This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Across the country, a thriving dissatisfaction with the U.S. government is prompting a growing spate of bills in state legislatures aimed at defying federal control over firearms — more than 200 during the last decade, a News21 investigation found.

Particularly in Western and Southern states, where individual liberty intersects with increasing skepticism among gun owners, firearms are a political vehicle in efforts to ensure states’ rights and void U.S. gun laws within their borders. State legislators are attempting to declare that only they have the right to interpret the Second Amendment, a movement that recalls the anti-federal spirit of the Civil War and civil-rights eras.

“I think the president and the majority of Congress, both in the House and Senate, are just completely out of touch with how people feel about Second Amendment rights,” said Missouri state Sen. Brian Nieves, who has fought for bills to weaken the federal government’s authority over firearms in his state.

In Idaho, the Legislature unanimously passed a law to keep any future federal gun measures from being enforced in the state. In Kansas, a law passed last year says federal regulation doesn’t apply to guns manufactured in the state. Wyoming, South Dakota and Arizona have had laws protecting “firearms freedom” from the U.S. government since 2010.

A News21 analysis shows 14 such bills were passed by legislators in 11 states, mainly in Western states, along with Kansas, Tennessee and Alaska. Of those, 11 were signed into law, though one was later struck down in court. In Montana, Missouri and Oklahoma, three others were vetoed.

More than three-quarters of U.S. states have proposed nullification laws since 2008. More than half of those bills have come in the last two years after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. All but three have been introduced since President Barack Obama took office.

Underneath the policy jargon lies a culture of firearms woven into the heritage and politics of states whose histories were shaped by guns.

“(The federal government) is diving off into areas unchecked that they’re not supposed to be involved in,” said Montana state Rep. Krayton Kerns, who introduced a bill in 2013 to limit the ability of local police to help enforce federal laws. “Not only is it our right in state legislatures to do this, it’s our obligation to do it. Somebody’s got to put a 'whoa' on it.”

Opponents say it’s not federal gun regulation that’s unconstitutional, but laws to nullify it.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed a lawsuit against Kansas on July 9 to stop enforcement of the state’s recently passed Second Amendment Protection Act.

“The law should not be called the Second Amendment Protection Act, it should be called the Gun Violence Preservation Act,” said Jonathan Lowy, director of the center’s Legal Action Project.

Two types of bills are the primary vehicles for the movement, both based on model legislation introduced in statehouses from Tallahassee to Juneau.

The first type holds that federal laws do not apply to firearms manufactured and sold within a given state, relying on the Constitution's interstate commerce clause. It says Congress can regulate trade between states, but says nothing about trade within states.

Under Utah law, for example, guns made, purchased and used in the state are exempt from federal laws. Commonly known as the Firearms Freedom Act, versions of the law have been debated during 78 legislative sessions across 37 states in the last decade.

The other approach says gun regulation falls outside the scope of the federal government’s power, making it state territory. Such bills, often known as the Second Amendment Preservation Act, usually say state officials cannot enforce federal gun laws or limit the ability to do so, and some bills have tried to impose penalties on officers who help federal officials.

“It's basically saying, ‘Federal government, if you want to enforce federal firearms laws in the state of Arizona, you're welcome to do it, but we won't give you any assistance. So in other words, no state police help with (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) raids, no local law enforcement enforcing a federal gun law, none of that,” said Mike Maharrey, national communications director of the Tenth Amendment Center, a for-profit nullification group based in California.

The Kansas law makes it a felony for federal officials to enforce U.S. firearm law.

The Brady Center suit against the Sunflower State indicates that some are beginning to view nullification as a threat.

“This is a matter both of constitutional law and common sense,” said Stuart Plunkett, a Brady Center attorney in that case. “Our system of laws would break down if each of the 50 states could offer its own interpretation of congressional authority over interstate commerce.”

But the bill’s sponsor and co-author, Republican Rep. John Rubin, said he believes it’s the Brady Center that errs in interpretation of government authority regarding intrastate commerce. Rubin, who spent much of his professional career as a government lawyer and in administrative law thinks U.S. government overreach is the problem.

“The founders never envisioned … that a modern federal government would construe the commerce clause so broadly as to enable the federal government to regulate every aspect of the lives of the states,” Rubin said.

The Tenth Amendment Center responded to the Brady Center suit with a pledge to ramp up its campaign to pass Second Amendment Preservation Acts in more states in 2015.

“To us, this is a BIG green light to push harder than ever to protect the 2nd Amendment through state level resistance to federal gun-control measures,” Tenth Amendment Center founder Michael Boldin wrote in a July 9 statement.

In Kentucky, Rep. Diane St. Onge has already introduced a nullification bill for the 2015 session. Although she’s sure a court challenge will come from the federal government if the bill is passed, she believes it will hold up.

“We’re making a statement here about what we hold true, what we believe in here in Kentucky,” St. Onge said.

The federal government has said little on the matter, but U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder rebuked Kansas for its law in April.

“In purporting to override federal law and to criminalize the official acts of federal officers, (Kansas’ law) directly conflicts with federal law and is therefore unconstitutional,” Holder wrote in a letter to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback.

The measures often fizzle, even in conservative states. The National Rifle Association doesn’t support nullifying federal gun laws because that could undo NRA legislative success in Washington.

“I think that is a misguided distraction,” said Todd Rathner, an NRA board member from Arizona. “I empathize with what they’re trying to accomplish, but I am not convinced it’s the right way to do it.”

In Montana, where the largely rural population is spread out over nearly 150,000 square miles of mountains, fields and valleys, one man has been pushing these bills since 2005.

Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, has written scores of gun bills that have been introduced since 1985 in the Montana statehouse, 64 of which have become law.

Marbut lives on his family’s old ranch, in a secluded geodesic dome near Missoula. A self-appointed guardian of state gun rights, he has failed in three bids for a seat in the Montana Legislature, but succeeded in starting a movement to weaken federal authority of guns across the country.

Marbut, who is running for state representative in 2014, didn’t expect other states to take up the cause. When it comes to the gun bills that challenge federal law, Marbut’s focus on guns seems almost incidental. His true target is challenging federal authority.

“I would like to see some of this power shifted back from governments, especially the federal government, to the states and to the people,” Marbut said in his home on an overcast morning in June.

This view appears to be shared by Montanans. The pioneer spirit that brought their ancestors to the West still runs throughout Montana and neighboring states. That independence, locals say, is what influences their views on guns.

“There is kind of a ‘leave me alone to live my life’ attitude in the state,” said Jim Smith, mayor of Helena, the state capital. “There’s only a million of us here and there’s vast acreage, six people per square mile.”

For Democrats and Republicans alike, guns are part of a time-honored and highly practical way of life.

Gun use is tied to family traditions: Firearm skills are passed down from parent to child. Elk hunts are social gatherings, gun safety is taught to 11-year-olds.

It was here that the first Firearm Freedoms Act, written by Marbut, was introduced. After three attempts in the Legislature, it passed in 2009. Its spark lit a nationwide fervor among those who want the federal government to get out of their lives.

“I designed it as a way to test federal commerce-clause power using firearms as the vehicle for the exercise,” Marbut said. The law said that guns made in Montana are not subject to federal law.

Almost immediately after its passage, Marbut announced he would manufacture a Montana-made rifle, but he was challenged by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, so he sued for his right to make the guns.

Eventually, the suit made it to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against Marbut. He tried to take the case to the Supreme Court, but it declined to hear the case earlier this year.

This libertarian streak, coupled with a deep-seated appreciation of the Second Amendment, is at the heart of the expanding national movement to nullify federal law.

“We could be arguing over crescent wrenches if they wanted to make that the debate,” said Kerns, the state representative from Laurel, Montana.

“It just boils down to the federal government stepping across a boundary that they shouldn’t.”

Kansas Republican Rubin echoed Kerns’ views for a bill that relies on the commerce clause and also punishes federal agents for enforcing federal law.

“To me, the Second Amendment Protection Act is even more about the Tenth Amendment than the Second Amendment,” Rubin said.

One of the major forces behind these bills isn’t even a gun rights group.

The Tenth Amendment Center, which created the model firearms legislation known as the Second Amendment Preservation Act, is actually focused on the Tenth Amendment, which says any powers not granted to the federal government by the Constitution belong to the states.

The group’s “Tenther movement” promotes federal firearm law nullification, but also advocates legalizing marijuana and nixing Common Core education standards.

"The kind of motto of our organization is, follow the Constitution every time, no exceptions, no excuses," Maharrey said. "So we focus on any constitutional issue and try to limit federal power to its constitutionally delegated role."

However, others say nullification efforts will not stand up in court.

Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that both types of nullification laws are unconstitutional.

“States are not entitled to nullify federal law,” he said. “Any law that interferes with a valid federal law is unconstitutional. The federal law is supreme over state law.”

“Nullification is no more valid today than it was during the 1950s during desegregation or during the pre-Civil War era,” Brady Center attorney Plunkett said.

But constitutional conservatives aren’t giving up.

Of the more than 200 bills introduced in the last decade, 130 have come in the two years since the Newtown shooting, a time of renewed advocacy for gun control legislation by Congress.With federal gun laws staying in the news and the nullification trend spreading, many gun rights advocates continue pushing to void U.S. law.

If the fight continues, it has the potential to have a broad effect on states’ rights. Although nullification is a recurrent challenge to the federal government, it rarely succeeds.

What seems like a purely pro-gun trend speaks to a deeper dissatisfaction among a large swath of Americans and a desire to spurn the federal government in today’s highly polarized political times.

“I think it’s part of a larger interest in pushing back against federal power,” said Maharrey.

“I think the gun debate’s become more pronounced over the last couple of years due to some of the tragedies that we’ve seen, but on the other hand, interest in general of re-establishing state sovereignty and limiting federal power … has also grown,” he said.

Wade Millward contributed to this report.

Jessica Boehm is a News21 Hearst Fellow. Robby Korth is a News21 Peter Kiewet Fellow.

Never mind that the vehicle is a boxy, lumbering, second-hand set of wheels with a top speed of just 60 mph. To some of the fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. M1117, aka the Guardian Armored Security Vehicle, has become their favorite ride.

Or so says Jeremy Binnie, editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, who has monitored propaganda sites for reports of jihadis toting, towing or tooling around in some of the millions of dollars’ worth of U.S.- and other foreign-built military equipment that ISIS captured after it swept into northern Iraq in early June.

A promotional video by the manufacturer, Textron Marine and Land Systems, touts the four-wheel-drive, amphibious vehicle as “survivable,” due to its armor, and “lethal,” with its mounted grenade launcher and heavy machine gun. The vehicles, which can cost more than $600,000 each, are everything, apparently, that the modern militant could ask for.

“I’m sure Textron will be very happy,” Binnie said. “Their vehicle has the thumbs up from the Islamic State.”

By authorizing the first of dozens of airstrikes against militants in Iraq on Aug. 8 and dispatching more than 1,000 troops there as military advisers, President Barack Obama has sent U.S. forces back to a conflict that many Americans wanted to forget.

In battles from Afghanistan to Iraq, the United States defeated conventional forces equipped mainly with Soviet-design hardware. Now as the United States conducts air sorties in areas controlled by ISIS, the United States faces the prospect of having some of its own modern weapons systems turned against its military forces and those of its Iraqi allies.

 “It’s a cautionary tale, in terms of the consequences of sending more arms to the Kurds and the Iraqi security forces,” said William Hartung, author and director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington. “I think once you send this kind of equipment into the middle of a civil war, it’s hard to say where it will end up.”

Michael Pregent, a former U.S. Army officer who speaks Arabic and has worked for the Defense Department in Iraq as a military and political analyst, estimated that the militants have captured up to 60 of the three heaviest pieces of U.S.-built equipment in the Iraqi arsenal — M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M109 self-propelled howitzers.

Pregent, who is now an adjunct lecturer at National Defense University, said some of these weapons were used in attacks on the Kurdish Peshmerga militia forces defending their semi-autonomous region. ISIS’ threat to the Kurdish capital of Erbil triggered the United States’ intervention.

A video of the first U.S. airstrikes shows a U.S.-made F/A-18 Hornet, which cost roughly $61 million, bombing what appears to be a U.S.-made M198 towed howitzer, which cost $527,000, in the hands of insurgents. Both Pregent and Birnie said the artillery piece was clearly identifiable in the video.

Pregent said he would expect that at least some U.S. airstrikes have targeted captured U.S.-built military equipment. Lt. Col. James Gregory of the Pentagon Press Office called that “speculative” and declined to discuss what ISIS may or may not have captured.

The jihadis claimed to have captured at least one abandoned M1 Abrams tank, and have posted photographs of flatbed trucks hauling Humvees to unknown destinations. But many of the photos on the Web purporting to be of captured U.S. equipment show Russian equipment instead.

When the Iraqi government announced in 2008 that it planned to spend almost $11 billion on weapons for its military, The Long War Journal reported that these purchases demonstrated Iraq’s resolve to create “a military capable of protecting its own borders.” Instead, the Iraqi National Army in early June withdrew from huge swathes of northern Iraq in the face of underwhelming odds.

Hartung estimated that since 2005 the United States has sold about $8 billion worth of weapons to Iraq. According to a July report by the Congressional Research Service, prior to the U.S. withdrawal in December 2011, Iraq purchased 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks, at a cost of about $6 million each, as well as two naval vessels and border monitoring equipment.

The CRS said Iraq has also struck a deal to pay $6.5 billion for 36 F-16 combat aircraft, the first of which scheduled for delivery next month. The F-16s were supposed to be based at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad, but InsideDefense.com reported Aug. 15 that preparations for their arrival were suspended because of the threat.

The U.S. also sold or leased Iraq 30 Apache helicopters in a deal worth $6.17 billion, the CRS report said, but delivery was held up by Congress until recently over concerns that the government might use them in sectarian clashes.

Iraq has also consided purchasing a $2.4 billion air defense system that includes 681 Stinger missiles, three Hawk antiaircraft batteries, and other equipment. The Pentagon has said the Stingers can only be operated as part of the larger air defense system they were designed to serve, not by militants on their own.

ISIS may not be able to use a lot of the equipment, Pregent said, because the fighters lack the training and facilities to operate and maintain it. He said that, based on his experience working with Iraqi forces, as many as half of the 60 largest weapons seized may have been broken down and in need of repair when they were captured.

“Every advisor who’s ever been with the Iraqi military knows that its biggest headache was to get the Iraqis to maintain this equipment,” Pregent said.

Binnie said untrained militants would find it a “trick to master” firing their new U.S. tanks and artillery, and probably couldn’t use them accurately against targets they couldn’t see in front of them. “You probably couldn’t hit much besides a city,” he said.

While the larger vehicles are more photogenic, Binnie said the small arms and ammunition caches seized by ISIS may have more military value.

“That is probably the main thing for the Islamic State guys, is just capturing large quantities of infantry weapons and ammunition, the stuff they’re using anyway,” Binnie said. “They burn through a lot of ammunition — rocket-propelled grenade rounds, mortars, bullets. Capturing that is probably going to be a major boon.”

Most militants, he said, would “prefer a land cruiser to a Humvee,” he added. “It’s just going to be easier for them to keep running.” As evidence of the low regard they have for the American military vehicles, he said that after the militants captured the Iraqi Army’s Humvees, it loaded some of them up with explosives for use as car bombs.

Pregent said even captured U.S. ammunition may not be as useful to the militants as it might seem, because they probably prefer their rugged if less accurate Soviet-designed weapons to U.S. military arms.

As for the M1117 Guardians, Pregent said he could see why they would appeal to young militants. “It’s a sexy vehicle,” he said. “It looks great.” But he estimated that there are probably fewer than 10 of them in jihadi hands. “If they’re not destroyed already.”

Twenty-six members of the Senate are calling on the Obama administration to increase planned spending on programs to secure or reduce global stocks of nuclear weapons materials in the upcoming 2016 White House budget, even as they are challenging an administration decision to significantly shrink these programs in 2015.

Dianne Feinstein of California and Jeff Merkley of Oregon were joined by 20 other Democrats, as well as two Republicans and two independents, in signing a three page letter August 13 requesting more spending for nuclear materials security programs in future budgets to White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan.

“The recent spate of terrorism in Iraq, Pakistan, and Kenya is a harrowing reminder of the importance of ensuring that terrorist groups and rogue states cannot get their hands on the world's most dangerous weapons and materials,” the senators wrote.

Obama called for a worldwide effort to lock up all nuclear explosive materials in a landmark speech in Prague in 2009, calling them “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” But the president’s proposed Fiscal Year 2015 budget cut nonproliferation programs in the Department of Energy by nearly $400 million. In their letter, the senators praised Obama‘s leadership on securing and eliminating nuclear materials but said his current budget marked a “major retreat” on the issue.

“Reducing budgets for agencies and programs that help keep nuclear and radiological materials out of the hands of terrorists is out of sync with the high priority that President has rightly placed on nuclear and radiological material security and signals a major retreat in the effort to lock down these materials at an accelerated rate,” the senators wrote.

The 2015 Senate Appropriations Committee’s Energy and Water bill increased spending on several nonproliferation programs, including the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, by $219 million more than the president’s budget proposal. Feinstein is chairwoman of the Energy and Water appropriations subcommittee.

The senators called on the Obama administration to build on the proposed increased funding levels in its fiscal 2016 budget. The Democrats were joined by Republicans Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Independents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine.

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.

This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University

POCATELLO, Idaho — Derek Sommer carries a concealed handgun almost everywhere he goes these days, including onto the campus of Idaho State University — an illegal act until recently.

Under an Idaho law that took effect July 1, nearly 3,000 Idaho residents with enhanced concealed carry permits — people like Sommer — can bring their guns on college campuses. Sommer no longer leaves his gun at home or in his car's locked glove compartment.

Idaho became the seventh state to allow "campus carry" in a movement gaining traction across the country, despite the often strenuous opposition of other students, faculty and campus administrators.

Spurred by recent high-profile campus shootings, grassroots groups like Students for Concealed Carry (SCC) are pushing for the right to carry weapons on campus, sometimes with the backing of larger gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.

For Sommer, 23, a computerized machining student who founded Idaho State’s SCC chapter, carrying his handgun means protection for himself, his wife McKinley, and their 7-month-old daughter, Andi.

“It makes me angry; it really does,” he said. “I don’t like the fact that there are places where it’s considered OK to tell somebody, ‘You don’t have the right to protect yourself.’”

For others, like Boise State University student Angel Hernandez, the new law means less focus on learning and more on worrying about who's packing a gun on campus.

“I went to Boise State to get an education; I didn’t go to Boise to go to a gun show,” he said.

Opponents of campus carry laws have saw mixed success of late. Arkansans Against Guns on Campus got state lawmakers to exclude students from a law letting faculty and staff bring concealed guns on campus if their college grants permission. Attempts to start a Colorado referendum to end campus carry there ended in failure.

Groups like SCC, meanwhile, have active chapters in at least 30 states, mobilizing as many as 30,000 students and faculty to support laws and court cases favorable to the cause, said group spokesman Kurt Mueller.

The group occasionally makes local headlines when members gather to wear empty holsters to promote campus carry — from Washington state to Michigan to Florida. It operates with little funding, relying instead on volunteers and social media for recruitment and chapter operations, Mueller said.

“We don’t have professional lobbyists,” he said. “We don’t pay anybody to lobby. People do it for free because it’s what they believe in.”

Victory in the West, Battles in the South

A News21 analysis of on-campus shootings found 87 of them, or 60 percent, have happened in the past decade. Campus carry supporters nationwide said in interviews that the increase in shootings partly influenced their desire to bring concealed guns on campus.

SCC formed after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Mueller argues an armed student could’ve stopped the shooter without waiting for police to arrive.

“The confrontation would have ended a lot sooner,” he said. “Lives would have been saved.”

Campus carry supporters point to the legal doctrine of preemption, which says only the state legislature can regulate guns in the state. No other government in the state, such as cities and counties, can make gun rules. Many states exempt K-12 schools and some public buildings from concealed carry of guns.

Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi and Wisconsin — and now Idaho — have laws on the books that allow students to conceal weapons on campus.

The first state to finalize campus carry was Utah in 2006. University of Utah continued banning guns on campus despite the state’s 2004 preemption law. Two years after the law passed, a lawsuit against then-state Attorney General Mark L. Shurtleff led to colleges allowing concealed guns.

A 2011 lawsuit by a division of the Oregon Firearms Federation led to a state court striking the Oregon state education board’s ban against guns on campuses.

The victories are not complete. As in other campus carry states, Oregon universities insist they can limit guns in buildings, and the Oregon state board bans guns in event centers, classrooms and dorms.

In Utah, students may ask not to live with gun owners in dorms, and universities can ban guns from certain meeting rooms.

Kansas' 2013 campus carry law included an optional four-year delay before licensees could bring concealed guns on campus. Arkansas’ law allowing only faculty and staff to carry requires colleges annually renew any on-campus bans.

The laws on campus carry in other states vary, from letting students store guns in their cars to leaving policy decisions to the schools.

