — that evokes passionate, occasionally violent reactions. In an insult-roast election during which a presidential candidate who avoided the draft (Donald Trump) belittled a former prisoner of war (John McCain) for getting “captured,” Kelly’s crusade is not to crusade.

“I feel that if somebody is going to show up and be involved in the process, they have a right to be heard,” he told me.

If anybody has the right to be angry, it’s Kelly, whose life changed in a muzzle flash on Jan. 8, 2011: “I had just gotten off the phone with Gabby, and 10 minutes later, her chief of staff calls: ‘I don't know how to tell you this, but Gabby has been shot,’” Kelly recalled, his voice still choked with emotion even though he’s told the story many, many times.

“A little while later, I called her back, and for a second, I thought, ‘Well, did that just happen? Did I really get that phone call?’ And then she said she's been shot in the head.”

A friend offered him a ride in a private airplane, and he monitored the TV — hearing a false report that Giffords had died. When he rushed into the hospital, he was appalled, and encouraged, by what he saw. His wife had been shot clean through her head — but she was semi-conscious and responding to basic questions with nods and squeezes of his hand.

When Kelly met Giffords’ doctor, a Navy trauma surgeon named Peter Rhee, he asked him whether his wife would survive. Rhee put a hand on Kelly’s shoulder and offered a chain-of-command answer: “I haven’t given her permission to die.”

Gradually, painfully, after months of therapy, Giffords regained much of her speech — and then in December 2012 came the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn. That was when Kelly, always a Democrat but never especially political, decided to devote his life to the cause of tightening gun regulations by increasing background checks and closing the gun-show loophole.

“If you're a felon, you shouldn't be allowed to own a gun or possess a gun — so why do we make it easy for felons to own and possess guns?” he asked. “The same goes for domestic abusers, even people that are suspected terrorists, people who are dangerously mentally ill. … Frank Luntz is a Republican pollster, and he polled NRA members on background checks, and that came out at 74 percent. Nationwide, it's about 90 percent.”

What makes Kelly unique as a messenger is the fact that he’s been a lifelong gun owner and a congenital badass. As kids, Kelly and his brother were fond of climbing onto roofs — and breaking bones by taking the short way down. But it was his father, who took them out in a small Boston Whaler through the treacherous Barnegat Inlet off of the New Jersey coast, who hooked him on the danger bug.

“I almost died 10 times before I was 15 years old,” he said. “It felt like, ‘This is it. We're done,’ and I think that may have had something to do with my future path, because afterwards you're like, ‘Man, that wound up being pretty cool.’ You don't remember, like, the bad parts. You remember that it was pretty exciting.”

Guns — or more precisely, getting shot at — also played a big role in Kelly’s life. And there was an eerie foreshadowing of Giffords’ experience in his own childhood.

In the mid-1970s, Kelly’s mother — one of the first female beat cops on a suburban New Jersey police force about 10 miles outside of New York City — was investigating a report of an emotionally disturbed man holed up in his house. That was when she heard the telltale pop, and flattened onto a patch of backyard dirt, pinned down as the bullets whizzed over her head. It was the only time in her career she ever drew her gun.

“I mean, people don't realize what it's like to be shot at,” said the 52-year-old West Orange, New Jersey, native, who was around 13 when Patricia Kelly came home to tell him about her brush with death.

Kelly’s father, Richard, a detective in the same department, had the opposite experience: He was never shot at, but he did fire his gun at a suspect who tried to run him over. (Kelly is sketchy about the fate of both perps, and said he can’t recall whether either one made it out of their shootouts alive.)

“I've been shot at 39 times,” he told me with a sheepish grin, “in airplanes.”

His experiences on bombing runs in Operation Desert Storm as a young pilot make him impatient with the self-protection argument he often encounters from protesters outside his events.

“You often hear the folks on the other side, the gun guys … about how, if everybody has a gun, everybody will be safe — ‘Well, if I was there and I had a firearm,’” he said. “People don't realize what an emotional and crazy experience it is to have somebody trying to kill you. … And that's where I kind of get back to this concept that people think they're Clint Eastwood. It is not the movies.”

Kelly knows from people trying to kill him. When McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, he was brought down by anti-aircraft fire after trying to evade a Soviet-made SA-2 surface-to-air missile he described as resembling a telephone pole. On his first mission over Iraq, Kelly looked out of his cockpit to see an expanding orange dot — a smaller and more deadly SA-6 missile, which destroys aircraft by exploding or cutting them in half with razor wire.

“It's a big, bright dot, just getting bigger, not moving forward or aft in the canopy, so it stays in the same spot — which means it's coming right at you,” he said. “We go through this whole process of trying to evade it, and ultimately, it doesn't work. So you wind up doing a last-ditch maneuver, which means being upside-down, full power, stick in your lap, trying to create angular change. The thing flies over the top and explodes.”

Then he paused.

“You know what's worse than the first missile coming at you?”

“What?” I asked.

“The second one,” he added. “Because now you've already experienced this — so now you really don't like it.”