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Mark Kelly didn’t know what a “bump stock” was before the Las Vegas mass shooting—but he says the signs that Congress is moving quickly to ban the semiautomatic rifle modification prove what he and other gun control advocates have argued for years: Pass the right kind of laws, and lives will be saved.


Even the National Rifle Association agrees on this one—though instead of backing new legislation, the group pushed for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms last week to use existing laws to crack down on bump stocks.

Kelly, the retired astronaut, husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords and co-founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions, says that’s “a big deal.”

“They are acknowledging that legislation matters. A lot of these folks have been saying it doesn’t matter, it will never matter,” Kelly told me in the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “They have just turned that argument upside down. And that’s a good thing. You know, maybe people have to be educated, right?”

In what’s become an endless rinse-repeat of mass shootings, speculation that this time will be different, politicians offering up clichéd expressions of “thoughts and prayers,” frustrated Democrats dismissing “thoughts and prayers” as a cop-out and the issue fading from conversation until the next mass shooting, Kelly said this actually does feel different, if only slightly, at the margins.

Kelly has never had much sympathy for people in Washington who tell him the answer isn’t new gun laws. He cites the comparative statistics on gun violence in states with stronger background checks and other restrictions to prove it, and like the engineer he trained as before going to space, can’t quite figure how anyone in good conscience responds to those by just repeatedly citing their NRA rating to him, as he says happens all the time in private conversations he’s had on the Hill.

“I think if you’re a member of Congress and you fundamentally believe laws don’t work, you should quit. I mean, you really should. You’re in the wrong job. And that goes for anything, including this issue,” he said.

Kelly says he never thought much about gun laws before the shooting that nearly killed his wife in 2011, but he’s lived through every mass shooting since with a feeling of disconcerting immediacy—“a lot of the victims of this shooting, that will never fully recover from this thing. They will live with it for the rest of their lives,” he says. But unlike previous times, when the news broke of last week’s massacre on the Strip, Kelly and Giffords happened to be in Washington, on their way to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam in Virginia.

Instead, they rerouted to the Capitol, the first time they’d been there in the immediate aftermath of a shooting. Giffords stood to the side for most of the appearance as Kelly spoke, taking the microphone for just a moment to raise her fist toward her old colleagues in the Capitol and say, “Your nation’s counting on you.”

“She’s frustrated that more of her colleagues don’t see this,” Kelly said.

The conventional wisdom holds that gun control is a losing issue for Democrats in rural areas. But ARS and Everytown, the Mike Bloomberg-backed gun control group, both saw last year’s New Hampshire Senate race as a watershed, claiming credit for Maggie Hassan’s ultra-narrow 1,000-vote win after the groups centralized the attacks on Kelly Ayotte for not backing gun control. Beyond Northam, Giffords is planning to campaign for New Jersey gubernatorial Democratic candidate Phil Murphy in the coming weeks, and they’re drawing up plans for a very active 2018. They also proudly point to the money donated from the NRA over the course of his career that Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan last week donated to ARS instead.

Click here to subscribe and listen to the full podcast, to hear Kelly on how Gabby Giffords feels about returning to stand with her old colleagues on the Hill, and his own feelings about President Trump’s space council—“with every new president there’s a change in direction of our space program.”

At the Capitol last week, Kelly was asked if he’s thought about running himself—if he could have more influence from the inside than on the outside.

He gave me the same answer he gave then: “I really only think about it when somebody asks me about it, and then because I feel like I owe them an answer.”

Kelly still refers to Giffords as the “politician in the family,” and at the townhouse in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington that ARS has converted into its headquarters, the walls are decorated with memorabilia from her time in Congress: photos with colleagues on the floor, a bill signed by President Barack Obama with the commemorative pen in the frame. Kelly, by contrast, was a Navy fighter pilot, then a full-time NASA employee until he retired in the wake of Giffords’ shooting, and is still in some ways adjusting to what’s become a nearly full-time job as an advocate.

But when I pressed him on the rumors of a run for governor of Arizona next year, Kelly was notably much more circumspect about the answer to that question than anything else that came up.

“I would never say never. I think elected office, running for office, public service—hey, I was a public servant my entire career, right, and 25 years in the Navy and at NASA. I feel that Gabby and I and our organization, Americans for Responsible Solutions, has been incredibly effective on this issue, moving the country in the right direction on this,” he said. “I don’t know if I could necessarily be as effective on this on the inside.”

As for whether that rules 2018 out, though, Kelly said, “We don’t know. We don’t know,” adding, “Let me just say I’m not planning anything.”

In the meantime, Kelly said he’s focused on preserving silencer restrictions and stopping what’s known as “concealed carry reciprocity,” which opens up every state to all the others’ gun permit laws. It’s all a business proposition by the NRA, he said: “They’re trying to sell more guns to less people.”

He’s suspicious, as other gun control advocates are, that the move on bump stocks is an NRA ploy to seem responsive without addressing anything more significant.

The search for a motive for the Las Vegas shooter continues, but to Kelly, it’s obvious domestic terrorism, enabled by the system that Congress and the NRA have created.

“Usually, you think terrorism, it’s got to be political or religious or some group—I’m convinced that when a guy goes to the window of a casino and tries to murder a massive number of people—he wasn’t trying to kill 50 people; he was trying to kill 500 people,” Kelly said. “I think the message he is sending is, ‘Hey! I am capable and willing, and I’m going to go out and do this, and I’m going to kill a bunch of people all at once.’ And to me, that is political here in the United States.”

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