Colorado courts sided with SCC in 2010 and 2012, ruling the state’s public universities and colleges must allow concealed weapons permit holders to bring guns on campus. The courts said college gun bans violated a 2003 state law giving the legislature sole gun regulation control.

Colorado colleges still regulate guns in dorms, dining halls and event centers. University of Colorado, Boulder, designated dorm space for gun owners, but no students have requested it, said campus spokesman Bronson Hilliard. In Colorado, concealed carry licensees must be at least 21.

SCC’s focus next year is Texas, Mueller said. As of September, students could store guns in cars on campus. The group plans to have members write and call state lawmakers to demand more places on campus that allow concealed guns.

The law shouldn’t block licensed gun owners — including college students — from carrying on campuses, Mueller said. In some places, crossing the street could mean a law-abiding gun owner is now on campus and breaking the law.

“If you’re responsible off campus, you’re going to be responsible on campus,” Mueller said. “Likewise, bad people don't change. They’re bad off campus, and they’re bad on campus.”

“We’re not interested in every college student carrying,” he said. “There might be a lot of people who might never want to use or bring their firearms. If that’s the case, that’s cool. We don’t think anyone should have to exercise rights they don’t want to. But on the other hand, we don’t think they get a veto over the rights of others.”

Encouraging students to own guns raises questions for some firearms researchers.

Crime research consultant Tom Gabor said he believes letting students possess guns in more places is too risky and goes against dozens of public health and criminal justice studies.

People in the 18- to 24-year-old age range are more impulsive and at greater risk for suicide, said Gabor, who taught criminology at the University of Ottawa for 30 years and studied firearms for 20 years.

Gabor cites statistics from a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine article — an article contested by gun rights groups — that said for every one time someone shoots and kills another in a home in self-defense, about 43 other home gun deaths result from suicide, murder or accident.

“People will thwart an attacker, but I imagine many more reports of death and disabling injuries,” he said.

He sees campus carry as a gun industry move to gain customers.

“It’s very mercenary, in my view, to profit at any cost and put young people at risk in school,” Gabor said. “More people carrying, bringing guns on college campuses, in public venues, grocery stores, makes people feel more afraid than providing them security.”

Capitols and courts

Marion P. Hammer calls opposition to campus carry “nothing more than an attempt to make gun-free zones, where murderers come on campus and kill kids."

Hammer, a former NRA president and the organization's longtime lobbyist in Florida, said that NRA will use the state’s preemption law to push state legislators to authorize concealed carry on campuses.

“Students can't (carry) right now, but we’re going to fix that," said Hammer, one of 76 NRA board members.

On July 30, the Florida Carry lobby lost its suit against the University of Florida over the university’s guns-in-cars policy and whether colleges must let guns in campus-owned housing statewide. The lobby will appeal, according to its website.

Florida Carry, which is unrelated to SCC, has a reputation for using the preemption law to successfully sue cities, counties and colleges over their gun bans. Last year, the lobby successfully sued the University of North Florida to get guns allowed in cars on college grounds.

The NRA led the campus carry effort in Idaho, where the NRA state lobbyist was a regular at bill hearings. Though the NRA has been a major player in Idaho and Florida, it usually takes a supporting role on campus carry, NRA board member and former lobbyist Todd Rathner said.

“The NRA is a huge organization, and second to none in protecting gun rights. It gets spread thin,” Rathner said. “There’s a need for these (single-issue) groups. They help maintain focus.”

The NRA’s press office declined to comment for this story.

SCC and a grassroots group called Ohioans for Concealed Carry cited Ohio's pre-emption law in a July lawsuit against Ohio State University that seeks to allow campus carry there. The trial is expected to start next year.

SCC has also threatened to sue Georgia after a letter from the state attorney general’s office declared campus carry still illegal, SCC Southeast Director Robert Eagar said.

The groups say campus carry is allowed by Georgia’s Safe Carry Protection Act, which critics have called “guns everywhere.” The law, which took effect July 1, allows permit holders to bring concealed guns into K-12 schools, bars, churches and more.

Colleges fight back

For Hernandez, the Boise State student, campus is no place for guns.

“School should be a place where you learn, where you make something better with your life," said the 24-year-old Hernandez, who wants to teach civics when he graduates in two years. "It shouldn’t be a place where you deal with the stress of a gun in the classroom.”

He is a member of the student government who joined other Idaho students to protest the campus carry law.

The students and other Idaho activists received guidance from Andy Pelosi, who challenges campus carry on a national level.

Pelosi, who is not related to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, started the anti-campus carry group GunFreeKids.org in 2008.

A series of campus carry bills following Virginia Tech and the 2008 Northern Illinois University shootings — in which 27-year-old former student Stephen Kazmierczak killed five people and wounded 18 — caused Pelosi to focus on higher education.

His group focused on Idaho and Georgia this past legislative year, he said. Next year, he expects to help coordinate resistance to campus carry in Texas.

Colleges that side with Pelosi fear on-campus gun theft, threats with guns and accidental shootings, he said.

“We really believe that college campuses are safe environments, certainly safer than places off campus,” he said. “The educational environment is very different than people’s homes, and that’s not a place that guns should be carried.”

In Idaho, students and faculty who protested when Gov. C. L. “Butch” Otter signed campus carry into law, said lawmakers ignored them and listened instead to lobbyists and Idahoans who don’t work and live on campus.

Boise State student body President Bryan Vlok said he faced an uphill battle fighting campus carry. Still determining what the law means for Idaho students, he joked about putting bulletproof vests in the student government budget.

Student leaders organized a rally at the state Capitol, arranged automated phone calls across the state and met with the governor’s staff to say students overwhelmingly fear campus carry.

The new law only applies to holders of enhanced concealed carry permits, not regular permit holders, who require less training and can be 18 to 21 years old. But Vlok believes the requirements to get the enhanced concealed carry permit are not enough to make someone responsible or accurate.

Created last year, the license requires applicants take an eight-hour class on gun use and fire 98 rounds in front of an instructor.

“The sad reality is … you don’t have to be accurate,” Vlok said. “In a situation like that, police officers are only 30 percent accurate in shooting. What does that make us? What does that make a student?”

Ross Perkins, a Boise State associate professor in educational technology, criticized the campus carry movement in an opinion piece for a local newspaper. He recalled witnessing the aftermath of the shooting at Virginia Tech, where he worked and studied for about nine years.

Perkins can picture the school’s grounds that day. He felt the heavy wind, heard the sirens and watched as responders rushed the first victims out of Norris Hall. He was 38 at the time.

About once a year, he said, he visits the Virginia Tech memorial at night, when it’s quiet. He walks the semicircle of Hokie Stones, rocks mined from Blacksburg quarries, reading the names of the 32 people murdered. He tells each person his or her life mattered.

“It’s also important for us never to forget, not just the names, but the individuals who are behind those names and understand who they could have been; who they were,” he said. “It’s something we all need to take account for every day, just to remind us that life is a precious thing, and for whatever reason it can go away.”

“I hope that it never happens again. But I said that in 2007, and how many incidences can we now count that have happened since then,” he said. “It’s stunning.”

But supporters of campus carry say the Idaho opposition is a vocal minority led by Boise State administrators. Idaho state Rep. Judy Boyle, a Republican and one of the law’s sponsors, hopes to amend it to stop the university from exempting the student union building.

“We’re talking about a Second Amendment right, a right to protect your life or the life of someone else,” Boyle said. “That’s why we felt it was important to give someone that ability.”

Now that Idaho State student Derek Sommer has that ability, he said he wonders if he could use his weapon should someone attack him.

“In my dream world, we could help these individuals before anything like this ever happens,” Sommer said. “Would I ever want to draw a gun on somebody? I would hate that. I don’t know if I could live with myself if I ended up taking somebody’s life, especially if it was somebody troubled.”

Carmen Forman an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation News21 Fellow.

Kate Murphy, Kelsey Jukam and Kristen Hwang contributed to this story. Kristen Hwang is the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Business Journalism News21 Fellow.

A former Los Alamos nuclear policy expert has filed an appeal in a whistleblower case to Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, arguing that the Energy Department had abused its power to label documents secret and retaliated against him for expressing his views.

James E. Doyle was fired July 8 after spending 18 months trying to force Los Alamos officials to reverse their ruling that an article he published in a foreign journal, which questioned the rationale for nuclear deterrence, had diclosed state secrets. The Center for Public Integrityfirst reported on Doyle's case last month.

Los Alamos is the oldest of America’s nuclear weapons labs and most of its nearly $2 billion annual budget goes to an effort to extend the shelf life of the country’s aging nuclear warheads.

“This article, while supportive of the current Administration’s nuclear policies, is viewed as expressing opinion contrary to other political forces, including those held by” Los Alamos, wrote Doyle’s attorney, Mark Zaid, in the appeal to Moniz.

The case has drawn intense scrutiny from the community of U.S. disarmament and nonproliferation specialists.

Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists, on August 21 wrote to urge Moniz to ensure that Doyle wasn’t penalized for his “good faith efforts to participate in the national dialogue over nuclear policy.”

Doyle is appealing a June 24 decision by the Department of Energy’s Office of Hearings and Appeals that let stand an earlier ruling dismissing a whistleblower case he filed last year.

Doyle’s appeal to Moniz says his security clearances were suspended or revoked, he was docked a day’s pay and he became “persona non grata” at the lab after he objected to the decision to classify his article as secret.

The August 20 appeal seeks reverse these actions and in effect wipe the slate clean when it comes to Doyle's job record, but it would not restore his job. Doyle and Zaid say they plan to challenge his firing in a separate whistleblower case, not yet filed.

Officials at Los Alamos and DOE did not respond to requests for comment.

But according to documents in the case, lab officials said they had docked Doyle’s pay and suspended his access to nuclear weapons information for  a month after he initially refusing to cooperate in an investigation of his case.

 A former supervisor told the Center that Doyle's main security clearance was later taken away because he no longer needed to work with classified materials.  And documents show lab officials told Doyle he was being laid off as part of an ongoing program of job reductions.

A lower-ranking member of the Los Alamos classification office had initially cleared Doyle’s article for publication in late January 2013.

But a few days after Doyle’s article, “Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons,” appeared online in the British journal “Survival” in early February, someone on the House Armed Services Committee staff raised concerns with the lab that he had spilled secrets.

The head of the lab’s classification office reviewed the article and ruled that it contained secret information after all.

In the appeal, Zaid wrote that the government had violated its own rules in reclassifying Doyle’s article, because, he wrote, it did not follow procedures for marking as secret a publication already in the public domain.

This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University

More women than ever before own guns.

Nearly 79 percent of firearms retailers reported an increase in female customers between 2011 and 2012, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. From this surge in popularity comes classes, specialized apparel, custom firearms, shooting-group memberships and conferences for women.

Women have also become the sellers, the lobbyists and the business owners.

Entrepreneur Carrie Lightfoot founded The Well Armed Woman in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2012 to be a resource for women shooters, by selling female-friendly merchandise, establishing educational chapters and hosting certified firearms instructor training sessions. In just two years, Lightfoot said it’s become one of the largest female gun groups in the U.S., boasting 350 chapter leaders in 43 states.

“We focus on educating, equipping and empowering women shooters,” Lightfoot said of her company’s goal to introduce women to guns in a safe, supportive environment.

When Lightfoot started The Well Armed Women, she wanted to represent the “everyday woman” she felt was missing from the industry.

“There were these two common extremes. One was a like military-type, real rugged woman with a gun … and the other was the more sexual, sexy woman with a gun. A woman in a bikini holding an AR-15 (semi-automatic rifle),” she said.

Lightfoot said women have always carried guns, but it wasn’t until recently that they began forming their own community within the firearms industry.

“Women now realize there are millions of them, they’re coming out of the shadows. They were already there, but just not openly. Not in the light,” she said.

Women have already hit societal and economic milestones: More women than ever before are living alone, marrying later and earning more than their husbands. Firearms are arguably another part of the equation. As Lightfoot put it, owning a gun as a self-protection tool mirrors this shift of women from “being the protected to being the protector.”

“Women are taking on that role – they have to,” she said, “And they’re taking it on pretty fiercely.”

The NRA, Women & Social Media

One of the strongest allies of the gun industry, the National Rifle Association, capitalized on the women and guns trend. In the last few years, the NRA has included women in its target demographics.

Karen Callaghan, an associate professor of political science at Texas Southern University, who is writing a book on the organization, described it as a “softening of the NRA.”

“They’re tapping into groups that are really primed and ready to receive the message that gun ownership is a good thing,” Callaghan said.

The NRA’s original womens programs were first formed by board members’ wives as a way to get involved. Today, as NRA board member Todd Rathner said, “It’s a whole world unto itself.”

“The Women’s Network folks are young gals with ARs (referring to AR-15 semi-automatic rifles) and Glocks just beginning their hunting careers,” said Rathner, as opposed to the traditionally older Women in Leadership Forum. “It’s a demographic we have never touched before.”

Several of the NRA’s 84 official social media accounts are dedicated solely to women, according to NRAnews.com. The NRA Women’s Network has more than 40,000 followers across all major social networking sites — from Facebook to Pinterest.

Another way the NRA is reaching these groups is through its online news network. NRA News features several commentators who touch on various points of the gun debate in different news episodes. Of the seven commentators, three are younger women.

Former Olympic pistol shooter Gabby Franco is one of the newest commentators. In one of her latest episodes, Franco talks about why the Second Amendment is important to her after immigrating to the U.S. in 2002 from Venezuela, a country, she says, is riddled with violence.

“As an immigrant and a U.S. citizen that has seen pretty much both sides of the coin, I have been able to put that on screen. It’s a great opportunity,” Franco said of her role as a commentator.

Petite with unwavering energy and a thick Venezuelan accent, Franco says she’s reached her goal to be one of the best female instructors in the U.S.

She is also a reality television personality. In 2012, Franco was one of the first women to compete on the History Channel’s “Top Shots.” She was invited back as the only woman on "Season 5: All-Stars. "

“I think the best part of being in the spotlight is just showing or giving my point of view about what I do and what I love,” Franco said of her fame — she has more than 90,000 likes on her Facebook fan page. “The shooting sports have given so much to me and I’m using this opportunity to share that with people. Not only as a sport but also as a life experience.”

Self-Defense

Self-defense is the common theme among women’s shooting groups. In Austin, Texas, Sure Shots women’s pistol league and monthly magazine focus almost exclusively on self-defense.

Standing out amid the dimly lit walls of rifles and camouflage of Red’s Indoor Range, where she runs Sure Shots, Niki Jones said she started the league in 2010. She encourages members to always take note of their surroundings.

“That doesn’t mean in a paranoid sort of way, just a very aware type of way,” she said.

Jones’ father, who worked as a police firearms instructor on Long Island, had her load ammunition into his gun when she was just 3 years old. Despite that early exposure to guns, she did not get directly involved in the industry until moving to Texas several years ago, she said.

“I got a gun, started training with it, and it set off the whole chain of events that started Sure Shots,” she said.

But Jones often found herself alone at the range without anyone to “push or encourage” her. And there were no female leagues to train with.

“So I said, I’m just going to start one, and I’m just going to make it everything I want it to be,” she said.

Sure Shots now has about 300 members between two Austin chapters and one in San Antonio.

“They feel a lot more safe and confident and kind of have a whole new defensive mindset that they never even considered before,” Jones said of her members.

Jennifer Carlson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, said the self-defense argument mischaracterizes most crime against women as random violence.

“Men are more likely to be victims of assault” perpetrated by strangers, said Carlson, who is writing a book on gun culture in the U.S. “Women should actually be most afraid of crimes in their own homes.”

Women are more likely to be attacked by someone they know, usually an intimate partner, than someone they don’t, according to a 2014 Center for American Progress report and an analysis by New21 of domestic violence gun homicides that occurred between 2002 and 2012.

Domestic violence often falls into what Carlson calls a “gray zone.”

“Men tend to see criminals in much more black and white terms … and transpose this onto domestic violence.” 

Politicization

Women also are getting involved in the political gun debate.

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America started in 2012 in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. According to its website, the group is a “grassroots network of moms” focused on preventing gun violence through “common-sense reforms” such as expanded background checks. In 2013, Moms Demand Action partnered with Mayors Against Illegal Guns to form Everytown for Gun Safety to advocate for gun-control legislation on a national level.

Jennifer Hoppe, a program director for Moms Demand Action, says have always brought social change.

“I don’t want to stereotype, but moms and women show up,” she said. “They show up at the polls, they show up at the offices of elected officials, they pay attention.”

On the other side, the 1 Million Moms Against Gun Control network formed as a direct response to Moms Demand Action, pushing for no new gun restrictions.

Beth Banister, the 1 Million Moms Arizona state coordinator, said her job is to “keep up to date on what is going on in the gun debate” and stay active on social media to engage the group’s almost 57,000 Facebook followers in discussion on issues.

Banister, a mother of four, said 1 Million Moms also coordinates national social-media campaigns such as #WorthProtecting, meaning worth protecting with guns if necessary.

“I put my kids on the couch and I had them hold a sign saying ‘I’m worth protecting’...whatever means something to you, show us your picture (and tag it)," she said.

Kristin Goss, associate professor of public policy at Duke University, said women have historically been activists in specialized issues. The debate is no different.

“Women historically have been the volunteer activists, the grassroots base of most social reform movements in history,” Goss said

When it comes to guns, Goss said both sides of the debate have “lots of reasons to watch women.”

“They make consumer decisions and are increasingly educated and have the kinds of skills that  groups on both sides of the debate would covet,” she said.

The only lobbyist for gun rights in the Texas Legislature is a woman named Alice Tripp. The membership of Texas State Rifle Association, the official state association of the NRA, is about 90 percent male, she said.

She works for 40,000 men with no support staff. But her lobbying style of “nips at the heels” of state lawmakers means that she is one of the most influential voices on gun policy in the state of Texas.

“My commitment is the fewest restrictions possible for law-abiding gun owners,” she said.

At her ranch in Paige, Texas, the walls are filled with the taxidermied bodies of fowl she’s hunted over the years, Tripp said when she started lobbying in 1998, she was the only female lobbyist in the State Capitol.

“I used to call … the legislators silverback gorillas because they were all older,” she said of the men she worked with in the Capitol. But over the years, Tripp said she’s seen more women enter the political arena.

There are “women district attorneys, women in the Legislature and younger women and younger men for that matter,” she said.

Today, Tripp shares the Texas gun lobby with one other person, also a woman, Tara Mica-Reilly, the NRA state liaison for Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana and Mississippi.

“I believe that women bring patience and logic and ability to research and memory and all the things that we’re raised to do that adapts to the legislative process,” Tripp said.

“We’ve been growing up, as a gender. We’ve been maturing. We’ve been self-determined. We’ve demanded wages. We’ve demanded recreational opportunities,” she said.

The Business of Pink Pistols

Today, 40 percent of Americans live in a household with a gun, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey. Thirty-six percent of women reported living in one of these households, and 14 percent of women said the gun is theirs.

Entrepreneurs are capitalizing on the movement of more and more women buying guns of their own.

Julianna Crowder said she got the idea for A Girl and A Gun women's shooting league after she took an all-day concealed carry class nearly 10 years ago so her husband could keep his pistol in the family car.

“I saw a business opportunity, because I saw some room to improve, or maybe something I could eventually fulfill. It was like an entrepreneurial lightning bolt,” she said of the class.

Crowder said she had some difficulty finding a range to host an established club for women.

“I’m the entrepreneur. I’m the voice. I’m the one wheeling and dealing and it took about three years to find a range because every time we got close, they would figure out it was me they were going to deal with and not the man,” Crowder said.

Since then, Crowder said she has expanded her ladies’ shooting club into 69 chapters across the U.S. with 2,500 active members. In March, she organized the second-annual A Girl and A Gun conference in Waco, Texas, featuring classes, range time and vendors selling female-friendly products.

At the conference, Crowder said her goal is to represent the “everyday” woman.

“A woman doesn’t want to see an advertisement that’s geared toward men with scantily clad women or all ninja’d-out men, that doesn’t speak to us,” she said. “We want to see us. How would the everyday woman use this product?”

Lucretia Free, who runs The American Woman Shooter magazine out of her Tucson, Arizona, home, publishes stories representing a wider variety of women who shoot guns. She said she started the magazine just over a year ago after she went to the range for the first time and found that gun owners didn’t fit her notions about shooting sports.

“I perceived them as being unsafe and I perceived guns as being unsafe,” she said. “So when I went to the range and saw all this extreme focus on safety and just the welcoming nature of the people who were there … I mean it was fun.”

A publisher by trade, Free wanted to tell these stories and support local businesses that catered to women’s shooting needs.

“Definitely the woman-shooter story wasn’t being told, because it’s about so much more than just self-protection and conceal-and-carry and those kinds of issues. It’s about women who enjoy shooting sports,” she said. “I just think it’s an undertold story just in general across the board.”

Free says it’s an area of marketing where there’s still not a lot of research. “So I think the approach to how to target women is all over the board. Throwing things up on the wall and seeing what sticks.”

