Something About Me and Mary: The Alleged NRA Spy Who Betrayed American Rights and Victims of Gun Violence

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin

Editor and Publisher

August 6, 2008

I knew an NRA spy.

Yes, the Editor of BuzzFlash (as many of our long-time readers know) has been an advocate for reducing gun violence for 25 years. My life has been threatened by gun nuts egged on by the NRA and other radical shills for the gun industry; I was commended for my work to save lives in public by Bill Clinton when he was President; I chaired or was president of the Illinois state group working for gun control off and on for 15 years; and I founded a national organization to promote grassroots public education on the issue.

Well you get the picture. I'm not boasting; I just want to lay the groundwork for what's to come.

I began my involvement with reducing gun violence after I was out jogging on the lakefront in Chicago in the early '80s. It was on the far North Side of the city and as I was running, I saw a funeral cortege go by with more than a hundred police cars, nearing a cemetery that separates Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.

A Chicago Police Deputy Superintendent had been shot and killed while waiting to be seated for dinner with another couple. He was armed, but it didn't matter. A gun owner was insulting the two women in James Riordan's group and Riordan told him to knock it off. The gun owner didn't like being told off, so he went to his car, removed a handgun from the glove compartment, returned to the restaurant, and shot Riordan point blank in the back of the head.

That was it, a Deputy Superintendent with a holstered handgun, trained in shooting, lost his life to some gun nut because he reprimanded the guy for being vulgar and obnoxious.

So I thought, as I was running and saw the massive tribute of surrounding suburban police departments that sent officers in their local police cars, that this doesn't make any sense. If an esteemed armed Deputy Superintendent, a man trained in firearms use, can be so easily shot down, what is the point of promoting the selling and ownership of handguns in the American society, which leads the industrialized world in firearms deaths?

And that was how I came to be an advocate against the NRA and someone that the NRA's state rifle association referred to as "Dr. Evil" and a "Bolshevik," if I recall. There have been so many tragically laughable insults and not so laughable threats hurled my way over the years by the gun lobby that I can't remember all of them. (And, yes, not all gun owners are pathological, but a lot of them are, particularly the ones in suburban and urban areas who see guns as an extension of their psychological identity. The rural guys tend to actually use guns for hunting and are often more realistic about the role of guns in their lives, but even for many of them firearms have come to carry a symbolic importance in their distaste for people from "the big city" who they feel "look down" upon them.)

Fast forward to 2008 and the publication of a bombshell exposé in Mother Jones magazine by James Ridgeway and David Corn. They reveal that a retired woman now residing in Sarasota, but formerly of Shady Grove, Pennsylvania, was a spy for the NRA. I knew her as Mary McFate, but the article revealed that she also spied on environmental groups and allegedly at least once urged illegal behavior in that role under the name Mary Lou Sapone.

The story has now hit the mainstream media, including the likes of ABC News and the Chicago Tribune. You see, most Americans don't like illegal spying (although Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi continually give the Bush Administration free rein to get away with it) -- and they don't like to see the Constitution violated. The NRA has always hidden its ideological and psychological zealotry (not to mention fronting for the gun manufacturers) behind the claim to a "Second Amendment Right" -- which only recently was given some partial legitimacy when a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court overturned all the Supreme Court legal precedent since the writing of the Constitution that de facto considered gun ownership a collective right.

As a volunteer and sometime consultant for gun control, I knew Mary McFate.

In fact, just this spring I was taken aback to be honored as a pioneer in the movement by state gun control groups at a dinner, as I assumed "emeritus volunteer" status. Mary was my dinner "partner," as she sat next to me, and we conversed through the long evening. She was always quite the conversationalist, someone you felt comfortable with. There aren't many grandmotherly types who make you suspicious, and neither did Mary. She was amiable, fun to talk to, but never mentioned her family, who -- according to Mother Jones -- joined her in her spying for cash enterprise.

When I first received word that Mary was being unmasked as an NRA and corporate anti-environmentalist spy, I was positively "blown away." Frankly, the NRA cut a deal with Rove in 2000 that if Bush was elected, they would get everything that they wanted, and they have -- including their insistence that terrorist suspects should have a "Second Amendment" right to buy guns, just like everybody else. So what did they need a spy for among gun control groups whose biggest need was funds to do battle with the well-heeled gun lobby?

I guess when you have as much cash as the NRA, you might as well violate the rights of Americans because you have to find something to spend it on. So why not pay a Daughters of the American Revolution member, such as Mary McFate/Sapone, who attended a fundamentalist college (that dropped government funding because it wouldn't comply with different provisions requiring equal access to education and sports for all) -- Grove City College in Grove City, PA -- to spy on gun control groups largely headed by people who had lost a loved one to gun violence or have been surviving on the most bare of budgets?

According to the background on McFate's/Sapone's college:

Grove City College remains true to the vision of its founders. Rejecting relativism and secularism, it fosters intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social development consistent with a commitment to Christian truth, morals, and freedom. Rather than political, ideological, or philosophical agendas, objective truth continues as the goal of liberal learning. The core of the curriculum, particularly in the humanities, consists of books, thinkers, and ideas proven across the ages to be of value in the quest for knowledge. Intellectual inquiry remains open to the questions religion raises and affirms the answers Christianity offers. The ethical absolutes of the Ten Commandments and Christ's moral teachings guide the effort to develop intellect and character in the classroom, chapel, and cocurricular activities

Mary McFate/Sapone is in hiding now. Ever since David Corn of Mother Jones called her Sarasota residence and she accidentally revealed that she was indeed the two Marys, her location has been unknown -- and she and the NRA have not offered any response to the Mother Jones article (which is based largely on the actual records of a consulting firm that engages in spying for corporate and NRA-type clients.)

People have asked me if I feel betrayed, and I guess my answer is I feel that, once again, the NRA and the gun lobby has betrayed the approximately 30,000 people killed each year by guns. It is for these victims that I feel the most outrage right now. They have been my friends and colleagues in doing the correct thing for a civilized and humane society for many a year, and I admire their tenacity and resilience in the face of a lobby totally indifferent to our rising death toll.

I don't know what part of Christ the woman who is the two Marys is claiming as justification for the treachery that she committed. She has worked against people whose lives have been torn apart and whose hearts have been ripped in half by gun violence. People on the right so often abuse Christ on behalf of their perfidy, it is a cliché by now.

But I do know this. What goes round comes round.

Good will triumph over the spies who would distort our Constitutional rights and so awfully take advantage of the trust of those who have suffered so much because of our gun mania.

I only wish that, wherever McFate/Sapone is at this moment, her dreams will turn into nightmares, and that the 30,000 Americans felled by gunfire in the last year will each parade before her and haunt her for the rest of her life.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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