mark kelly is not averse to risk <u+2014> 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. story continued below 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. <u+201c>one of my favorite things to do is <u+2014> and it makes my staff a little nervous at times <u+2014> is to go and talk to protesters,<u+201d> said kelly, who spoke to me for this week<u+2019>s <u+201c>off message<u+201d> podcast, halfway through a countrywide bus tour to raise awareness for gun control. <u+201c>i'll walk across the street. i walked across the street to the gun show,<u+201d> he added. <u+201c>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 <u+2014> and i understand these people, i own guns <u+2014> usually, by the end, it's a pretty positive experience for all of us.<u+201d> 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<u+2019>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<u+2019>s wandered out of <u+201c>the right stuff<u+201d> and onto the set of <u+201c>armageddon.<u+201d> that<u+2019>s the point. if kelly has devoted himself to a cause, he<u+2019>s equally intent on projecting an air of respect to people who don<u+2019>t agree with him, on an issue <u+2014> gun control <u+2014> 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 <u+201c>captured,<u+201d> kelly<u+2019>s crusade is not to crusade. off message by politico staff <u+201c>i feel that if somebody is going to show up and be involved in the process, they have a right to be heard,<u+201d> he told me. if anybody has the right to be angry, it<u+2019>s kelly, whose life changed in a muzzle flash on jan. 8, 2011: <u+201c>i had just gotten off the phone with gabby, and 10 minutes later, her chief of staff calls: <u+2018>i don't know how to tell you this, but gabby has been shot,<u+2019><u+201d> kelly recalled, his voice still choked with emotion even though he<u+2019>s told the story many, many times. <u+201c>a little while later, i called her back, and for a second, i thought, <u+2018>well, did that just happen? did i really get that phone call?<u+2019> and then she said she's been shot in the head.<u+201d> a friend offered him a ride in a private airplane, and he monitored the tv <u+2014> 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 <u+2014> but she was semi-conscious and responding to basic questions with nods and squeezes of his hand. when kelly met giffords<u+2019> doctor, a navy trauma surgeon named peter rhee, he asked him whether his wife would survive. rhee put a hand on kelly<u+2019>s shoulder and offered a chain-of-command answer: <u+201c>i haven<u+2019>t given her permission to die.<u+201d> congress by rachael bade gradually, painfully, after months of therapy, giffords regained much of her speech <u+2014> 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. <u+201c>if you're a felon, you shouldn't be allowed to own a gun or possess a gun <u+2014> so why do we make it easy for felons to own and possess guns?<u+201d> he asked. <u+201c>the same goes for domestic abusers, even people that are suspected terrorists, people who are dangerously mentally ill. <u+2026> 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.<u+201d> what makes kelly unique as a messenger is the fact that he<u+2019>s been a lifelong gun owner and a congenital badass. as kids, kelly and his brother were fond of climbing onto roofs <u+2014> 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. <u+201c>i almost died 10 times before i was 15 years old,<u+201d> he said. <u+201c>it felt like, <u+2018>this is it. we're done,<u+2019> and i think that may have had something to do with my future path, because afterwards you're like, <u+2018>man, that wound up being pretty cool.<u+2019> you don't remember, like, the bad parts. you remember that it was pretty exciting.<u+201d> guns <u+2014> or more precisely, getting shot at <u+2014> also played a big role in kelly<u+2019>s life. and there was an eerie foreshadowing of giffords<u+2019> experience in his own childhood. in the mid-1970s, kelly<u+2019>s mother <u+2014> one of the first female beat cops on a suburban new jersey police force about 10 miles outside of new york city <u+2014> 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. <u+201c>i mean, people don't realize what it's like to be shot at,<u+201d> 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<u+2019>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<u+2019>t recall whether either one made it out of their shootouts alive.) <u+201c>i've been shot at 39 times,<u+201d> he told me with a sheepish grin, <u+201c>in airplanes.<u+201d> 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. congress by burgess everett <u+201c>you often hear the folks on the other side, the gun guys <u+2026> about how, if everybody has a gun, everybody will be safe <u+2014> <u+2018>well, if i was there and i had a firearm,<u+2019><u+201d> he said. <u+201c>people don't realize what an emotional and crazy experience it is to have somebody trying to kill you. <u+2026> and that's where i kind of get back to this concept that people think they're clint eastwood. it is not the movies.<u+201d> 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 <u+2014> a smaller and more deadly sa-6 missile, which destroys aircraft by exploding or cutting them in half with razor wire. <u+201c>it's a big, bright dot, just getting bigger, not moving forward or aft in the canopy, so it stays in the same spot <u+2014> which means it's coming right at you,<u+201d> he said. <u+201c>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.<u+201d> then he paused. <u+201c>you know what's worse than the first missile coming at you?<u+201d> <u+201c>what?<u+201d> i asked. <u+201c>the second one,<u+201d> he added. <u+201c>because now you've already experienced this <u+2014> so now you really don't like it.<u+201d> by thomas wright by bill scher by joshua zeitz by jack shafer
the anti-trump - politico
rachael bade burgess everett jack shafer