One company that is introducing guns to more women is Shoot Like a Girl. Chief Operations Officer Cristy Crawford said the organization reaches out to women from a 52-foot trailer driven to outdoor expos and gun shows around the country. Once inside, women are able to shoot through a simulated firing system used in military and police training.

“It introduces women to archery and shooting sports in a safe, controlled environment,” Crawford said.

Participants are sent a survey asking if they purchased a firearm after their Shoot Like a Girl experience. Since they launched this program in December, Crawford said they’ve recorded 850 direct gun sales. Of those purchases, 69 percent were by new and inexperienced shooters.

Firearms manufacturers are also benefiting from the surge in female customers, including Gordon Bond, the president of Bond Arms in Granbury, Texas, which manufacturers double-barrel derringers (small conceal-carry pistols). Bond Arms handguns are sold through individual dealers around the U.S.

Bond guessed that women make up 20 percent or so of his customers, up from about 10 percent five years ago.

On the company’s website, a link to an instructional video Bond Arms produced helps women pick out their first handgun. Bond said it’s been getting more than 40 clicks per day as of late.

To keep up with demand, Bond Arms markets differently to men and women. Bond said men tend to like the terminology “hand cannon” used to describe some of the pistols, while women are looking for something “very functional, very clean.”

“Ours is very simple to clean and load...and it’s pretty,” he said. “This gun is polished, stainless, really pretty wood grips. We got really nice ways to dress it up.”

When giving demonstrations at gun shows, Bond likes to bring out a pink pistol first and shoot a .357 magazine out of it. The loudness is jarring.

“My favorite comment (while demonstrating) is there’s nothing like bringing down a bad guy with a pink gun,” he said.

Moving Beyond the Pink

Not everyone is thrilled with the use of pink guns as a marketing device for women.

Former Secret Service Agent Tina Wilson-Cohen, who in 2010 founded She Can Shoot, a national firearms training network for women with more than a dozen chapters, says the industry does not fully understand how to bring women into the fold.

“Most of the marketing is usually the men think they can slap the pink and the purple and some bling on something and it captivates us as women, and it’s not the case,” she said.

In 2007, Wilson-Cohen said, she joined an NRA think tank on how to recruit more women.

But even after becoming an NRA training counselor, firearms instructor and teaching a lot of classes, Wilson-Cohen said she was still treated differently.

“As a woman, even given my background, it’s almost like I have to constantly prove myself to them,” she said. “And that’s unfortunate because their message is it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, but I’ll have to say it certainly doesn’t feel like that.”

Lightfoot, founder of The Well Armed Woman, one of the largest female shooting organizations in the U.S., has a different understanding of the pink guns and accessories that debuted en masse several years ago.

“Originally when the industry started seeing women … the first reaction was to turn things pink so we saw pink holsters and pink grips, things like that,” Lightfoot said. “And I think at first we we’re like, ‘OK, they see us, that’s great, thank you!’”

But Lightfoot said that was a superficial response. According to her, women are working hard to gain respect in the industry and taking the “sexy” or “girly” avenues could undermine all that hard work. As she says, “Carrying a gun isn’t sexy ... it’s a huge responsibility.”

“Women have grown, we’re more educated and we want more depth,” she said. “So now the pressure is on to go beyond the pink.”

Lauren Loftus is an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation News21 Fellow.

Brittany Elena Morris, a News21 Hearst Fellow, and Allison Griner contributed reporting to this story.

This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University

R.I.P.s are scrawled on the shell of a burned-out brick building, pockmarked by bullet holes. Overgrown with vines, its dilapidated outer walls recall the ruins of a fortress, a monument to a long-finished battle. But a war still courses through the streets of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the past decade, it’s claimed the lives of hundreds of people —  most of whom were black and barely into adulthood.

In Flint, Michigan, swing-sets in Mott Park are empty as drug dealers and gang members claim the turf as their own, guns tucked in their wastebands. During summer months, parents keep their children indoors, rarely letting them play outside in the daytime. Kickball at night isn’t even a thought. The recreation centers created to give the city’s youth a refuge are now hotbeds of violence, referees replaced with police.

Amid the crumbling row houses in once-industrial Camden, New Jersey, murals are dedicated to the fallen, hundreds more lost in one of America’s deadliest cities. One is dedicated to a veteran who survived his deployment in Iraq unscathed only to be shot and killed in his hometown.

“This is not a war you can win in one day,” one Camden police officer said. “This is not a war where you can go and get rid of the bad guys and say, 'OK guys, here’s your city back.'

“We have to occupy this city forever.”

Homicides are down across most of the country, but little has changed in these three cities. Parents are still losing their children at an alarming rate. Over 40 percent of all victims of firearm-related homicides are 25 or younger. In Camden, Flint and Baton Rouge, the typical victim is just 22.

A News21 analysis of the FBI’s national database of supplementary homicide reports found that across the country, 17,422 black men between ages 13 and 30 have been killed by firearms since 2008.

Baton Rouge

Patrick Holmes has a large pink scar running from his right wrist to the top of his little finger, a remnant of a gunfight he got into when he was 16. Next to the scar is a tattoo — a black, cursive “R.I.P.” On his left hand is one word: “Lawrince,” his best friend, now dead.

“I was crying, high, drinking, ain’t want to talk to nobody, couldn’t eat for a couple weeks,” Holmes said, of the day his friend was killed.

Now 19, Holmes points to an overgrown yard across from the train tracks that run along a busy highway in a neighborhood of north Baton Rouge called Scotlandville. In the distance is a new, two-story police station. This is where his friend was shot in the chest in September 2011  - collateral damage in someone else’s fight over a girl. He says it took 30 minutes for the police to respond.

News21’s analysis found 74 homicides in Baton Rouge in 2012, giving the city of 230,000 a homicide rate that is nearly seven times higher than the national rate. The data shows that a majority of Baton Rouge’s homicides — 85 percent — involved firearms, and the victims in 68 percent of all firearm-related homicides in Baton Rouge were 30 or younger in 2012.

“Murder in Baton Rouge, period, is glorified,” Holmes said. “The dude that go to school … he get his GED, high school diploma — he get all that, he a square. You ain’t nothing until you get out here and shoot you somebody. You get yourself a body.” 

Louisiana’s murder rate has been the highest in the country, with 10.8 murders for every 100,000 people. Some have attributed Louisiana’s high murder rate to the prevalence of weapons in the state and its strong gun culture.

Holmes said he got his first gun when he was 11. He knew where a man kept it, so he stole it and sold it for $150 the same day. Stealing is just one way to get a gun in Baton Rouge -- with $50, it’s easy to buy one on the street, Holmes says.

Perry Brooks, 42, is a substitute teacher in the city. He lives in Scotlandville, just across the train tracks from Southern University, and is a mentor to many former students, including Holmes. The kids in Scotlandville respect him — he’s not afraid of them. Brooks survived a gunshot wound to the head when he was 20. He says it’s not surprising to see 11-year-olds with guns. He’s seen fourth-graders bring them to class. He was disappointed when one of his 10th-grade students, who had a 3.79 GPA, was kicked out of school for selling a gun on campus.

“You’ve got to have guns to ward off people who intend to do harm with them,” Brooks said. “If I have a shotgun, someone is less likely to rob me.”

For Holmes and many of his friends, carrying a weapon is about the economics of survival. He says that most of the kids he knows are raising themselves. They might not know their parents or have a place to live. In Scotlandville, 56 percent of children under the age of 18 live below the poverty line according to U.S. Census data.

“It’s so many situations people grow up in … seeing his mother get beat or on dope and he got to get it for his family,” Holmes said. “He’s 5 years old, breaking into everybody’s cars trying to get something to eat for his little sister or something. You think he get old enough and he get a gun, you think he ain’t going to rob somebody? You think he won’t kill you to go bring that back to his people?”

“This environment don’t do nothing but just swallow you up.”

Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore says he sees kids on the witness stand, no older than 15, who have a three-page rap sheet. He often asks where they see themselves at age 18.

“There’s generally two answers,” Moore said. “The answer is either at Angola (prison) doing a life sentence for killing someone … or being dead.”

Last year, Baton Rouge received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to reduce youth violence. The grant helped the city fund the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination program (BRAVE), which is modeled after “Operation Ceasefire,” a crime-reduction strategy that’s effectively reduced gun crime in many American cities since it was first implemented by the Boston Gun Project in 1996.

The program’s primary goal is to get youth to put their guns down and stop shooting each other, Moore said.

The grant is directed at one ZIP code: 70805. Just north of downtown Baton Rouge, bordered on the west by the mammoth ExxonMobil refinery, the 70805 area is predominantly black, and very poor. Moore said it accounts for 13 percent of the city’s population, but 40 percent of all police calls in Baton Rouge come from there.

Moore attributes a drop in Baton Rouge murders last year — from 72 in 2012 to 61 in 2013 — to BRAVE. However, while crime fell in BRAVE’s target area, it rose in some neighboring areas.

On March, 27, Lashona Mosby’s three sons were shot in broad daylight in an area of Baton Rouge referred to as “the Jungle” — just east of 70805. Two survived: her youngest son, age 21, was shot once and the oldest, 25, was shot twice. But her 23-year-old middle son was shot three times in the head and twice in the upper torso. He did not survive.

“We are rooted and grounded in God,” Mosby said. “But I do have my moments when I’m at home, and I might scream. Like today I woke up, I went outside. About 6 o’clock in the morning I began to cry out, to shed tears, because as days go by, months go by I’m missing my son even more so.”

Recently, Mosby has been attending anti-violence events. She hopes to form a support group for mothers who have lost children to violent crime .

“We’re not speaking up enough,” Mosby said. “We’re not being those people that we used to be, whether we’re white, black, no matter what we are, just stand together, pull together.”

Flint 

Around the corner from Hurley Medical Center, a teaching hospital that treats dozens of shooting victims in Flint, five men rest on the rotting wooden steps of a chipped and crooked house. They say they’re exhausted from a day of work on the streets.

“I don’t like doing that shit man. I don’t like feeding my kids with drug money,” one man says.

Flint residents say the robberies and violence stem from drugs, a lack of education, and a lack of jobs. When General Motors and other factories left, the city’s fall from grace came shortly after. For years, it topped lists as the most-violent city in the nation.

One of the men, who calls himself “Big Hurt,” has lived in the city his whole life and laments how much it has changed and how violent it has become. “I just got shot, around June 5 of last year, like right here,” he says, while pointing at the corner right in front of the home. “Over a whole bunch of bullshit. But I ain’t crying over it…it is what it is.”

In 2012, there were 64 murders in the city, which had 101,632 residents that year, 13 times higher than the national murder rate. Nearly 90 percent of those homicides were firearm-related.            

The numbers don’t surprise these men, whose conversations are strewn with murder stories. A man who called himself “Boobie Dawg” said his nephew went to prison because of a $32 gun.

“Him and another friend, they went half on it. Him and another friend were running around going ‘I got you, I got you’ with the gun .... My nephew was f---ing around, he pulled it and he killed somebody. He’s in prison right now. He didn't mean to shoot him, but he shot him.”

It’s Porsha Fluker’s 21st birthday. She’s trying to enjoy a rare day off work, to celebrate with family and friends. But she can’t help thinking about her older brother, now dead. It’s her first birthday without him and the trial of his accused killer is set to start in the weeks to come. 

“There is not a day when I’m not thinking about him. I think what hurts more is that I’ll never see him again,” Fluker said, fighting to hold back tears until she no longer can.

He brother, Terience Demonte Johnson, was 26 when he was shot and killed on Oct. 12, 2013. Shortly after his death, Fluker got a tattoo in his memory. It’s a lifeline, like one from a cardiac monitor, intended to represent the peaks and valleys during his short life.

The peaks include the times Johnson cheered on Fluker at her basketball games, and the birth of his two daughters, now 6 and 8 years old.

The low points are run-ins with the law. Johnson did some time in jail for selling drugs, but his grandmother, Star Kelly, said, “He was trying to turn his life around and we thought things were going good.”

A suspect is in custody, but Johnson’s family still doesn’t know why he was killed, or exactly how it happened. No witnesses have come forward. Kelly says it’s difficult to find people willing to speak to police or in court in Flint, as they fear retaliation.

“We’ve seen people try to tell what they’ve seen and the next day they’re dead,” she said.

Although she may never know why her brother had to die, Fluker hopes the trial will bring her peace, and her brother justice.

“I hope that he do life in prison and whoever else was involved I hope they go down too,” she said of her brother's killer.

If there’s redemption to be found, it comes at the Foss Avenue Baptist church where the Brothers Battling Bloodshed are trying keep young men from killing and dying.

“Thank you Lord for everything you’ve done for us,” they pray at their meeting. “Thank you for motivating us to move past any situation or any wrong, Father, that may try to hold us back.”

In a city where little is sacred, Foss Avenue Baptist’s basketball court and community garden are sanctuaries. All of the youth in Brothers Battling Bloodshed live in close proximity to the church, making it easy for them to meet, garden, talk politics and go to theater performances together.

The program director, Roderick Green, hopes he can keep kids from picking up guns by keeping their minds on other things.

Isiaha Canada’s best friend encouraged him to join the outreach group. The 16-year-old had some close calls — including having a gun pointed to his head — and his friend thought that the group might be able to protect him.

“My friend got shot in front of me on my porch,” Canada said. “You see that happen you be like, ‘Oh, shit, it’s a body in front of me, it’s bleeding.’ You don’t know what to do … I was scared.”

Canada says it’s common to see kids as young as 14 carrying guns. He used to be one of them, and reluctantly admits he once shot someone he didn’t like.

“I did what I did,” he said. “I can’t go back in time and stop what I did, but I was young and dumb. Just seeing older people do it, I do it.”

According to Canada, guns in Flint are “dirt cheap” and he says they mostly come from predominantly white suburbs like nearby Grand Blanc, Michigan.

Throughout his first term in office, U.S. Congressman Dan Kildee has fought to secure federal resources for cities like Flint to combat violent crime. In May, Kildee introduced an amendment that would add $15 million to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives budget to fund partnerships of local and federal organizations to “go after these basically bad guys with guns” as he puts it.

The bill failed, and Kildee says many in the government don’t believe there’s “a legitimate federal role” in supporting cash-strapped cities like Flint. But Kildee, a Democrat who was born and raised in Flint, believes the city can only improve if given federal assistance and that it’s the government’s “most significant” responsibility to provide for the basic safety of its citizens.

“The thing to keep in mind is that the people who live in Flint, they’re not any different than the people who live anywhere else,” Kildee said. “They have the same aspirations that anyone else does. They just need to be given the same opportunities. And we, as a society, have a responsibility to them.”

Camden

Every other week, the mothers of Camden meet at Virtua hospital, where they come to talk about the dead. They cluster around a table, where the windows behind them frame an American flag flying in front of the towering oxidized copper spires of a historic Catholic church.

Each one raised children in the city; each one lost children to the city.

"I don't think I can really ever 'get over' losing my son," says one of the women. "They told me to go to counseling, but those psychiatrists haven't gone what I've gone through."

Cheri Burks started the support group, United Mothers Stand, after her son was shot and killed on Mother's Day last year. He was 24 years old.

“Nobody here has money,” Christina “Goosie” Carstarphen said. “Nobody has a bank account, nobody has homes, nobody has a business.”

Carstarphen saw her son, Robert, lying in an alley after he was shot and killed in 2012.

“For him to be gunned down like he was, in an alleyway, like a dog, that wasn’t right,” she said. “I couldn’t even cry, I was so angry. It was just like, something just ripped out of my body, like a part of me just went.”

After her son’s death, she installed blackout blinds throughout her apartment. She wanted to grieve in the dark.

“I lost my job and everything when my son died,” Carstarphen said.  I didn’t want to leave the house. I shut myself down.”

Camden is a community that has been wrecked by gun violence. In 2012, the small city — only nine square miles with a population of 77,000 — had a murder rate that was 17 times higher than the national murder rate. Since then, the number of murders has fallen, down from 65 in 2012 to 58 in 2013 and 19 so far in 2014, according to statistics from the Camden County Police Department.

Despite the falling homicide rate, the problems plaguing Camden and spurring violent crime are numerous. Police Chief Scott Thompson calls the city “the perfect storm of social inequities.” Its streets are deteriorating. There are no supermarkets, and restaurants are hard to find. It is one of the poorest cities in the United States with a per capita income of around $13,000, and there are few job opportunities.

One factor contributing to the killings is the proliferation of illegal firearms. About eight out of 10 guns the police confiscate are from out of state, Thompson said, coming from Pennsylvania and Maryland, both of which have more relaxed gun laws than New Jersey. Frequently, they end up in the hands of Camden’s youth.

Former Camden County Prosecutor Diane Marano said young men in Camden carry guns for protection after they start working on the streets. Marano, who wrote a doctoral thesis on juvenile gun acquisition, interviewed many jailed youth from south New Jersey. In an environment of acute economic deprivation,  a gun was "a key to anything you want to do," one teen told her.

Thompson says that with so many guns accessible, they’re commonly used to resolve street-corner disputes.

Camden County Police — successors to the Camden Police Department, which was disbanded in 2012 after the city ran out of money to pay for its own force — has taken on a more prominent role in the community since its was formed in 2013, increasing foot patrols and installing additional surveillance cameras. Thompson said the heightened police presence seems to be helping, with murders down by 35 percent so far this year.

Nevertheless, many Camden residents say they do not feel any safer. People are still reluctant to venture far beyond their “'hoods” -- there’s still a feeling that safety is only possible if you stay within a stone’s throw of your own house.

Thompson concedes that the police will never be able to solve every problem the city is facing.

“We got a gun and we got a pair of handcuffs,” he said. “The pistol and the bracelets aren’t going to fix the problems of our city, and we try to use those as tools of last resort.”

The first line of defense is the community.

Hamzah Hamid is a fixture on Haddon Avenue. Shouts of “Assalamu Alaikum” typical of this heavily Muslim community greet him. He’s a religious man; a prayer bump on his forehead from his daily devotions proves the intensity with which he practices his faith. He feels it’s his destiny to stay in Camden, to keep kids from going down the same path he did: Hamid served three years in prison for selling drugs.

Hamid is one of the co-founders of Rising Leaders, an outreach group trying to create positive opportunities for at-risk youth. He talks to kids in Camden about everything from job readiness, budgeting, and healthy eating. He wants them to have goals, to plan for a future many have trouble imagining.

"We're just trying to show these young bulls that they can do something else with their lives besides dealing drugs and gang-banging," Hamid said.

He says the young people he works with turn to crime because they’re frustrated and alone. They have no place to go, and no positive role models. Part of Hamid’s work is simple: Give the kids something to do besides run the streets. On the bottom floor of his house, Hamid offers drop-in karate courses and lets neighborhood kids play videogames.

“If there were two or three more people like Hamid in Camden,” said Dexter Hart, Hamid’s father-in-law, “the city would be a lot better off.”

A few blocks north of Rising Leaders' makeshift headquarters, a Jesuit priest is fighting the same battle. The Rev. Jeff Putthoff, is the founder and executive director of HopeWorks N' Camden, a group that focuses on helping youths who come from unstable housing situations. The program offers temporary housing and helps young men and women get jobs and GED certificates.

The cornerstone of the program, however, focuses on the youths’ pasts. HopeWorks provides counseling, employing a form of treatment called trauma-informed care that looks at the impact trauma has had on the lives of youths in the program.

“The people living in Camden, especially the youths, have been exposed to so much stress in their lives due to the poverty they've grown up in and the violence all around them,” Putthoff said. “This hurts them when they try to get and hold a job.”

Puthoff says that many young people turn to drugs to alleviate the distress caused by trauma.

"I see a future of healing, but a future that requires a lot of work," he said. “Healing takes work, healing is sweaty.”

“Hope is sweaty.”

A few years ago, Pyne Poynt Park in North Camden was a notorious open-air drug market, littered with needles. But in 2011, Bryan Morton founded the North Camden Little League, remaking the park as one of the only places offering recreational activities to the city’s youth. Now, he says, summer is the best season in Camden.

“Everybody is out, everybody is connected,” Morton said. “Nobody wants to leave the park, nobody wants to go home, everybody wants another at bat.”

He says he founded the baseball league to give fathers the chance to be fathers, mothers a time to relax, kids the opportunity to be kids and to let everyone forget for a moment that they live in the most-dangerous city in America.

He loves the view from the baseball field.

“The sun’s setting, the back channel of the Delaware, light breeze blowing through the trees, kids and coaches. Parents looking on. That’s all-American,” Morton said.

“This is reminding us of our place in this society, and it’s reminding the society that we are here.”

And that they want their children to live.

Erin Patrick O’Connor, Jon LaFlamme, Claudia Balthazar and Jackie DelPilar contributed to this report. O’Connor is an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation News21 Fellow; LaFlamme is a News21 Weil Fellow and DelPilar is The John and Patty Williams Fellowship Fellow.

Every three months for three years, when federal law compelled the Carmen Group topubliclydescribe its federal lobbying efforts on behalf of Xavier University of Louisiana, the firm used the vaguely worded phrase: “Hurricane Katrina related recovery issues.”

It’s akin to calling Hurricane Katrina a weather event.

The firm’s true objective was to “devise and implement strategy” to convince federal officials they should forgive $130 million worth of emergency loans the U.S. Department of Education gave the storm-battered university.

The lobbying gambit met with some success: Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., successfully included a loan modification plan for the university in an omnibus spending bill — something Xavier University President Norman Francis publicly lauded as “critical and important.”

The Carmen Group later praised itself as “instrumental in drafting and securing legislation … which provided for loan modification relief” for Xavier University it valued at more than $45 million.

In keeping with the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the public should seemingly know of a lobbyist’s attempts to secure forgiveness or modification of a taxpayer-funded loan worth tens of millions of dollars. 

But were it not for a lawsuit, which detailed a dispute between the university and the firm, the public would be unaware of what Carmen was really hired to do, despite a law requiring that it describe its activities with specificity. 

The Lobbying Disclosure Act says“public confidence in the integrity of government” will increase when “the identity and the extent of the efforts of paid lobbyists to influence federal officials” is disclosed.

Apart from the case of Carmen and Xavier, details contained in a half-dozen other lobbying proposals and service contracts obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through state and federal court filings as well as freedom of information requests reveal exponentially more information about lobbying efforts than what’s contained in quarterly reports submitted to the U.S. Senate and U.S. House.

Reforms fall short

Lobbyists seldom get into trouble for filing such a paucity of information despite the 2007 passage of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal.

The bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared upon its introduction, would help create the “most open and honest Congress in history.” President George W. Bush said upon signing it into law that it didn’t go far enough, and that he would “work with the Congress to improve upon this legislation.”

At first, the reforms showed promise.

The law’s “full public disclosure of lobbying” section requires lobbyists to file disclosures electronically and do so quarterly instead of semiannually. It requires them to provide more information about clients and detail political contributions. It increased civil and criminal penalties for failing to comply with disclosure requirements.

Despite the increased penalties, lobbyists routinely sidestep the law’s disclosure requirements. They also avoid the ban on buying members of Congress meals and gifts by throwinglavish campaign fundraisers for them— events that remain perfectly legal. Lobbyists also continue to bundle campaign donations for notable lawmakers, though they are required to disclose the contributions.

Many lobbyists have avoided detection altogether and have stoppedregistering, even as they continue their employment with the same firms where they represent the same set of clients. Some firmlyargue that they’re well within their rights not to register.

Abramoff  — a former super lobbyist who served 3 ½ years in prison for fraud and corruption — himself considers the reforms made in his name a failure and lobbying disclosure rules a veritable mess.

“After everyone erected the gallows for me, they just went back to what they were doing before,” Abramoff said. “Gigantic problems remain.”

Some lawmakers — even lobbyists themselves — believe it’s again time to reform the way lobbyists are allowed to ply their craft.

Little enforcement

Lobbyist registration is required when an influence practitioner spends at least 20 percent of his or her time for a paying client lobbying the federal government, per the complex federal definitions of “lobbyist” and “lobbying activities.”

As regulations have tightened and anti-lobbyist actions have heightened, the overall number of federally registered lobbyists has declined.  The amount of money reportedly spent on federal lobbying efforts has also slipped each year since 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The drop, some have theorized, may be due to more lobbyists terminating their registrations rather than doing less influencing. President Barack Obama’s executive actions against the profession may have prompted lobbyists to go underground. And there is little fear of punishment for unregistered lobbying.

“There are certainly firms, here and there, that should probably register but do not,” said Rob Kelner, chairman of law and lobbying firm Covington & Burling’s election and political law practice group. “It’s not hard to operate in a way to avoid the need to register. People now push the envelope and take risks they might not otherwise take.”

Abramoff, who since exiting prison has fashioned himself a reformer, says the very word “lobbyist” is pejorative, and therefore, “you come off as a lot more wholesome when you say you’re a ‘strategic adviser.’ ”

But strong lobbying laws don’t mean strong enforcement, as the federal government doesn’t put much effort into policing the lobbying industry.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is tasked by Congress with investigating potential violations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act, most of which arrive in the form of referrals from Congress’ clerk of the House or secretary of the Senate.

Lobbyists who violate federal disclosure provisions could face a $200,000 fine and up to five years in prison — seemingly strict punishments created as part of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

But of the 3,042 referrals the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia received from 2009 to 2012, almost all resulted in no penalties, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report. The handful that have ever resulted in fines involve lobbying law violations that are absurdly overt and sustained.

Unregistered go unchecked

Likewise, the vast majority of referrals involve registered lobbyists potentially acting badly, not un-lobbyists who should be registering and disclosing their activities but do not.

The issue of illegally unregistered lobbyists “isn’t outside the purview” of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, spokesman William Miller said. “However, the referrals we are statutorily required to receive from Congress mainly consist of registered lobbyists who fail to file required reports.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia uses a contract paralegal to work full time on lobbying-related cases, Miller said.  Five civil attorneys and one criminal attorney, who are supervised by a deputy chief in the office’s civil division, are also available to work on lobbying cases, as needed, he said.

“We continually assess our resource needs throughout the office and will make adjustments as necessary, in this area, and in all of our practice areas,” Miller said.

Perhaps sensing a power vacuum, other government entities not typically associated with lobbying enforcement have recently asserted themselves.

Audit firm Ernst & Young, which operates a federal lobbying subsidiary, last month agreed to pay $4 million to settle a case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the firm had illegal potential conflicts of interest because it lobbied on behalf of two audit clients.

And the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent and little-known congressional operation, in July accused an unnamed “entity” of breaking lobbying laws by not registering to lobby. It’s the first time the office, which typically trades in questionable campaign, travel and expenditure activities among congressional members and employees, took such an action against what appears to be a government influence operation.

Nevertheless, such instances remain rare.

Constitutional right

Former Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, who in 2013 registered as a lobbyist on the first day his two-year lobbying ban under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act expired, scoffs at efforts to squelch hired political influencers.

He, like hundreds of other former Republican and Democratic members of Congress, quickly entered the government influence industry upon exiting public service, saying he has every right to do so.

Indeed, the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances” — in other words, lobby on behalf of any interest or cause — is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment alongside the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.

Lobbyists make lots of money because they are effective, and they are effective because Congress can be a scary place for a novice.

“A lobbyist’s stock in trade is his knowledge of the way the system works,” said Bennett, one of 17 senators to co-sponsor the lobbying reform act, although he said he does not remember being a co-sponsor. “If you have an issue that is very complex, going to Congress without a lobbyist is like going to court without a lawyer.”

Like Xavier University and many other colleges, Missouri State University sought professional lobbying help to secure federal funding.

The school hired lobbying giant Patton Boggs LLP (now Squire Patton Boggs) in 2007, with the firm disclosing in a federal filing that it would lobby for Missouri State on “BUD” and “EDU” — codes for budget and education issues. Under the heading “specific lobbying issues,” it listed only “funding for various education programs.” Later filings generally disclosed lobbying on appropriations bills.

But in its 2007 contract with Missouri State University, Patton Boggs provided a five-page game plan for influencing lawmakers and helping the school win federal money. 

The firm boasted of its “close ties” with the Missouri congressional delegation and name-dropped seven federal lawmakers, including Sens. Kit Bond and Claire McCaskill and now-Sen. Roy Blunt, each of Missouri. In a separate 2012 contract, Patton Boggs added Rep. Billy Long to its friends list and mentioned how Rep. Kenny Hulshof’s political committee had been a firm client.

The contract promised the university “direct access to decision makers at senior levels in the government.” The firm would use its “knowledge of the legislative process” to attract grants and obtain line-item funding in appropriations bills.

The 2012 contract noted that “Patton Boggs will assist Missouri State by seeking Congressional appropriations for your priority objectives — in preparation for a possible return to the practice of earmarking appropriation bills.”

In a lobbying proposal in 2008 to Louisiana-based building securities firm MBI Global, Patton Boggs said it could help the company “become a major player with the numerous agencies within the U.S. Department of Defense” by “providing you with direct access to the Department of Defense so that you can reach the people who will make the decision to purchase and use your technology.”

Patton Boggs declined to comment on its clients or disclosure practices. “We’re not really in the habit of discussing our contracts,” firm spokesman Angelo Kakolyris said.

Change urged

Upset with the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act’s legacy to date, several Democratic lawmakers are bent on changing it through legislation.

Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., wants to create a Lobbying Disclosure Act enforcement task force within the Justice Department, assign lobbyists identification numbers and require lobbyists to undergo ethics training.

Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., is intent on banning corporations from making election-season communications if they employ registered federal lobbyists.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., aims to compel more people to register as lobbyists and ban Senate candidates from soliciting registered lobbyists for campaign contributions.

Bennet in June also introduced separate legislation that would in part ban any former member of Congress from lobbying “any Member, officer, or employee of either House of Congress or any employee of any other legislative office of the Congress.” Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., has introduced similar legislation in the House, as has Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla.

Bennet could not be reached for comment, but Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., the bill’s lead co-sponsor, told the Center for Public Integrity that while the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act was a “good first step, it’s now time to take the next step … because the revolving door has to stop.”

Even the Association of Government Relations Professionals, the nation’s largest lobbying trade group, supports some of the reforms contained within the various bills.

“The current laws regulating lobbying were a good first step to open up the government and ensure a baseline of transparency. However, there are many improvements that can be made,” said Monte Ward, the organization’s president. “We are reviewing the proposals with a keen eye towards the balance between increased transparency, respect for the First Amendment and over-regulation of the profession.”

None of the bills are, at this juncture, close to being passed; most are mired in committee.

And with Congress in the teeth of election season and hard pressed to agree on much of anything this session, does Tester believe the bill has any chance of advancement?

“It’s going to be a tough fight, because many people don’t like this bill because they’d be impacted by it,” Tester said.

Other, more informal lobbying proposals also abound.

Kelner, of Covington & Burling, suggested changing federal law to put lobbying enforcement in the hands of the main U.S. Department of Justice, not the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Craig Holman, a lobbyist with Public Citizen, supports one working model that already exists: the Foreign Agents Registration Act, administered by the Department of Justice.

Among its requirements, it demands lobbying firms that represent foreign governments disclose lobbying contacts and a list of every meeting they set up for their clients, in addition to filing more typical lobbying disclosures. Non-FARA lobbying reports filed by most lobbyists “do not provide the public with sufficient information about the scope and targets of a lobbying campaign,” Holman said.

But the idea of reporting all lobbying contacts strikes others as excessive and prone to manipulation. Tom Susman, director of governmental affairs for the American Bar Association and a longtime registered lobbyist, argued that such a measure would be too easy to defeat.

For instance, lobbyists could schedule meetings that don’t align with their clients’ interests only with the intent to deceive. On the other hand, politicians may grow wary of meeting with dissident voices for fear of losing favor with their parties or constituents.

“It would have a chilling effect in just the wrong way,” Susman said.

‘Keep the contract … confidential’

As for Xavier and the Carmen Group, all did not end well in regard to their dealings. A disagreement over their lobbying contract ultimately landed them in court.

The university has maintained that the Carmen Group failed to fully deliver on its promise to seek forgiveness of the loan, having only secured a loan modification. Leading the firm’s efforts for Xavier was David Carmen, the firm’s founder; lobbyist John Ladd, a former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee; and Peter Oppenheimer, a former congressional and State Department intern.

The Carmen Group responded by suing its former client for nonpayment of $270,000 in lobbying fees. The dispute is ongoing.

But no one involved in the lobbying effort is much interested in saying more about it.

Marc Miller, general counsel for the Carmen Group, says his firm complied with federal lobbying law when disclosing its activity on behalf of Xavier University. The firm has never had any issues with its disclosure filings, he added. Miller declined to discuss the firm’s relationship with Xavier University or specific elements of its agreement.

Xavier University representatives also declined to comment. But in a 2010 email from Xavier University official Gene D’Amour to the Carmen Group, the university made it clear that the school’s president wanted no more publicity about its relationship than necessary.

“Dr. Francis would like us to keep the contract, especially the amount we are paying, confidential,” D’Amour wrote.

Landrieu, the U.S. senator who took credit last year for securing Xavier University’s loan modification, said at the time that her efforts would remove “a serious economic burden” from Xavier and other Louisiana schools, which she thanked for their “partnership.”

Never mentioned in her office’s public statements was the Carmen Group, which had privately taken credit for orchestrating the deal. 

Landrieu’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

As one of an estimated 78 million baby boomers in this country, I was delighted to hear that Medicare’s Hospital Trust Fund won’t run out of money until 2030 — 13 years later than projected in 2009, the year before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act.

While it’s uncertain how much of that good news can be attributed to the health care law, some of the provisions aimed at slowing Medicare spending, such as requiring Medicare to reduce payments to hospitals with high readmission rates, are likely helping.

But the Hospital Trust Fund accounts for only about half of total Medicare spending. Most of the rest goes to cover physician fees, prescription drugs and to provide incentives for health insurance companies to participate in the Medicare Advantage program and administer the Medicare drug program.

The Affordable Care Act could have done much more than it does to curb spending in those areas. Because it doesn’t is a testament to the power and influence of the lobbyists who represent doctors, pharmaceutical companies and health insurers.

Some lawmakers, including Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., wanted to include language in the law that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies. That’s something that has long been a policy priority for patient and consumer advocates. But drug companies and their lobbyists are far more powerful and have far more money to spend to influence elections than any patient advocacy group could ever hope to have.

Late last month, two of the advocacy groups — the Medicare Rights Center and Social Security Works — released a report suggesting that Congress could save taxpayers $141 billion over 10 years just by reauthorizing a program that was eliminated at the behest of drug makers when lawmakers enacted the Medicare prescription drug benefit (Part D) in 2003.

The groups noted that while the prescription drug benefit helped Medicare beneficiaries afford their medications, “the law also severely limited the government’s ability to control Medicare drug prices.”

Prior to passage of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, which created Part D, the federal government benefited from discounts on prescription medicines for people covered by both Medicare and Medicaid. According to the advocacy groups, elimination of that program “resulted in windfall profits for pharmaceutical manufacturers.” They cited an analysis showing that drug companies’ profits soared by 34 percent to $76.3 billion in the first year of the Part D program.

The groups also recommended that Congress allow Medicare to create its own drug insurance plan that could directly negotiate drug prices in the same way as another big government agency — the Department of Veterans Affairs — has long been able to do.

Medicare could also reduce spending by billions of dollars if it wrested some control from the American Medical Association, which for more than two decades has largely determined how much doctors get paid by Medicare for the services they provide.

As reported in POLITICO Magazine last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gave the AMA/Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC for short) the responsibility to determine the relative value of the “time, effort and skill that goes into performing a procedure.” 

Over the course of several years, the committee’s recommendations to CMS have led to the major income disparity that now exists between primary care physicians and specialists, who are paid more because the work they do is deemed by the committee to have greater relative value. This not only has created the severe shortage of primary care physicians in the United States, but it has also contributed to soaring health care costs, especially for Medicare.

Congress has also allowed health insurers to enrich themselves, in both lawful and unlawful ways, since the creation of the Medicare Advantage program in 1997. 

Under this program, Medicare pays privately run health plans a set monthly rate for each patient. As the Center for Public Integrity reported in a series of investigative reports this past June, about 16 million Americans have enrolled in these private plans at a cost to taxpayers of more than $160 billion. In addition to paying the private plans a bonus to participate in the program, the CPI investigation uncovered as much as $70 billion of improper payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through last year.

Will Congress act to save taxpayers billions of dollars — and protect the solvency of the Medicare programs — by taking on the AMA, the drugmakers and the insurers? Don’t hold your breath.

As Waxman said following the release of the report calling for Congress to allow Medicare to demand rebates and negotiate prices with drug companies, it’s unlikely that lawmakers will take any action any time soon.

“Republicans, but even a lot of Democrats, are looking to the drug companies for campaign support,” he said.

He could have included insurance companies and physicians and host of other special interests on that list.

Pop quiz, teachers: Would you like to inject a strong dose of libertarianism into the curriculum you take back to school this fall?

If you answered yes, then a Koch-funded think tank has exactly what you need. And it won’t cost you or your school a penny.

The EDvantage, a project of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, bills itself as an online “curriculum hub for pioneering educators.”

The website offers high school teachers and college professors educational videos, articles and podcasts on topics including economics, history and philosophy. But as people might expect from a think tank whose board is chaired by billionaire libertarian Charles Koch, most of the project’s economics content features two common themes: vilify government, promote the free market.

For example, teachers using EDvantage can find economics videos explaining how the Environmental Protection Agency is bad for the environment, how sweatshops are good for third-world workers and how the minimum wage costs workers jobs. Content featuring opposing viewpoints, however, is sparse.

“The minimum wage is supposed to help the poorer, less-skilled and younger workers in the economy,” says the narrator in “The Truth About the Minimum Wage,” a video produced by the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education and featured on EDvantage. “But it doesn’t. It gets them fired.”

According to its website, EDvantage is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, whose core funding areas include “individual freedom and free markets.”

Program director Daniel Green said through a foundation spokeswoman that the two-year, $739,000 grant is meant “to further Sir John Templeton’s objective of supporting education about the enhancement of individual freedom and free markets.” In addition to funding free-market initiatives, the foundation — founded by the billionaire global investor and mutual fund pioneer — supports a variety of other causes, including ones related to science and religion.  

The Institute for Humane Studies, which is housed at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, is funded largely by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The think tank, whose mission is to advance “a freer society,” received $12.4 million from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation from 2008 to 2012, according to annual tax documents.

The Koch brothers appear to be on a mission to spread their libertarian message to high school and college students. In July, The Huffington Post published a story headlined, “Koch High: How The Koch Brothers Are Buying Their Way Into The Minds Of Public School Students,” which detailed how a Koch-run nonprofit called Youth Entrepreneurs is recruiting teachers and crafting curricula favorable to the Koch’s political agenda.

And as the Center for Public Integrity reported in March, two of the six private charitable foundations the Koch brothers control and personally fund combined in 2012 to pump more than $12.7 million into colleges and universities.

The EDvantage officially launched last October, but this is the first time it will be available to teachers for the beginning of a school year.

It is unclear how many teachers and professors have used EDvantage. Scott Barton, a director of the project, declined to be interviewed for this story. In an emailed statement, he wrote that “Resources are curated with the help of our academic editorial board to present ideas from diverse ideological perspectives.”

But teachers who use EDvantage won’t find much ideological balance while researching content on the website’s economics pages. The educational materials selected by EDvantage for economics lessons are overwhelmingly anti-government and pro-free market.

For example, a page of videos and articles on economic regulations includes videos that lament occupational licensing laws, explain how regulations are burdening food truck owners and argue that free markets regulate product safety better than the government.

Content found on pages about fiscal policy, entrepreneurship and price controls is similarly dominated by libertarian perspectives critical of government regulation.

The videos offered on the website are often clever, funny and well-produced. Many videos are produced by Learn Liberty, a separate project of the Institute for Humane Studies that calls itself “a resource for learning about the ideas of a free society.”

One animated Learn Liberty video, titled “How Food Regulations Make Us Less Healthy,” explains how government red tape results in less competition and higher food safety risks.

“Is government the best way to promote food quality, health and nutrition? I say no,” the narrator says in the video. “A freer market without distortions would allow consumers to buy cheaper, healthier food.”

Another video features libertarian Jeffrey Tucker recalling a heart-wrenching personal story about how a small increase in the minimum wage caused his mentally disabled friend, Tad, to lose his job at a department store.

“People want to know why I’m against the minimum wage,” a teary-eyed Tucker says in the video. “It’s because of Tad and all of the millions of other Tads out there.”

EDvantage editorial board member Gailen Hite says he’s “very pleased” with the website, but the Columbia University economics professor acknowledges that the editorial content “is not completely balanced.”

“It’s fair to say that most of us have a libertarian and market orientation,” he said, referring to EDvantage’s board members, all of whom are economists. The site’s content is certainly heavy on free-market perspectives, he added, “but that’s sort of consistent with the values of the organization.”

Besides, Hite said, college students could use a lesson in libertarianism.

“I don’t think the libertarian perspective gets that much of an airing on college campuses,” he said. “We would like to have our story told, too.”

LAS VEGAS — Americans are twice as likely to die from turning guns on themselves as they are to be murdered with one.

A national News21 analysis of 2012 data found 18,602 firearm suicides in 44 states compared with about 9,655 firearm homicides in 49 states. That means at least 50 people died per day from firearm suicide; 26 died from firearm homicides.

Gun shops and ranges in areas with high rates of suicide are teaming up with prevention specialists to prevent firearm suicides. Range employees are learning the warning signs of suicide to stop mentally unstable people from getting their hands on guns.

News21 contacted all 50 states seeking suicide data for 2012, the most recent year available, but Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island denied requests for statistics or could not be reached. The FBI received limited homicide data from Illinois and Alabama and none from Florida.

That firearm suicides outnumbered firearm homicides doesn’t surprise Matthew Miller, who studies suicide at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Suicide rates have been higher than homicide rates for as long as Miller remembers, but many people still assume they are more likely to die in a mass shooting than they are by shooting themselves, he said.

Living with a gun in the home makes residents more likely to die from suicide, because they’re more likely to attempt suicide using a gun — and with guns, there’s no turning back, Miller said.

The public doesn’t hear about firearm suicides often because of the stigma surrounding suicide and people who kill themselves, he said.

“I think what we see in the media, whether it’s newspapers or television or movies, there have been people shooting at one another with guns, but rarely do you hear information about suicide,” Miller said.  

Firearm suicides in the states studied made up 51 percent of the 35,831 total suicides in those states in 2012, News21 found. For the previous five years, firearm suicides made up just under half of all suicides throughout the U.S., according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Suicide by firearm has been loosely studied for the past 20 years by the American Association of Suicidology, a research and education organization based in Washington, D.C., that was created in 1968.  But most experts concentrate on the motives of suicide victims and not the means people use. Prevention specialists are increasingly studying the link between guns and suicide.

Death and gun ownership: Is there a connection?

Experts say having a gun in the house greatly increases the chance someone will use that gun on themselves. States with high rates of firearm suicide generally have high gun ownership.

Alan Berman, former director of the American Association of Suicidology, said there is a direct correlation between gun ownership and death by suicide. Studies show having a gun in the home makes firearm suicide more likely, and can be higher based on gender, age and gun storage.

People choose their method of suicide due to its accessibility, Berman said.

Safe-storage laws are among the few measures suicide analysts agree could help lower firearm suicide rates, because they put a buffer between the mental impulse to end one’s life and the firearms available, Berman said.

“The problem of course is the NRA (National Rifle Association) and their interpretation that any attempt even to talk about safe storage is the beginning of gun control,” Berman said.

Legislation isn’t necessary to promote gun safety, said Don Turner, Nevada Firearms Coalition president.

“As a responsible gun owner, we have the obligation to make sure that our firearms are kept secure and under control, and that we only sell or give firearms to people who are not at risk,” Turner said. “All the time and energy put into limiting access to firearms could be put into improving our mental health system. It would probably yield better results.”

Nationally, firearm suicide rates haven’t changed much over the past 20 years that Berman has studied them. However, some states with prevention programs have had success in lowering rates, he said.

“There are efforts,” Berman said. “But again, they are small-scale efforts relative to a large-scale national issue, which no one has the key to the lock yet.”

Suicide generally stems from a buildup of depression and internal despair, said Cathy Barber, creator of Means Matter — a Harvard research group that studies access to guns or other means of suicide.

It’s not unusual for suicidal people to make several plans or attempts to kill themselves, but experts are noticing a trend of more impulsive suicides with firearms, she said. A survey showed 47 percent of people who attempted suicide did so within 10 minutes of thinking about it, she said.

“For the person who is going from 0 to 60 in a few seconds, you don’t want that person to have access to something that could really quickly kill them,” Barber said. “You want to try to build some delay in them being able to get their hands on something that could kill them.”

Gun owners have higher rates of suicide than non-gun owners, but they don't have higher rates of attempts, according to a study on which Barber worked. They don't have higher rates of mental illness and aren't more likely to kill themselves. They are just more likely to use a more final means for suicide, she said.

Voluntarily relinquishing firearms to a friend or loved one during times of depression, high stress or mental anguish removes the temptation of turning to a gun when someone might be contemplating suicide, Barber said.

Any means necessary

After his son killed himself in 2003, Stephen Johnson, of Las Vegas, installed a gun safe in his garage. Now, Johnson encourages anyone with guns to lock them up for safety.

His 18-year-old son grabbed a Smith & Wesson handgun from a knapsack in his parents’ closet and shot himself in the shower.

Johnson felt guilty about it for a long time. The guilt eventually stopped. The pain never did.

In his suicide note, Levi Johnson said he would’ve killed himself regardless of the means. The note he left behind took fault with his brief time in the Marines and told his Mom not to blame his Dad for the gun, because if the gun hadn’t been available he would have just used a knife or something else.

“Why? You ask that question, oh, a billion times,” Stephen Johnson said. “I still don’t have the answers of why, but I have been able to cope with that — not getting those questions answered.”

It was the second time Johnson’s son tried to kill himself. During basic training, he tried to overdose on aspirin. In high school, he had a history of cutting himself.

Levi Johnson planned his last attempt. He cleaned his room, made his bed and put his last two paychecks and his ATM code on a bulletin board.

Then he picked up the phone and called the police to forewarn them of his suicide. He hung up, turned the phone off, stepped into the shower, pulled the curtain shut and squeezed the trigger.

Two weeks later, Johnson and his wife joined the Survivors of Suicide group. Three years later, they became facilitators to help others process their grief.

Clark County coroner Michael Murphy spends time helping Las Vegas-area families cope after they lose a loved one to suicide. He can’t provide much solace because he can only tell a family how their loved one committed suicide, but not why — the burning question for most. 

“They do not bring a child into this world with the idea that the child’s death will precede them,” Murphy said. “Everything’s out of order for them at that point. And then when they look at what they consider to be a senseless act that someone has done and done to themselves, it leaves them with this emptiness and I don’t know if there’s anything that will fill that void.”

Regardless of the means, suicide is a mental health issue to Murphy. The solution is increasing awareness of the problem and treating it as such, he said. It’s difficult to know what prevention practices work best because statistically, it’s hard to measure what hasn’t happened, Murphy said.

State prevention measures

Prevention specialists in New Hampshire and Nevada are looking at firearm suicides and working with gun stores and ranges to decrease deaths.

Nevada had a high rate of suicide by firearm, 9.83 per 100,000 residents, or 268 suicides, in 2012, the News21 analysis found. It was ninth in the 13 states that make up the West — the region that accounts for some of the highest rates as a whole.

More than three times as many firearm suicides as firearm homicides happened in Nevada in 2012, data shows.

The Nevada Office of Suicide Prevention has coordinators contacting gun stores, ranges and training centers with pamphlets and posters about gun safety. They also train employees to recognize suicidal or distressed customers, said Richard Egan, prevention training and outreach facilitator.

Egan took the Office of Suicide Prevention job after a long Air Force career. He regularly staffs the office’s booth at gun shows to talk to people about firearm safety and suicide.

He teaches employees of gun ranges and stores to recognize suicidal tendencies of customers in a three-hour class called safeTalk.

“Suicide breeds isolation and darkness — open the door and turn on the light,” Egan said. “Talk to them about what they’re going through. Let them express their feelings. And it may not always be about suicide, but you’re not going to know until you ask.”

Nevada is expanding on safety programs that started on the East Coast.

New Hampshire had a firearm suicide rate of 7.36 per 100,000 people with 97 suicides in 2012, according to News21 data. That put it at more than double the average rate of Northeastern states and slightly above the national average rate. Firearm suicides were nearly nine times higher than the 11 firearm homicides in 2012.

Within five days of each other in 2009, three individuals walked into Riley’s Sport Shop in Hooksett, New Hampshire, and bought firearms they used to kill themselves hours later. Elaine Frank, creator of the New Hampshire Firearm Safety Coalition — of which the sport shop was a member — worked together with the owner of Riley’s to create the Gun Shop Project.

The project — seeking to start suicide prevention conversations among gun owners and sellers — has distributed materials for suicide prevention to more than half of New Hampshire gun stores.

In 2011, the Gun Shop Project added a commandment addressing suicide to the previously established “10 Commandments of Firearm Safety” created by gun manufacturer Remington. The new commandment says “If a loved one is at risk for suicide, keep firearms away from them.”

Suicide is preventable up to a point, Frank said. But there will always be a few individuals who give no warning and will end their lives by any means available. “There are many people who are suicidally ambivalent. They’re not sure that they want to live, but they’re really not sure they want to die,” Frank said.

Counter employees at The Range 702 in Las Vegas are sent to safeTalk training to learn to identify the warning signs of potentially suicidal customers, gunsmith Bill Smallwood said.

Smallwood hasn’t yet been through the training, but after knowing four people who committed suicide — including his best friend — he feels like he can recognize the signs.

Smallwood was in Washington, D.C., when he got a 1 a.m. call about his best friend’s suicide. He was on the first plane home to Las Vegas to be there for Danny Wortman’s wife and family.

“I didn’t see it coming,” he said.

Wortman came home and went upstairs for a long period of time, Smallwood said. When his wife went to the bedroom to check on him, she found him with a revolver to his head. She screamed “What are you doing?” and tried to pull the gun away.

He pulled the trigger. Click. He put the gun to his head a second time and pulled the trigger. It went off.

“Going through so many (suicides) and going through what I did, I pretty much know what to look for,” Smallwood said.

For gun shop employees who haven’t experienced suicides, it’s important to know how to recognize warning signs, he said. “It’s something everybody in the building watches out for,” he said.

Employees know it’s a red flag when a customer asks to rent a gun but doesn’t care what kind. When they only ask for one or two bullets, employees know to be cautious, Smallwood said.

That’s when a counter employee will call over Smallwood or another manager for a second opinion. If a manager feels uncomfortable giving the person a gun, service will be denied. Smallwood keeps a stack of brochures and phone numbers in his office he can give to people who seem to need help.

After the person leaves, employees of Range 702 will call every other gun range in town and warn them not to rent a gun to the at-risk individual, Smallwood said.

“People move here for the good life and then you get sucked into Sin City,” Smallwood said. “It is Las Vegas. You start at the penny machine, move up to the nickel machine, then you’re off to the quarter machine and then you’re on to the dollar machine, then you’re spending the rent and it just goes up like that.”

Discount Firearms and Ammo, a gun shop and range in Las Vegas, experienced a suicide about five years ago, operations manager Ron Reyes said.

A suicide will happen at any range if it has been open long enough, Reyes said. Ranges see more red flags and have more ability to stop suicidal customers if they are renting guns, as opposed to bringing their own. But gun ranges hire gun safety officers to provide oversight on the range, spot customers acting irregularly and prevent any incidents, he said.

“It’s a sad instance when it happens to anybody and when it’s as close as within our doors,” Reyes said. “The range officers, where that’s their daily work area, every time they pass by that lane they know something that other people don’t.”

Politicians told Linda Flatt, who helped create the Nevada Office of Suicide Prevention and was a former suicide prevention trainer, not to bring up guns or gun safety from the beginning of her crusade for suicide prevention resources in Nevada.

Before the office was created in 2003, Sen. Ann O’Connell, R-Las Vegas, who sponsored legislation Flatt worked on, told her any mention of gun safety or gun control paired with suicide prevention talk would kill any progress for help to curb suicides.

Now, Flatt is amazed the office and its director, Richard Egan, are addressing it.

After her 25-year-old son, Paul Tillander, committed suicide in 1993, Flatt was adamant in thinking suicides were unpreventable. More than a decade later, she’s convinced the creation of the Office of Suicide Prevention and its work have helped decrease the high rate of suicide in the state.

Nevada had the highest rate of suicides and firearm suicides among all states in 1999, and was still in the top five for both in 2003 before the office was created, according to data gathered from the CDC. Flatt attributed high suicide rates to high gun ownership in the state and large rural areas with feelings of isolation and a go-it-alone mentality among residents. 

By 2012, Nevada ranked 15th for firearm suicides, the News21 analysis shows. Flatt believes her work and that of her colleagues in her former office is the main cause of the drop over the years.

“I decided I was not going to be destroyed by this,” Flatt said of her son’s suicide. “There was only going to be one death, and that was his.”

Carmen Forman is an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation News21 Fellow.

Everyone knows most federal lobbyists aren't going hungry. But how much pay does one lobbyist truly command?

You won't find the answer in federal lobbying disclosures, which only require a lobbying firm to reveal how much money a client pays them on a quarterly basis. That's regardless of whether a client is purchasing the services of one lobbyist or an entire team of them.

Several lobbying contracts obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through federal court filings do, however, reveal the hourly market rate at one notable firm for lobbyists of different skill and experience levels.

In 2010, the Washington, D.C.-based Carmen Group said it would charge Xavier University of Louisiana $1,250 an hour for its "most senior" lobbyist to work beyond what was otherwise a flat-fee billing arrangement with the school.

Carmen Group's "most senior" official is its chief executive officer, David Carmen, who founded the bipartisan firm in 1985 and is the son of Gerald Carmen, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and administrator of the General Services Administration.

In 2005, the Carmen Group said it would charge Louisiana Construction Systems a comparatively modest $850 an hour for lobbying services from its top official, according to a contract between the lobbying firm and its client.  

On the other end of the spectrum, Carmen Group quoted a $75-per-hour fee for "junior personnel" to lobby on behalf of Louisiana Construction Systems in 2005.

The hourly fee increased to $100 by the time the Carmen Group negotiated a contract with Xavier University of Louisiana, which is now mired in a breach of contract lawsuit with its former lobbying firm. 

Another Carmen Group contract — a 2009 public relations agreement between the firm and the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada — quoted firm Managing Director Nicole Korkolis as working for $390 per hour as part of calculating an overall monthly fee of $8,500.

Meanwhile, Managing Associate Don McClure would be paid $250 per hour, Associate Judy McBride $175 per hour and Associate Sabrina Ram $100 per hour, according to the agreement. 

Marc Miller, general counsel for the Carmen Group, declined to discuss the firm’s relationships with its clients or specific elements of its agreements with them.

This year, the Carmen Group's lobbying clients have included more than three-dozen entities, many of them local governments, public agencies, colleges and hospitals. Among the other notable clients? Japanese telecom company SoftBank, resource management firm Veolia Environment and medical outfit HealthFirst.

Senate Democrats have embraced a new big-money fundraising vehicle — after repeatedly blasting the U.S. Supreme Court decision that made it possible — that could help candidates, state parties and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tap wealthy donors for even more cash.

The new “jumbo” joint fundraising committee, dubbed the Grassroots Victory Project 2014, marks the Democrats’ first foray into the territory opened up in April after the Supreme Court’s McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission ruling.

That decision eviscerated the so-called “aggregate” campaign contribution limits that capped at nine the number of candidates a single donor could financially support at the maximum level.

Paperwork recently filed with the Federal Election Commission indicates 26 Democratic candidates and party committees stand to benefit from money raised collectively through the Grassroots Victory Project 2014.

This means that thanks to the McCutcheon ruling, donors this year may give more than $178,000 a piece to the new Grassroots Victory Project 2014, which would distribute the funds among its 26 members.

Senate Democrats' de facto reversal on McCutcheon comes as they brace for a midterm election that will determine whether they cling to a slim Senate majority or lose it to Republicans. The GOP must pick up six seats to win the majority.

Dan Backer, the conservative attorney behind the McCutcheon case, laughed when informed of the Democrats’ new jumbo joint fundraising committee.

“I’m thrilled to help the Democrats demonstrate their hypocrisy,” Backer said. “It’s taking advantage of the freedoms that have been given to them through the McCutcheon decision. They’re dirty free-riders, and I wish them all the best as they raise even more money from the likes of Tom Steyer and George Soros.”

Backer added: “There is no fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to generating as much money as possible for their campaigns.”

DSCC spokesman Justin Barasky declined to comment for this story, saying “we will have more information about our Grassroots Victory Project soon.”

The DSCC has operated a website touting a "Grassroots Victory Project" since early this year.

That website argues that Democrats in key states like Arkansas, Iowa and Louisiana are being outspent on the TV airwaves by “the Kochs and their friends,” referring to the conservative billionaires David and Charles Koch, whose political network reportedly plans to spend $290 million ahead of the November election.

“To fight back, we’ve launched an unprecedented midterm field program: The Grassroots Victory Project!” the DSCC website continues.

In addition to the DSCC, the Grassroots Victory Project 2014 committee includes 11 state and local party committees in battleground states:

• Democratic State Central Committee of Louisiana
• Iowa Democratic Party
• Democratic Party of Arkansas
• Colorado Democratic Party
• North Carolina’s Wake County Democratic Party Federal Campaign Committee
• Michigan Democratic State Central Committee
• Georgia Federal Election Committee
• Alaska Democratic Party
• New Hampshire Democratic Party
• Kentucky State Democratic Central Executive Committee
• West Virginia State Democratic Executive Committee

Fourteen Democratic Senate candidates will also benefit:

• Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska
• Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota
• Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina
• Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana
• Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon
• Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas
• Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire
• Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado
• Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia
• Rep. Bruce Braley of Iowa
• Rep. Gary Peters of Michigan
• Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes
• West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant
• Michelle Nunn of Georgia

Several Democratic politicians who stand to directly benefit from the new Grassroots Victory Project 2014 have previously blasted the McCutcheon decision in messages to supporters.

Franken, for instance, argued that the Supreme Court had “stripped away some of the last remaining protections against keeping even more money out of our elections.” An email from the Minnesota Democrat email urged his backers to sign a petition to “protect our Democracy” and “stand against” McCutcheon and the 2010 campaign finance ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations to make unlimited expenditures for or against candidates.

Colorado’s Udall, meanwhile, said the McCutcheon decision is “definitely a good deal for billionaires and special interest groups looking to buy elections.” He added: “Coloradans are tired of outside spending and extreme television ads. Thanks in part to the McCutcheon ruling, we’ll see even more bombarding our airwaves.”

And Nunn, the Georgia Democrat angling to win the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, declared the McCutcheon decision“bad news for anyone who believes that democracy should be about the voices of the many — not a few billionaires.”

All the while, the DSCC’s sister committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said this of the McCutcheon decision: “Every voice in America deserves to be heard equally. But the court’s decision in McCutcheon v. FEC allows the ultra-wealthy to drown out middle-class Americans at the polls. We need campaign reform to keep our democracy fair and, quite frankly, democratic.”

As recently as Aug. 13, the DSCC itself lambasted the McCutcheon decision.

“The Supreme Court’s misguided rulings in the Citizens United and McCutcheon cases have opened the floodgates for secret spending by corporations and billionaires,” it wrote in a fundraising email. “And super-rich right-wing donors like the Kochs have wasted no time in taking advantage of this free-for-all.”

Republicans have been quicker to embrace the loosened campaign finance rules and have created eight jumbo joint fundraising committees in the aftermath of McCutcheon.

Some GOP party leaders have even called for the "base" contribution limits to be struck down completely.

Alexander Cohen contributed to this report.

This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University

For every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America.

More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten.

Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car.

Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead.

A News21 investigation of child and youth deaths in America between 2002 and 2012 found that at least 28,000 children and teens 19-years-old and younger were killed with guns. Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in America.

The News21 findings are compiled in the most complete database to date from records obtained from 49 state health departments and FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports.

“It’s an unacceptable number and it should be regardless of where you stand on gun-owning ideology,” said Colette Martin, a member of Parents Against Gun Violence. “The numbers are that high and we are as a country ignoring them.”

Most of those killed by firearms, 62 percent, were murdered and the majority of victims were black children and teens. Suicides resulted in 25 percent of the firearm deaths of young people: The majority of them were white. More than 1,100 children and teens were killed by a gun that accidentally discharged.

An Epidemic of Violence

Zeke Cohen, executive director of The Intersection, a Baltimore youth advocacy group, said the dialogue on guns only seems to pierce the national consciousness when it’s a mass shooting in an affluent white suburban community, such as the one where he grew up.

The American gun debate, he said, rarely takes into account the number of black youth who are murdered every day.

“We as a country tolerate violence when it is in low-income black communities,” Cohen said. “Because we’ve come to accept that the acceptable face of gun deaths is black, we allow it to continue to happen.”

Dawnya Johnson was 11 years old when her already broken life was shattered further. Her mom was addicted to drugs, her dad was in prison, and she was tossed from foster home to foster home. She found solace in her older cousin, but that protection was left on a bloody sidewalk. Johnson’s cousin was shot six times in the back and he bled to death before the ambulance got to the scene. He was 17.

“He had taken on the role of two people who were unable to take care of me at that time,” Johnson said. “This beam of support had been ripped from under me.”

Her cousin had lost his job and started selling drugs to make ends meet. When Johnson’s foster families wouldn’t give her food or buy her clothes, he always found a way to get her what she needed.

“My cousin made sure that I had the basic stuff and that I had Nikes and looked fresh every day,” Johnson said. “No kid would ever know if we were homeless or I was hungry walking in the door.”

A young black girl growing up on her own in inner-city Baltimore, in a state with one of the highest percentage of black youth gun deaths in the nation, she said she doesn’t live in fear.

“I’ve become desensitized to fear,” Johnson said. “Once something happens so many times and it repeats itself it becomes something that you don’t fear.”

Jennifer Rauhouse, executive director of Peer Solutions, an Arizona-based organization that looks to prevent violence from occurring, said gun violence was a manifestation of other issues, such as child abuse, sexual abuse and bullying.

“If we don’t get to the heart of the question of gun violence, we’re doomed,” said Rauhouse, who founded the organization.

It’s not enough to react after a shooting, she said. Steps have to be taken to prevent that sort of violence from occurring in the first place.

Eli Chevalier, a high school senior and member of Peer Solutions, said the group works to prevent violence by teaching middle- and high-school students that respect and equality are the norm, not violence.

“People won’t turn to drugs and violence if they have respect and equality in their lives and in their relationships,” Chevalier said.

Cohen started The Intersection, a Baltimore youth advocacy group, after he was held at gunpoint in his Maryland apartment and realized how many kids live with gun violence in their neighborhoods. Johnson, an active member and student leader of The Intersection, lives with it every day.

“For my students, it’s having hope and feeling like they are playing a constructive role in bettering their communities,” Cohen said. “One of the challenges when you’re dealing with communities is that the victims of the gun violence often have a feeling of disenfranchisement.”

All of the students at The Intersection have been affected by gun violence. They’ve lost family or friends, been shot at or caught in shootouts.

“Our students are attempting to change that narrative and dismantle the amount of violence in our city,” Cohen said.

The state of Maryland had one of the highest percentages of black youth gun deaths from 2002 to 2012. In 11 years, more than 600 black kids were shot and killed in their homes or on the street.

“Kids are getting killed, but the reality is America has played such a role in shaping these communities, there is a responsibility that we have to solve this problem,”  Cohen said.

The conversation can’t be just about guns, it’s more about racism and poverty, he said.

“There is too much access. It’s easier for a child to buy a firearm in Baltimore than it is to buy a pack of cigarettes,” Cohen said. “The less guns that are available, the less gun deaths we are going to have, but that doesn’t solve the problem.”

“This is not a Maryland problem, this is an American problem.”

One gun, one moment

Suicides by gunfire, on the other hand, made up the majority of gun deaths among white youth, accounting for an average of 653 every year.

“A gun doesn’t cause the suicidality, but a suicidal person with access to a gun is far more likely to die from an attempt than someone using another method,” said Elaine Frank, the director of Counseling on Access to Lethal Means. “It’s the combination of accessibility, familiarity, lethality and really short time frame that’s offered by a firearm.”

In New Hampshire, where CALM is based, more than 95 percent of all young people killed by guns were white youths and 70 percent of them committed suicide, News21 found.

As a former program director of the injury prevention center at the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, Frank helped develop a state plan on suicide prevention, from which the state developed a suicide prevention council. According to Frank it’s not the gun laws that are going to prevent suicide - it has to be more of a family, community and cultural change.

“We are not anti-gun, we aren’t saying that gun use is a problem or gun ownership is a problem,” Frank said. “What we are opposed to is gun misuse and we do consider the ill-attempt by a child misuse.”

With a fairly rural culture, New Hampshire kids grow up with guns and are taught gun safety. They are familiar with firearms and most teenagers know where the guns are kept.

“If someone is suicidal and if they have easy access to highly lethal means, specifically firearms, it greatly increases the risk that if they do make an attempt it will be a lethal attempt,” Frank said.

Vermont, another rural New England state, also is facing the problem of youth suicides, with 73 percent of its youth gun deaths being suicides.

“Particularly in young people, the time of risk is often very short,” Frank said. “The time from making the decision to make an attempt, to actually making an attempt can be very, very short. There’s not enough time to say I don’t want to do this.”

Unintentional bullets are just as destructive

Accidents involving guns are the third-largest cause of firearm deaths for youths, after murder and suicide. More than 1,100 kids have been killed by a gun that accidentally discharged, the News21 analysis showed.

James Parker was 12 years old when he was accidentally shot and killed by a family member. He was hunting with his dad, uncle and step brother in Wake Forest, North Carolina, when a shotgun blast took his life.

Sincere Tymere Smith was 2 when he fatally shot himself with his father’s gun on Christmas in Conway, South Carolina. His father, who bought the gun after a previous break-in, was charged with involuntary manslaughter after the toddler grabbed the gun as it was lying on the table and shot himself in the chest.

Ryder Rozier was 3 when he stumbled across a gun in his uncle’s bedroom and shot himself in the head in Guthrie, Oklahoma. The gun belonged to his uncle, a state trooper.

Neegnco Xiong was 2 when he was shot by his 4-year-old brother, who found a gun under their father’s pillow in Minneapolis. The gun did not have a safety on it. The father was charged with second-degree manslaughter and endangerment of a child.

William Rees was 14 when he shot himself at his grandparent’s house in Fremont County, Idaho. He was shooting targets when his pistol went off and pierced his abdomen.

All were killed in 2012.

“Any gun that ends up in the hands of a child is first passed through the hands of an adult,” said Colette Martin, a member of Parents Against Gun Violence. “We have a lot of responsibility and accountability when it comes to legal gun owners who allow children to access their guns unsupervised.”

Teens between 15 and 19 were the most likely to be killed by the unintentional pull of a trigger, accounting for half of such deaths.

“These are the cases that keep me up at night because they are 100 percent preventable,” said Martin, a gun owner and stay-at-home mom, “and I will not be swayed from that belief.”

America’s Kids

Whether homicide, suicide or accident, every four hours a child’s life was taken by a bullet during the 11-year period from 2002 to 2012. That’s the equivalent of the Sandy Hook massacre every three days.

More than 19,000 high school-aged students never got to walk across the stage and get a diploma.

“No gun law is going to change anything at this point,” Rauhouse said. “We make it about the guns and we’re not worried about our kids. People should be focusing on why gun violence exists and trying to prevent it from occurring.”

Other gun-control activists argue that gun-storage laws need to be implemented.

“Gun-storage laws with teeth behind them would stop some of the gun deaths that happen in homes,” said Martin, of Parents Against Gun Violence. “It’s a really important piece of federal law that’s missing. Responsible gun owners do it already, it’s not an infringement of a Second Amendment right.”

There are currently 28 states and Washington D.C. with a child access prevention law, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. These laws impose criminal liability on adults who do not properly store their guns when children are in the house.

“The gun lobby is very powerful. Elected officials are out of step with what the general public wants,” said Gerry Hills, founder of Arizonans for Gun Safety. “Americans are not serious about protecting youths and preventing gun violence.”

Janice Bowling, a 67-year-old grandmother and Republican state senator from rural Tennessee, thought it only made sense that the city of Tullahoma be able to offer its local high-speed Internet service to areas beyond the city limits.

After all, many of her rural constituents had slow service or did not have access to commercial providers, like AT&T Inc. and Charter Communications Inc.

But a 1999 Tennessee law prohibits cities that operate their own Internet networks from providing access outside the boundaries where they provide electrical service. Bowling wanted to change that and introduced a bill in February to allow them to expand.

She viewed the network, which offers speeds about 80 times faster than AT&T and 10 times faster than Charter in Tullahoma according to advertised services, as a utility, like electricity, that all Tennesseans need.

“We don’t quarrel with the fact that AT&T has shareholders that it has to answer to,” Bowling said with a drawl while sitting in the spacious wood-paneled den of her log-cabin-style home. “That’s fine, and I believe in capitalism and the free market. But when they won’t come in, then Tennesseans have an obligation to do it themselves.”

At a meeting three weeks after Bowling introduced Senate Bill 2562, the state’s three largest telecommunications companies — AT&T, Charter, and Comcast Corp. — tried to convince Republican leaders to relegate the measure to so-called “summer study,” a black hole that effectively kills a bill. Bowling, described as “feisty” by her constituents, initially beat back the effort and thought she’d get a vote. 

That’s when Joelle Phillips, president of AT&T’s Tennessee operations, leaned toward her across the table in a conference room next to the House caucus leader’s office and said tersely, “Well, I’d hate for this to end up in litigation,” Bowling recalls.

The threat surprised Bowling, and apparently AT&T’s ominous warning reached her colleagues as well. Days later, support in the Tennessee House for Bowling’s bill dissolved. AT&T had won.

“I had no idea the force that would come against this, because it’s just so reasonable and so necessary,” Bowling said.

AT&T and Phillips didn’t respond to emails asking for comment.

A national fight

Tullahoma is just one battlefront in a nationwide war that the telecommunications giants are fighting against the spread of municipal broadband networks. For more than a decade, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable Inc., and CenturyLink Inc. have spent millions of dollars to lobby state legislatures, influence state elections and buy research to try to stop the spread of public Internet services that often offer faster speeds at cheaper rates.

The companies have succeeded in getting laws passed in 20 states that ban or restrict municipalities from offering Internet to residents.

Now the fight has gone national. The Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C., is considering requests from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina, to pre-empt state laws that block municipalities from building or expanding broadband networks, hindering economic growth, the cities argue.

If the FCC rules in favor of the cities, and the ruling survives any legal challenges, municipalities nationwide will be free to offer high-speed Internet to residents when they aren’t satisfied with the service provided by private telecommunications companies.

To better understand the municipal broadband debate, the Center for Public Integrity traveled to two southern cities. Tullahoma, which has a broadband network, and Fayetteville, North Carolina, which doesn’t.

City-provided broadband widespread

More than 130 cities from Norwood, Massachusetts, to Clallam County, Washington, currently offer fiber or cable Internet connections to their communities, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that supports municipal broadband. The municipalities are mostly small to mid-sized cities that critics say large Internet providers avoid because the return on investment is too low.

Cities build broadband networks to support businesses, improve health care and education, and attract jobs, they say. About 89 cities offer gigabit speeds, a rate that can download a 4.5 gigabyte movie in 36 seconds. The same file takes an hour at 10 megabits per second. Slower DSL or dial-up connections, which are common in rural areas, would take many hours longer.

Instead of investing in improving infrastructure in these communities, the telecommunications companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers in 20 states to pass laws restricting or banning municipal networks, according to research conducted by Jim Baller, of the Baller Herbst Law Group, which is representing Chattanooga and Wilson.

When Tullahoma began planning its fiber optic network in 2004, “it got unpleasant real fast,” said Steve Cope, who was mayor at the time. “When you get into broadband you begin stepping on the toes of some of the big boys, the AT&Ts and Charters of the world. They don’t want the competition, and they’ll do anything to keep it out.”

Most of the telecommunications companies say they support municipal broadband, but only for those areas that they don’t serve.

“The idea of private capital competing with taxpayer-provided capital just feels inconsistent to us with what a free-market system looks like,” AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said at a U.S. Senate hearing in June. “But where it’s unserved, it seems like a logical place for government to step in and provide a solution.”

By far, AT&T is the company with the most political influence in states, say statehouse watchers.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 on who is the most powerful lobbying presence in Tennessee, AT&T is a 12,” said a long-time lobbyist in Nashville who asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly about lobbying in the state. “They are the big horse in the race, and they are unstoppable.”

AT&T spent between $250,000 and $300,000 this year hiring 15 lobbyists, ranking it among the largest spenders, according to the Tennessee Ethics Commission.

AT&T’s political action committee is also the biggest donor among telecommunications companies to state campaigns nationwide. Since 2000, its donations more than tripled to $13.6 million in the 2012 election cycle, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which tracks campaign contributions in the states.

In Tennessee, AT&T’s giving in the 2014 election cycle was more than $370,000, almost five times what it was in 2000. In North Carolina, AT&T’s total campaign giving in the 2012 election cycle, including 2011, when the General Assembly passed a bill to restrict municipal broadband networks, was more than $404,000, 60 percent higher than in 2000.

AT&T didn’t respond to requests for comment. Stephenson said during the Senate hearing that he wasn’t aware that AT&T had spent millions of dollars on lobbying for laws that restrict municipal broadband.

“I’m not saying we haven’t,” Stephenson said. “I just don’t know.”

Comcast, the second-largest campaign contributor among telecommunications companies in Tennessee, also has upped its PAC giving from about $3,200 in the 2004 election cycle to a record of more than $270,450 in the 2012 cycle, according to the money in state politics institute.

Going to court

Telecommunications companies aren’t hesitant to spend millions of dollars on lawsuits to kill municipal broadband.

Lafayette, Louisiana, population 123,000, considered building a network in 2004 when city leaders couldn’t convince BellSouth or Cox Communications Inc. to install a fiber network for residents. For the next three years, Lafayette spent $4 million responding to three lawsuits and subsequent appeals from BellSouth, which AT&T bought in 2006, and Cox. The city eventually borrowed $125 million to build the network.

Terry Huval, director of utilities for the city, told a U.S. Senate committee in 2010 that the companies’ actions were “grossly excessive.”

The companies have also used traditional campaign tactics such as newspaper ads, push polls, direct mail and door-to-door canvassing to block municipal networks. And they’ve tried to undermine the appetite for municipal broadband by paying for research from think tanks and front groups to portray the networks as unreliable and costly. 

In a June 19 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Thomas Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, and Royce Van Tassell, vice president of the Utah Taxpayers Association, wrote that an effort by Utah cities to build a municipal broadband network “has caused a spectacular financial failure.”

The authors cited a study by Joseph Fuhr Jr., an economics professor at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, who gave examples of municipal broadband networks that were failing.

Schatz and Tassell did not mention the study was paid for by the Coalition for the New Economy, which says it consists of “businesses, associations, and individuals who are concerned about wasteful duplication of existing or planned Internet service.”

The group’s IRS Form 990 for 2012 shows it gave between $5,000 and $15,000 to each of seven conservative groups, including Americans for Prosperity and the 60 Plus Association, which are backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch; the Center for Individual Freedom, which has been funded by Crossroads GPS, the nonprofit political outside spending group co-founded by Karl Rove; and the tea party-backed FreedomWorks Inc.

Thad Nation, a former staffer to two Democratic governors who is listed as executive director on the form, didn’t return calls or emails asking for comment.

Impact on business

The success of these tactics worries Ted Hackney, executive director of the Industrial Board of Coffee County, who’s in charge of attracting businesses to the Coffee County Joint Industrial Park, a 400-acre development five miles outside Tullahoma.

The site is home to just four businesses, including a tool and die shop and a food processor. A visit in July revealed that it consisted mostly of acres of tall, green stalks of corn.

Hackney is trying to attract technology companies including a large data center, but the Internet service from Charter won’t support such data-hungry businesses. The only network that can provide robust capacity at an affordable price is LightTUBe, the municipal Internet run by the Tullahoma Utility Board (TUB).

If the park can’t get the service, “it certainly would be disappointing,” Hackney said. “It wouldn’t completely wipe us out, but we need it if we are really going to make a go of this.”

Hackney is partial to LightTUBe because it’s a local business and it’s financially stable. In its first year, LightTUBe reported a positive cash flow, but showed losses due to the depreciation of assets.

Today, it has 3,250 customers, about 35 percent of the market, with Charter claiming about the same, estimates Brian Skelton, TUB’s general manager. The utility has paid off more than $3 million of the $16.9 million in bonds it issued to build the network, and it projects it will report its first profit this year — $200,000 — one year behind schedule.

Its success rebuts one of the arguments telecommunications companies have made against municipal broadband systems — that small cities don’t have the technical expertise to operate complex networks or the financial experience to manage the funding. Tullahoma, population 18,700, is one of the smallest cities in the nation with a gigabit network. 

To be sure, several cities have had financial difficulties. They include Ashland, Oregon; Burlington, Vermont; and the 11-city Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency. Some, such as Provo, Utah, and Groton, Connecticut, have sold their networks.

But proponents of municipal broadband say the successes outnumber the failures. And for Tullahoma officials, the characterization is insulting.

“It wasn’t like everyone in Tullahoma was barefoot and dumb,” said Cope, who works for Avion Solutions Inc., a major engineering defense contractor and is chairman of TUB. “We do have a fair amount of sophistication in the community, despite what many people think.”

LightTUBe’s Internet packages are lower-priced than Charter’s or AT&T’s when speed is accounted for.

TUB’s annual customer turnover is low, with less than 1 percent leaving compared with the industry average of 1 to 2 percent. The low rate is surprising, Skelton said, because if a customer moves out of the city limits, “we can no longer serve them because of the state law.” About 80 percent of the customers who leave TUB do so because they have moved out of the city, with most of the other 20 percent leaving for promotional offers like a $200 credit card from AT&T, he said.

“We’re cheaper than anyone, but we can’t compete with the teaser offers,” Skelton said.

Service serves hospital

LightTUBe’s customers include big manufacturers, insurance agents, car dealerships and doctors’ offices, as well as “mom and pop shops,” Skelton said

Lisa Hayes, owner of 1st Choice Realtor, which employs 15 people, said LightTUBe’s reliability has helped her triple her sales this year since she moved to a Web-based listings service. She switched from Charter because her Internet connection would frequently crash and response times were slow.

“We just can’t afford to be down at all, and we can’t wait for two weeks to get something fixed, or we’ll lose customers,” Hayes said.

Agisent Technologies Inc., which provides online records management for police departments and city jails, moved to Tullahoma in 2011 because it needed a fast reliable broadband network that had a backup if the connection failed, said David Lufty, the company’s president.

Charter and AT&T couldn’t offer redundancy, but LightTUBe could.

“Since we’ve been here, we haven’t had more than five minutes of downtime in almost three years,” Lufty said.

Charter didn’t respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.

1st Choice and Agisent are examples of what fast and reliable broadband can do to encourage economic growth, according to Robert Litan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has researched the economics of technology. In a 2007 study, Litan and his colleagues found that for every one-percentage-point increase in the availability of broadband in a state, the number of jobs increased up to three-tenths of a percent per year. Faster broadband speeds likely have the same effect, he said.

“I don’t know what the magnitude would be, but I am convinced you can show there is an incremental benefit,” Litan said.

Employment in Tullahoma lagged statewide job growth before theLightTUBe was turned on. Since the recession ended in 2009, two years after the city began offering broadband, the city has outpaced job growth in Tennessee. The city added 3,598 jobs from April 2009 to April 2014, a 1.63 percent annual growth rate, about double the statewide rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Arnold Air Force Base and its flight simulation development complex, as well as a regional medical center, are the primary engines for employment, officials say, but “if the city of Tullahoma can offer to businesses high-speed Internet at a reasonable price as part of the city’s overall infrastructure, we think that’s a huge advantage for us and one that businesses look for,” said Thom Robinson, executive director of the Tullahoma Area Economic Development Corp.

Meanwhile, in Fayetteville

In Fayetteville, the story is different.

Like Tullahoma, the North Carolina city is adjacent to a military base: Fort Bragg. But Fayetteville’s economy has been struggling for years. Unemployment has been reduced since the depths of the recent recession, but not as quickly as in the rest of the state. The unemployment rate in Cumberland County, where Fayetteville serves as county seat, was 7.6 percent in June, placing it 78th out of the 100 counties in North Carolina and a sharp drop from 21st just five years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Job growth has been anemic in the last five years, with employment increasing 0.55 percent a year compared with 1.27 percent statewide.

It was the struggling economy, combined with his own experience that led Eric Mansfield, a soft-spoken physician in Fayetteville and a former Democratic state senator, to fight a law that would restrict his city from providing fast Internet to its residents and businesses. 

The city’s Public Works Commission operates a gigabit network of more than 200 miles of fiber-optic cables throughout Fayetteville that connect computer systems to monitor its electric, water and sewer systems, and provide Internet access to local government buildings, fire stations and the city’s hospital.

But residents and businesses can’t hook into the network. Mansfield’s Cape Fear Otolaryngology pays $359 a month to Time Warner Cable for a slower connection that frequently crashes trying to manage the load from the practice’s electronic medical records and CT scans, Mansfield said.

“It’s just horrible,” he said.

Time Warner told Mansfield it would cost $500 a month for a faster line.

Mansfield said as a businessman he understands Time Warner Cable’s refusal to upgrade its network in Fayetteville, because the return on its investment is just not there.

“But we still need a fast, affordable network,” Mansfield said. “They have a monopoly, and they act that way. I just think a little competition from the city would go a long way in getting better service for everyone.”

Time Warner Cable said it couldn’t respond to Mansfield’s experience unless they knew the facts of his situation.

Friend of telecoms

Less than four months after Mansfield was elected to the North Carolina General Assembly in 2010, Rep. Marilyn Avila, a Wake County Republican, introduced a bill that would prevent cities from building or expanding existing broadband networks, by requiring them to follow prescribed and time-consuming procedures and financial requirements. The bill became law in May 2011.

Avila’s colleagues in the General Assembly describe her as a friend of telecommunications companies. Before heading to Raleigh in 2006, Avila worked for the John Locke Foundation, a free-market public policy think tank founded by Art Pope, who while a college student also helped establish the Libertarian Party of North Carolina.

Pope, who amassed a fortune in the family retail business, is a prolific donor and is described as a close ally of Charles and David Koch. He is a former board member of the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity.

A few months after her bill passed, Avila spoke at the 2011 meeting of the North Carolina Cable Telecommunications Association in Asheville, in the scenic Great Smoky Mountains, where Avila’s and her husband’s expenses of $1,045 were paid for by the association.

In the 2012 election cycle, when her bill passed, Avila’s campaign received $9,000 from CenturyLink, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, four times more than the previous cycle, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Fayetteville’s Internet provider Time Warner Cable gave $6,000 of the total, 12 times the $500 the company gave in the previous cycle. Avila was among the five North Carolina lawmakers who received the most from the telecommunications industry that year.

Avila didn’t return phone calls or emails asking for comment.

‘We should be so powerful…’

Numerous lawmakers and lobbyists said they suspect the bill was heavily influenced by Time Warner Cable, if not written by the company. Gary Matz, senior vice president of government relations for Time Warner Cable, laughed at the accusation.

“We should be so powerful,” Matz said. “It was a bill that had bipartisan support. It was certainly a bipartisan effort.”

When Avila’s bill hit the Senate floor, Mansfield tried to exempt Fayetteville from the requirements. Colleagues had already been able get exclusions for four other North Carolina cities that operated their own networks: Wilson, Salisbury, Davidson and Mooresville. Mansfield knew he had the votes to pass his amendment.

But Sen. Thomas Apodaca, a Republican from Hendersonville, in the western part of the state, used a procedural maneuver to block Mansfield’s proposal, introducing an amendment of his own that would prohibit city-owned cable companies from providing adult entertainment channels.  If it passed, it would kill Mansfield’s effort. But a vote against it was a vote for pornography. 

The debate turned nasty when Apodaca suggested that if Mansfield, a part-time Baptist pastor, didn’t support his proposal, that perhaps meant he wanted his young daughters to have access to pornography, Mansfield recalls. The statement surprised lawmakers so much they called a recess.  Apodaca eventually apologized, but Mansfield was still stung.

“I told him ‘I know how this works, but your light is a little bit dimmer with me now,’” Mansfield said.

Apodaca and the telecom companies won. Fayetteville wouldn’t be offering residents access to its network. 

Apodaca, chairman of the powerful Rules Committee, is a big beneficiary of telecommunications company largesse. He received $16,750 from AT&T, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable and Verizon Communications Inc. in the 2012 election cycle, the third-largest amount among North Carolina lawmakers, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.  Since he was first elected in 2002, Apodaca has received $62,000 from the telecommunications carriers, the second most of any lawmaker in North Carolina.

Apodaca didn’t return phone calls and emails asking for comment.

For Steven Blanchard, chief executive of Fayetteville’s Public Works Commission, prohibiting Fayetteville residents from using the fiber network that’s already there doesn’t make sense.

“Why shouldn’t we be allowed to sell fiber if it runs by everyone’s house?” Blanchard said. “They are already paying for the fiber to be there, so why not allow them use it for telephone and Internet and capture back a lot of the cost they put in to have it there?”

Time Warner Cable said this summer that Fayetteville is on a short list to get faster Internet next year.

Seeking federal help

In spite of the laws, cities like Tullahoma and Fayetteville may end up being able to expand their networks.

On July 24, the Electric Power Board in Chattanooga and the city of Wilson, which both operate fiber networks, petitioned the FCC to pre-empt their respective state laws that restrict them from expanding service.

Both cities said towns and businesses outside of their areas have asked for Internet service. Chattanooga said cities wanted it for economic development and to replace dial-up modems.

Wilson, which serves six counties with electricity but provides broadband services to just one, said it “stands ready, willing and eager to expand the scope of its broadband capabilities into neighboring communities.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has vowed numerous times, including during testimony to Congress, that he would pre-empt the state laws if the agency is asked to do so. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican who represents a district just west of Tullahoma, inserted an amendment in the fiscal 2015 funding bill for the FCC that would prevent the agency from pre-empting state broadband laws, saying to do so would “trample on our state rights.” Some Democratic lawmakers have come out to support the pre-emption.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, a nongovernmental organization that promotes the interests of states in Congress, has threatened to sue the FCC if it voids the state laws.

The outcome may, however, come down to a footnote. In January, in a federal appeals court ruling on a related issue, U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman laid out in a minority opinion the FCC’s regulatory powers in deploying broadband as stated in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Silberman, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, noted that Congress granted the FCC the ability to “remove barriers to infrastructure investment.” In a footnote, he wrote that a definitive example of such a barrier “would be state laws that prohibit municipalities from creating their own broadband infrastructure to compete against private companies.”

The footnote “is a powerful argument” for the FCC to block the state laws, said Blair Levin, a former lawyer who oversaw the FCC’s National Broadband Plan in 2010, which laid out a road map for providing universal Internet access. The policy goal as outlined in the Telecommunications Act has always been to provide “abundant bandwidth,” he said.

If there were no restrictions, "it is very likely new networks creating such abundance would be deployed,” Levin said.

The FCC has set Aug. 29 as the deadline for comments on Chattanooga’s and Wilson’s petitions, and Sept. 29 as the deadline for replies to comments. No date has been set for when the five commissioners will vote.

In the meantime, the tide in states may be turning against the telecommunications giants. Kansas and Utah, where Republicans control the legislatures, defeated bills this year that would have restricted or banned municipal broadband networks. Republican-led Georgia defeated similar bills in 2012 and 2013.

What it comes down to for communities is self-determination, and even self-preservation, said Baller, the attorney representing Chattanooga and Wilson. He, said officials want to provide fast Internet to their communities for the same reasons they provided electricity a century ago. 

“Local officials want to give their businesses, institutions and residents, particularly their kids, a reason to remain in and thrive in the community,” he said.

This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University

Fear of the federal government’s interference with Second Amendment rights and suspicion that elected officials are ignoring the “will of the people” have provoked a resurgence of self-described patriots across the country who say they are preparing to defend themselves and their rights by any means necessary.

Organizations tracking the movement say the number of groups has risen dramatically in the past six years.

“There’s a very unreasonable, ridiculously crazy attack on the Second Amendment and people that own guns,” said Cope Reynolds, a member of the White Mountain Militia in Show Low, Arizona. “If everything were not protected by the Second Amendment, the government would have the opportunity, if they so desired, to go unchecked with impunity and do whatever they want to do.”

Reynolds is the operations manager of Shots Ranch, a tactical shooting range and survival training facility in Kingman, Arizona. He considers this type of training to be necessary preparation for a time in America he sees as inevitable.

“We want people to be able to provide for themselves in a world where we might not be able to just run down to Wal-Mart at any time,” Reynolds said. “We think that at some point in America we’re probably going to experience those times and a lot of us think it’s not going to be far away.”

For individuals like Reynolds, the Second Amendment is an important check on the government and is needed to protect the Constitution.

“It’s the beauty and the danger of America’s Constitution,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Second Amendment expert. “Its great generalities are so vague that anyone can interpret them in light of their own experience and their own interests. And indeed, the Second Amendment is one of the most confusing textual provisions of the Constitution.”

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes like self-defense.

“It has certainly given fuel to gun rights proponents and to gun culture,” said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist, author and professor at State University of New York Cortland who specializes in gun issues. “It fortified, in a very specific way, the very idea that there is in law something called gun rights.”

The 2008 ruling held that the individual right to own a firearm is “unconnected with service in a militia.”

“There certainly is a belief, and it’s a long-standing belief, that somehow average citizens owning guns will somehow have a beneficial or therapeutic effect on government behavior,” Spitzer said. “It’s rooted in anti-government sentiment, which has a very long history in the U.S.”

Reynolds disagrees.

“We're not anti-government. We're anti-corruption in government. There's a huge difference,” he said.  “We cannot survive without government. We would turn into probably one of the most savage nations on the planet with no government at all.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 1,096 “anti-government” patriot groups in the U.S. in its 2013 Intelligence report, an increase from about 150 groups in 2008. Considered part of this movement are 240 militia groups, which the center says have made a resurgence since their earlier popularity in the mid-1990s.

Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, also has been studying the militia movement for the past 20 years and says the numbers are higher. The ADL keeps an internal list of militia groups, but does not publish it.

"We were tracking around 50 active militia groups in 2008 and now we're tracking between 250 and 300 active militia groups," he said. "It certainly represents a serious surge, which we're able to confirm through the presence of groups and individuals on social networking sites, the number of militia-related events and trainings that we count each year."

Pitcavage said the last militia movement was sparked in part by events in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, sieges that tuned in to deadly standoffs with federal agencies. He noted a similarity between these events and the standoff between Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management earlier this year in Bunkerville, Nevada.

Bundy had been in a disagreement with the government over more than $1 million in grazing fees and fines owed to the federal government. When the BLM came to seize his cattle in April, many militia groups and other members of the patriot movement joined his resistance, aiming their weapons at federal officers until the BLM withdrew.

“Here's someone involved with conflict with the government and the government shows up at his ranch and starts taking his cattle that have been illegally grazing off the property,” Pitcavage said. “That's tailor made for the militia movement.”

A Modern Militia

Modern private militias are unregulated by the government. Members of the movement say they feel disenfranchised and believe their conservative ideals are at odds with the current administration.

They say that arming themselves and training with other like-minded people gives them a sense of preparedness in an unstable world.

“When I was my kids' age, we never locked the door on our cars, on our houses,” said Robert Mitchell, commander of the Citizens Militia of Mississippi. “That doesn't exist anymore. Maybe it sounds cliche, maybe it sounds like Mayberry. I don't know, but that's the way the world's supposed to be. And we have a strong desire to see our communities at least return to that.”

A little over a year ago, Mitchell started the Citizens Militia of Mississippi, which now claims nearly 150 official members – a number that members believe would probably be higher if not for the word “militia” in their name. They acknowledged a stigma surrounding the word, and said part of their mission is to help remove the negative connotation.

“Our goal is to change the public opinion of what the militia is,” Kevan Owen, commander of the northeast chapter of CMM, said. “We're not a bunch of guys running around the woods, pretending to shoot bad guys.”

CMM, which formed in 2013, was not included on the list of anti-government patriot groups published this July by the SPLC. It is one of the newest groups to emerge in the last few years to call itself a militia. Members cite a concern about the current state of our country and a need to defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

“It's supposed to be your neighbors and your friends and your family, working together to better the community,” said Doug Jones, the militia’s co-founder who also serves as treasurer and second-in-command. “That's really what a militia is.”

Active members typically do field training one day a month. That includes drills to practice patrolling and live-fire target practice, as well as learning about first aid, compass navigation and outdoor survival skills. Mitchell says their exercises are largely focused on team building, much like basic training for new military recruits.

Much of their activity focuses on the community. Mitchell said the group holds regular open meetings at the local public library and helps raise money for local police and firefighters.

“We can see ourselves making a difference in our community and in our state. It hasn't been easy,” Mitchell said. “It's not going to get easier, but we're going to keep doing it because we can see that result.”

While he says he wishes the militia were his full-time job, Mitchell makes his living as a machine operator at Batesville Casket Co. He said most of his remaining time is occupied by CMM business.

“My kids hate it, my ex-wife hates it, my now ex-girlfriend hates it. Everybody in my personal life pretty much hates it, because it consumes all my time,” Mitchell said. “It's what I live to do. I'm one of those ‘all or nothing’ kind of guys, and I've put it all in this.”

Mitchell considers the Second Amendment a priority in his life, one that requires sacrifice.

“If you want to get technical about it, every gun law on the books is unconstitutional. I'm not saying give lunatics guns. There have to be limits. Anybody with common sense knows that,” Mitchell said. “The problem is, the more you let them infringe on your right, the more they're going to. I'm not willing to let them have any of mine.”

Charles Heller is the co-founder of the Arizona Citizens Defense League and spokesman for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, a national organization that aims to “destroy gun control.”

The group was formed to spread awareness “about the historical evils that Jews have suffered when they have been disarmed.” Twenty-five years later, that mission has expanded.

“I’ll put it in four words: Gun control is poison. Any form of gun control,” Heller said.

Many gun-rights supporters believe that the uninfringed ability to keep and carry guns is necessary to protect all other rights in the Constitution.

“When the guns are taken away, then the rest of it's all gone,” Reynolds said. “There's nothing protecting any of it. The Second Amendment is the glue that holds the Bill of Rights together. If you slide the Second Amendment out of there, the rest of it's going to collapse.”

Reynolds is stockpiling food, medical supplies, guns and ammunition for a time when American society collapses. He said such an event happening is “not a matter of if, but when.”

People who share these beliefs are preparing throughout the country. A majority of states have at least one established militia group.

In Alaska, militias from across the state have gathered annually for the past three years for a weekend Prepper, Survivalist and Militia Rendezvous just north of Anchorage. The public is invited to come out for “free training provided by patriots.” Topics on the training schedule include close-quarter tactics, base defense, camouflage and convoy security.

The Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia marks its 20th anniversary this year. The group trains every month to prepare for “disasters, crime, invasion, terrorism and tyranny.”

This year, its training calendar included topics like winter survival exercises, shotgun and gas mask drills, as well as patrolling in various conditions.

“As ‘individual’ citizens who have the right to ‘keep and bear arms,' we fund our own equipment and arms, we peacefully assemble with other likeminded ‘individual’ citizens who do the same,” said Louis Vondette, a member of SMVM. “We enjoy the best of times, but prepare for the worst of times.”

Alex Lancial is an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation News21 Fellow.

This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University

Sheriff Mike Lewis considers himself the last man standing for the people of Wicomico County.

“State police and highway patrol get their orders from the governor,” the Maryland sheriff said. “I get my orders from the citizens in this county.”

With more states passing stronger gun control laws, rural sheriffs across the country are taking the meaning of their age-old role as defenders of the Constitution to a new level by protesting such restrictions, News21 found.

Some are refusing to enforce the laws altogether.

Sheriffs in states like New York, Colorado and Maryland argue that some gun control laws defy the Second Amendment and threaten rural culture, for which gun ownership is often an integral component.

They’re joined by groups like Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, both of which encourage law enforcement officers to take a stand against gun control laws.

The Role of a Sheriff

Lewis and some other sheriffs across the nation, most of them elected by residents of their counties, say their role puts them in the foremost position to stand up to gun laws they consider unconstitutional.

“The role of a sheriff is to be the interposer between the law and the citizen,” said Maryland Delegate Don Dwyer, an Anne Arundel County Republican. “He should stand between the government and citizen in every issue pertaining to the law.”

While the position of sheriff is not found in the U.S. Constitution, it is listed in state constitutions: Article XIV of Colorado’s, Article XV of Delaware’s, Part VII of Maryland’s and ARTICLE XIII of New York’s. Nearly all of America’s 3,080 sheriffs are elected to their positions, whereas state and city police are appointed.

When Lewis was president of the Maryland Sheriffs’ Association, he testified with other sheriffs against the state’s Firearms Safety Act (FSA) before it was enacted in 2013. One of the strictest gun laws in the nation, the act requires gun applicants to supply fingerprints and complete training to obtain a handgun license online. It bans 45 types of firearms, limits magazines to 10 rounds and outlaws gun ownership for people who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility.

After Lewis opposed the FSA, he said he was inundated with emails, handwritten letters, phone calls and visits from people thanking him for standing up for gun rights. He keeps a stuffed binder in his office with the laminated notes.

“I knew this was a local issue, but I also knew it had serious ramifications on the U.S. Constitution, specifically for our Second Amendment right,” said Lewis, one of 24 sheriffs in the state. “It ignited fire among sheriffs throughout the state. Those in the rural areas all felt the way I did.”

In New York, the state sheriff’s association has publicly decried portions of the SAFE Act, legislation that broadened the definition of a banned assault weapon, outlawed magazines holding more than 10 rounds and created harsher punishments for anyone who kills a first-responder in the line of duty. The act was intended to establish background checks for ammunition sales, although that provision hasn’t taken effect.

A handful of the state’s 62 sheriffs have vowed not to enforce the high-capacity magazine and assault-weapon bans. One of the most vocal is Sheriff Tony Desmond of Schoharie County, population 32,000. He believes his refusal to enforce the SAFE Act won him re-election in 2013.

“If you have an (assault) weapon, which under the SAFE Act is considered illegal, I don’t look at it as being illegal just because someone said it was,” he said.

Desmond’s deputies haven’t made a single arrest related to the SAFE Act. Neither has the office of Sheriff Paul Van Blarcum of Ulster County. Van Blarcum said it’s not his job to interpret the Constitution, so he’ll enforce the law. But he said police should use discretion when enforcing the SAFE Act and determining whether to make arrests, as they do when administering tickets.

In Otsego County, New York, population 62,000, Sheriff Richard Devlin takes a similar approach. He enforces the SAFE Act but doesn’t make it a priority.

“I feel as an elected official and a chief law enforcement officer of the county it would be irresponsible for me to say, ‘I’m not going to enforce a law I personally disagree with,’” he said. “If someone uses a firearm in commission of a crime, I’m going to charge you with everything I have, including the SAFE Act. I won’t do anything as far as confiscating weapons. We’re not checking out registrations. People that are lawfully using a firearm for target shooting, we’re not bothering those people.”

Colorado made national headlines when 55 of the state’s 62 sheriffs attempted to sign on as plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of several 2013 gun control bills in the state. The most-controversial measures banned magazines of more than 15 rounds and established background checks for private gun sales.

A federal judge said the sheriffs couldn't sue as elected officials, so Weld County Sheriff John Cooke and eight other sheriffs sued as private citizens. Cooke was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, which a federal district judge threw out in June. He and the other plaintiffs are preparing an appeal.

“It’s not (the judge’s) job to tell me what I can and can’t enforce,” Cooke said. “I’m still the one that has to say where do I put my priorities and resources? And it’s not going to be there.”

Cooke has won fans with his opposition. He, like Maryland's Sheriff Lewis, keeps a novel-thick stack of praise and thank-you notes in his office. He’ll run for a Colorado Senate seat in November and is endorsed by the state’s major gun lobby, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

Lewis, who is running for re-election this year, said sheriffs have a responsibility to push against what he sees as the federal government’s continual encroachment on citizens’ lives and rights.

“Where do we draw a line?” he asked. “I made a vow and a commitment that as long as I’m the sheriff of this county I will not allow the federal government to come in here and strip my law-abiding citizens of the right to bear arms. If they attempt to do that it will be an all-out civil war. Because I will stand toe-to-toe with my people.”

But Maryland Sen. Brian Frosh, an FSA sponsor and gun-control advocate of Montgomery County, said Lewis’ understanding of a sheriff’s role is flawed is flawed.

“If you are a sheriff in Maryland you must take an oath to uphold the law and the Constitution,” said Frosh, now the Democratic nominee for Maryland attorney general. “You can’t be selective. It’s not up to a sheriff to decide what’s constitutional and what isn’t. That’s what our courts are for.”

Bronx County, New York, Sen. Jeffrey Klein, who co-sponsored the SAFE Act, agreed that sheriffs who refuse to enforce laws they disagree with are acting out of turn. Constitutional sheriffs are not lawyers or judges, Frosh said, which means they are following their convictions instead of the Constitution.

“We had lots of people come in (to testify against the bill) and without any basis say, ‘This violates the Second Amendment,’” Frosh said. “They can cite the Second Amendment, but they couldn’t explain why this violates it. And the simple fact is it does not. There is a provision of our Constitution that gives people rights with respect to firearms, but it’s not as expansive as many of these people think.”

But sheriffs have the power to nullify, or ignore, a law if it is unconstitutional, Maryland Delegate Dwyer said. He said James Madison referred to nullification as the rightful remedy for the Constitution.

“The sheriffs coming to testify on the bill understood the issue enough and were brave enough to come to Annapolis and make the bold stand that on their watch, in their county, they would not enforce these laws even if they passed,” said Dwyer, who has recognized the sheriffs for their courage. “That is the true role and responsibility of what the sheriff is.”

Rural versus Urban Divide

Some rural sheriffs argue that gun control laws are more than just unconstitutional — they’re unnecessary and irrelevant. In towns and villages where passers-by stop to greet deputies and call local law enforcement to ask for help complying with gun laws, they say, firearms are less associated with crime than they are with a hunting and shooting culture that dates back to when the communities were founded.

Edward Amelio, a deputy in Lewis County, New York, shares that sentiment. There’s no normal day for Amelio, who has patrolled the 27,000-person county for eight years. But he usually responds to domestic disputes, burglaries and car accidents. That’s why he considers the SAFE Act unnecessary.

“We issue orders of protection and some contain a clause the judge puts in there saying a person’s guns are to be confiscated,” Amelio said. “That’s mostly when we deal with guns.”

Zachary Reinhart, a deputy sheriff in Schoharie County, New York, said he responds to a wide variety of calls, too.

“Our calls range from accidental 911 dials to domestic disputes to bar fights,” he said. “You can’t really typify a day at the Schoharie County Sheriff’s Office. It’s all pretty helter-skelter.”

Violent crime also isn’t common in Wicomico County, Maryland, where Lewis is sheriff. He receives daily shooting reports from the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which are not available for public disclosure.

“You always see ‘nothing to report’ in the eastern region, in the southern region, in the northern region, in the western region,” Lewis said. “But the Baltimore central region? Homicide after homicide after homicide.”

Even though there are few gun crimes in rural areas, Sheriff Michael Carpinelli in Lewis County argues that people need guns for self-defense.

“People rely on the police in an urban environment to come and protect you all the time,” he said. “People who live in a rural area also rely upon the police, but they realize that they live further out from those resources and that they may have to take action themselves.”

Duke law professor Joseph Blocher said gun culture has varied in urban and rural areas for centuries.

“It has long been the case that gun use and ownership and gun culture are concentrated in rural areas. whereas support for gun control and efforts to curb gun violence are concentrated in urban areas,” he said. “In the last couple decades we’ve moved away from that towards a more-centralized gun control.”

Lewis bemoaned lawmakers who craft gun-control legislation but are ignorant about guns. “They have no idea between a long gun and a handgun,” he said. “Many of them admittedly have never fired a weapon in their lives.”

But Klein, the Bronx County senator, said he does understand the gun and hunting culture in upstate New York.

“Growing up, my father was in the military,” Klein said. “When I was younger, I had a .22-caliber gun. In the past, I’ve gone pheasant hunting, quail hunting. It’s great," he said. "I mean, there’s nothing that we do in Albany, especially with the SAFE Act, that in any way takes away someone’s right to own a gun for hunting purposes.”

Oath Keepers and CSPOA

If former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack had it his way, there wouldn’t be a single gun control law in the U.S.

“I studied what the Founding Fathers meant about the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, and the conclusion is inescapable,” said Mack, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). “There’s no way around it. Gun control in America is against the law.”

He knows his no-compromise stance has cost him and the CSPOA the support of some sheriffs and law enforcement organizations around the country. And it’s resulted in civil rights agencies labeling CSPOA an anti-government “patriot group.”

But Mack, the former sheriff in eastern Arizona’s rural Graham County, is not letting up. His conviction is central to the ideology of CSPOA, which he founded in 2011 to “unite all public servants and sheriffs, to keep their word to uphold, defend, protect, preserve and obey” the Constitution, according to his introduction letter on the association’s website.

CSPOA also has ties to Oath Keepers, an organization founded in 2009 with a similar goal to unite veterans, law enforcement officers and first-responders who pledge to keep their oath to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Mack serves on the Oath Keepers Board of Directors.

Oath Keepers is larger and farther-reaching than CSPOA, with active chapters in 48 states and the District of Columbia, and an estimated national membership of 40,000. Its website features a declaration of “orders we will not obey,” including those to disarm Americans, impose martial law on a state and blockade cities.

CSPOA grabbed media attention in February with a growing list of sheriffs — 484 as of late July -- professing opposition to federal gun control. Detailed with links beside each name, the sheriffs’ stances run the gamut from refusals to impose a litany of federal and state gun-control laws, to vague vows to protect their constituents’ Second Amendment rights, to law critiques that stop short of promising noncompliance.

Only 16 of those 484 are listed as CSPOA members.

Some sheriffs perceive Oath Keepers and CSPOA as too radical to associate with. Desmond, of Schoharie County, New York, is known around his state for openly not enforcing provisions of the SAFE Act that he considers unconstitutional. Still, he’s not a member of either organization.

“I understand where they are, I guess, but I just have to worry right here myself,” Desmond said. “I don’t want to get involved with somebody that may be a bit more proactive when it comes to the SAFE Act. I want to have the image that I protect gun owners, but I’m not fanatical about it.”

Mack is familiar with that sentiment. He suspects it’s hindered the growth of CSPOA.

“This is such a new idea for so many sheriffs that it’s hard for them to swallow it,” Mack said. “They’ve fallen into the brainwashing and the mainstream ideas that you just have to go after the drug dealers and the DUIs and serve court papers — and that the federal government is the supreme law of the land.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit that classifies and combats hate and extremist groups, included both CSPOA and Oath Keepers on its list of 1,096 anti-government “patriot” groups active in 2013. Both groups have faced criticism for their alleged connections to people accused of crimes that range from possessing a live napalm bomb to shooting and killing two Las Vegas police officers and a bystander in June.

Media representatives from the Southern Poverty Law Center did not return phone calls and emails requesting comment.

Franklin Shook, an Oath Keepers board member who goes by the pseudonym “Elias Alias,” said the organization doesn’t promote violence, but rather a message of peaceful noncompliance.

“What Oath Keepers is saying is ... when you get an order to go to somebody’s house and collect one of these guns, just stand down,” Shook said. “Say peacefully, ‘I refuse to carry out an unlawful order,’ and we, the organization, will do everything in our power to keep public pressure on your side to keep you from getting in trouble for standing down. That makes Oath Keepers extremely dangerous to the system.”

The Future of Gun Control Laws

Self-proclaimed constitutional sheriffs hope that courts will oust gun control measures in their states — but they recognize that may not happen. Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of gun control legislation in Maryland, New York and Colorado have been, for the most part, unsuccessful.

In New York, five SAFE Act-related lawsuits have yielded few results: One lawsuit resulted in an expansion of the magazine limit from seven rounds to 10, but the rest of the measures were thrown out and are awaiting appeal; a similar lawsuit was stayed; a third was thrown out and denied appeal; and two additional lawsuits have been combined but are stagnating in court.

Plaintiffs in the Colorado sheriff lawsuit are preparing to appeal the decision of a federal district judge who in June upheld the constitutionality of the 2013 gun control laws.

A lawsuit seeking to overturn Maryland’s assault weapons and high-capacity magazine bans went to trial in July, but the judge has yet to issue a ruling.

“My hope is that the governor will look at it now that it’s been a year plus and say, ‘We’ve had some provisions that have failed. Let’s sit down and look at this and have a meaningful conversation.’” New York's Devlin said. “I personally don’t see that happening, but I’d like to see that happen.”

Emilie Eaton is a News21 Hearst Fellow. Jacy Marmaduke is a News21 Peter Kiewet Fellow. Sydney Stavinoha is an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation News21 Fellow.

For the next two months, Californians will to be subjected to a barrage of TV, radio and online ads, which, ironically, they unknowingly will be paying for with their health insurance premiums.

The ads are a part of a multi-pronged, multimillion dollar campaign — developed by public relations, advertising firms and political consultants for the state’s biggest insurers — to convince voters that an initiative on the Nov. 4 ballot designed to protect them against unreasonable rate increases will actually cause their premiums to go up.

As of last week, a small handful of health insurers had contributed tens of millions of dollars to an organization called Californians Against Higher Health Care Costs. If you think the companies’ CEOs opened their personal checkbooks to finance that group’s work, think again. It is their customers that are paying for the propaganda campaign.

Californians Against Higher Health Care Costs (CAHHCC) is not a grassroots, consumer-led organization as the name implies. If you check out its website, you’ll read that it’s a “coalition of doctors, nurses, hospitals, health plans, and California employers” who want the state’s residents to vote against Proposition 45, which would give the state’s insurance regulators the ability to reject health insurance rate increases they deem excessive.

But while a number of business and health care provider groups presumably have joined the coalition, it doesn’t appear that any of them have put any money on the table.  According to state filings, the campaign is being financed almost exclusively by five insurers with the most customers in the state: Anthem/WellPoint; Blue Shield of California; Kaiser Foundation Health Plan; Health Net; and UnitedHealthcare.

Of $37.9 million donated to CAHHCC as of August 22, $37.3 million came from those insurers and their PR and lobbying group, the California Association of Health Plans. The rest came from a small group of insurance brokers and their PR and lobbying groups, the California Association of Health Underwriters and the National Association of Health Underwriters. 

The main argument cited by these groups’ opposition to Proposition 45 is that it might interfere with the efforts of Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, to provide individuals and small businesses with affordable coverage options in a timely fashion.

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, who is up for re-election this year, rejects that argument. In a letter to state lawmakers this summer, Jones wrote that if voters pass Proposition 45, his department — which has long had the ability to reject proposed rate increases from auto and property and casualty insurers — will work cooperatively with other state agencies “to ensure that rates are reviewed and approved to meet Covered California…deadlines.”

Jones also pointed out that insurance regulators in 35 other states already have the ability to disapprove unreasonable rate increases, and he offered a point-by-point rebuttal of a report commissioned by the insurance industry that suggested Proposition 45 could undermine provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

Jones wrote that his department has had more than three years’ experience reviewing individual and small group health insurance rates under the federal reform law “including experience last year completing review of health insurance rates in time to meet Covered California’s deadlines to allow health insurers to offer health insurance in the California exchange.”

As a former health insurance company executive, I’d be willing to bet that the state’s health insurers care far less about meeting Covered California’s deadlines than meeting their profit goals. Their real concern, in my opinion, is that regulators with more experience reviewing insurers’ business practices than Covered California staffers might be more likely to detect proposed rate increases designed more to pad their bottom lines than to cover expected increases in medical costs.  

According to the Los Angeles Times, a recent poll showed that 69 percent of registered California voters support Proposition 45, which means that the health insurers have their work cut out for them. But $38 million deployed strategically can change a lot of minds. And insurers know from successful campaigns they’ve conducted in the past that carefully targeted negative ads — and the use of front groups and surrogates — can quickly turn public opinion..

Having been a part of planning and implementing such campaigns in my previous career, I can tell that the industry is conducting a “bifurcated” campaign in California. The industry’s message for conservatives, communicated by its allies in publications like Breitbart.com, is that if a Proposition 45 passes, Democrat Jones would become a health care “czar” empowered to destroy the “free market.”

Another message for conservatives is that it would enable “trial lawyers who fund Jones’s campaigns” to get rich by intervening in the rate-approval process by filing “frivolous lawsuits” against health insurers.

The industry’s key message to scare liberals, communicated by its “coalition,” is showing up in media seldom seen by most conservatives. Some of that $38 million was spent last week on an ad in Salon.com featuring a large picture of President Barack Obama and this message: “Protect Obamacare from Legal Attacks. Prop 45’s Dirty Little Secret: More Attacks Against Obamacare. Vote No on 45!”

I will continue to monitor the industry’s campaign and write more about it in the weeks ahead.

Gazprombank GPB (OJSC), a Russian bank targeted with sanctions by President Obama over the Ukraine crisis, has hired two former U.S. senators to lobby against those sanctions, according to a new disclosure filed with the Senate.

Gazprombank is controlled by Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom, the country’s largest gas producer; it supplies about a third of Europe’s natural gas.

In a filing submitted Friday and effective that day, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and former Senator John Breaux, D-La., are listed as the main lobbyists under the Gazprombank account for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, lobbying on “banking laws and regulations including applicable sanctions.”

Gazprombank GPB (OJSC) is a subsidiary of Gazprombank, Russia’s third largest bank. On July 16th, the U.S. Treasury Department added it to a list of Russian firms barred from debt financing with U.S. institutions.

Lott and Breaux left public service almost a decade ago and are among more than 300 members of Congress who’ve become lobbyists, and begun petitioning former colleagues on behalf of clients, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2008, they started a lobbying firm with their sons, Breaux Lott Leadership Group, which was acquired by D.C.-lobbying powerhouse Patton Boggs in 2010. Patton Boggs merged with Squire Sanders to form Squire Patton Boggs in June.

Gazprom has been in the news a lot. In July, The Permanent Court of Arbitration, an intergovernmental organization located in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled that the Russian government should reimburse $50 billion to certain shareholders of former Russian oil company Yukos. The tribunal said the government, in a series of actions starting in 2003 “accompanied by serious due process violations,” had dismantled and seized the assets of Yukos and transferred them to Gazprom and state-run oil company Rosneft.

Last month, Russian gas firm OAO Novatek retained Washington, D.C., public relations firm Qorvis to lobby the administration and Congress after one of its largest shareholders, an associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin, was similarly targeted for sanctions by the United States.

Whether Republicans control both chambers of Congress during President Barack Obama’s final two years in office squarely depends on a handful of U.S. Senate races now entering their final phase.

So far in all Senate races, candidates, parties and other political power players have aired more than 428,000 television advertisements, including both primary and general election-focused ads, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data provided by Kantar Media/CMAG, a media tracking service.

Together, the ads are worth an estimated $153 million— a figure that will only continue to balloon between now and the Nov. 4 election.

Candidates themselves are responsible for only about half of these ads. Nominally independent groups — such as super PACs and politically active nonprofits — are responsible for most of the rest.

While partisan primaries in part account for the messaging barrage, candidates and other political groups have aggressively pivoted toward the general election during summer months — traditionally a period of political calm before the post-Labor Day sprint toward Election Day.

To oust Democrats from power, the GOP must pick up six Senate seats in November.

Competitive races are under way in more than a dozen states, with the battlefield stretching from Alaska to Colorado to North Carolina.

Democratic candidates and their allies have aired more TV ads to date than their GOP rivals in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana and North Carolina, according to data provided by Kantar Media/CMAG.

Republican candidates and their allies, meanwhile, have bankrolled more ads in Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan and Montana.

Thanks to retirements of Democratic lawmakers in Montana, West Virginia and South Dakota, the GOP looks poised to pick up at least three seats.

Meanwhile, Democratic incumbents in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana and North Carolina are bracing themselves against strong Republican challengers.

And hotly contested open seat races are also underway in Iowa and Michigan, where long-serving Democratic senators have also announced plans to retire.

Republicans are mostly playing offense, except in a few states — most notably, Georgia and Kentucky — where Democratic candidates are mounting well-financed bids.

Both Democrats and Republicans have big-money allies on their sides.

Among the five most active non-candidate spenders so far this cycle, three lean Republican and two are aligned with the Democrats.

The top-spending groups to aid Republicans have been Americans for Prosperity, the politically active nonprofit backed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch; Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit co-founded by GOP strategist Karl Rove; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit trade association.

On the left, the TV ad wars have been dominated by Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC, and Patriot Majority USA, a nonprofit led by a longtime ally of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

So-called “dark money” abounds: Of these five groups, only the Senate Majority PAC must regularly disclose its donors to the Federal Election Commission. The rest must only reveal information about their funders if money is received for a particular ad campaign — something that rarely happens.

Remarkably, about two-thirds of these 428,000-plus ads have aired in just nine battleground states that will likely determine which party will control the upper chamber of Congress during the final two years of Obama’s presidency.

1) North Carolina

Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan is running for re-election against Republican state House Speaker Thom Tillis in North Carolina, where voters have not re-elected a Democratic senator since the 1960s.

Super PACs and politically active nonprofits have dominated the airwaves in North Carolina, with all non-candidate, non-party groups responsible for about 80 percent of the more than 40,700 ads that have aired, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from Kantar Media/CMAG.

Hagan’s campaign has repeatedly blasted the Koch brothers, who support conservative nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, for their involvement in the race.

But the top sponsor of ads in this contest? It’s Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC, which has produced more than 9,500 ads in the race.

That’s about 63 percent more ads than Americans for Prosperity, which has pummeled Hagan for her ties to Obama and her vote for the president’s health care law. Americans for Prosperity’s ads don’t overtly call for Hagan’s defeat, thereby allowing the group to avoid telling federal election regulators how much money its pumping into its messaging machine.

Kantar Media/CMAG estimates that Americans for Prosperity has spent at least $1.8 million on TV ads in the Tar Heel State. Other sources, in attempting to calculate the cost of TV ad buys, have put this figure much higher.

To compete in this environment, both candidates’ campaigns have raised millions. Hagan had raised nearly $17 million for her re-election campaign as of June 30, versus Tillis’ $4.8 million. Hagan ended June with about $8.7 million in the bank, while Tillis reported $1.5 million cash on hand.

Candidates, parties and other politically active groups have, through late August, spent about $2.66 per eligible voter on TV ads.

2) Arkansas

Incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor is fighting for a third term in a state shaded red — Mitt Romney won 60 percent of the vote in 2012. Six years ago, Republicans didn’t even field a challenger to Pryor, whose family is an institution in Arkansas politics. This election cycle, Pryor is being challenged by freshman Rep. Tom Cotton, an attorney who’s a veteran of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both Pryor and Cotton have been prolific fundraisers.

Pryor raised nearly $9 million as of June 30, and he ended the month with about $4.1 million cash on hand. Cotton, meanwhile, raised about $7.1 million. He ended June with about $2.8 million in the bank.

Notably, through late August, Pryor’s campaign had aired more ads than any other group or the Cotton campaign, at about 5,600. The Koch-supported Americans for Prosperity ranked as the second-most frequent ad sponsor, at about 4,000, according to Kantar Media/CMAG.

In all, non-candidate, non-party groups have accounted for about 62 percent of the more than 31,300 ads that have aired in Arkansas, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from Kantar Media/CMAG.

3) Louisiana

Incumbent Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu is facing a tough race for a fourth term, but Louisiana’s election rules don’t pit her against just one Republican opponent. In November, all U.S. Senate candidates run in a “jungle primary,” and if no one candidate secures 50 percent of the vote, then the top two vote-getters will face each other in a December runoff.

Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy is widely viewed as Landrieu’s main challenger, although retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness, another Republican, is also drawing some support from conservative voters.

Landrieu’s campaign had aired more than 13,700 TV ads as of late August, according to Kantar Media/CMAG. That represented about 40 percent of all 34,200 ads in the Senate race.

Non-candidate, non-party groups account for nearly half of all ads aired in Louisiana, with Americans for Prosperity earning the No. 1 spot, at about 4,900 ads.

As of Aug. 2, Landrieu had far outraised Cassidy: $14 million to $8.6 million. However, the Republican challenger reported slightly more cash on hand: $5.6 million versus $5.5 million.

4) Alaska

You wouldn’t necessarily know it by watching the TV ads, but Senate Majority PAC has been a major player in Alaska's U.S. Senate race. It has provided the bulk of the funds for another super PAC, called Put Alaska First, which supports incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Begich.

Put Alaska First has aired about 6,400 TV ads, as of late August, according to Kantar Media/CMAG. That amounts to roughly one out of every five aired in the race. In all, non-candidate, non-party groups account for about 52 percent of the more than 33,400 ads aired in Alaska.

Meanwhile, Begich’s own campaign has aired more than 10,100 ads — about 30 percent of all ads.

Begich has also maintained a fundraising advantage over his Republican rival, Dan Sullivan, the state’s former attorney general and commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources.

As of July 30, Begich had raised about $8.4 million compared to Sullivan’s $4.1 million. The Democratic incumbent reported about $2.1 million cash on hand, at that time, while Sullivan reported about $990,000.

Through late August, no other Senate race has a higher rate of TV ad spending per eligible voter — an estimated $6.

5) Kentucky

No matter that Kentucky is a fairly rural state with only a few sizable media markets. Through late August, candidates and outside groups have aired about 37,500 TV ads in this monsterSenatebattle— with 70 percent from Republican candidates and GOP-aligned groups, including ads run during Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s primary against tea party challenger Matt Bevin.

McConnell would almost certainly become Senate Majority Leader if Republicans gain six Senate seats after the midterm elections, but he’s under withering attacks from Democrats, particularly his Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Grimes has already raised millions of dollars and received endorsements from the likes of Bill Clinton, though McConnell has an even bigger war chest — his $9.8 million in the bank as of late June compares to $6.2 million for Grimes.

Meanwhile, candidate-specific outside groups exist to support both McConnell and Grimes, and the pro-McConnell Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a nonprofit, leads all others in total ads with more than 9,300. Other big groups — including the American Chemistry Council, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Senate Majority PAC and Patriot Majority USA — have also been active in the contest.

The estimated spending through late August on TV ads from all sources per eligible voter is $3.64.

6) Michigan

The openseat Senate race in Michigan pits Democratic Rep. Gary Peters against former Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, who has already pumped millions of dollars of her own money into her campaign. The Democratic-leaning state has already seen a deluge of ads from Koch-connected groups, including Americans for Prosperity and the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.

Team Peters has fought back under the auspices of the Senate Majority PAC, as well as labor unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and Service Employees International Union. A super PAC supporting Land — founded by retired businessman Paul Mitchell — has also entered the fray, as has a nonprofit called the American Sustainable Business Council Action Fund, which has praised Peters in ads for supporting the auto industry bailout.

Through late August, Michiganders have already watched more than 23,500 TV ads about this Senate race.

As of mid-July, Land's campaign had raised $8.7 million, while Peters' campaign had raised about $7 million.

7) Colorado

This race went from quiet to animated when Republican Rep. Cory Gardner announced in March that he would challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, who was first elected in 2008. Recently, Colorado has leaned Democratic — Obama carried it in both 2008 and 2012. But Democratic state leaders have also recently faced ire from voters over a push for stricter gun control laws and education funding.

Already, conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity and Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit co-founded by GOP strategist Karl Rove, have been working to lower Udall’s favorability rating, criticizing him for backing Obamacare, for instance. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, has spent more than $1 million brightening Gardner’s image, according to FEC filings. Udall has been boosted by groups such as Senate Majority PAC, which FEC records show has invested more than $2.6 million into the race through late August, and the League of Conservation Voters.

At the end of June, Udall’s campaign committee enjoyed a $5.7 million-to-$3.4 million cash-on-hand advantage over Gardner.

8) Georgia

This open seat Senate race— incumbent GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss is retiring — could be one of the nation’s closest, pitting two extremely well-funded candidates against one another.

The Democratic Party has rallied behind Michelle Nunn, CEO of the Points of Light Foundation and daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn. Nunn has raised more than $9.2 million and still had $4.8 million in the bank as of late June.

Republicans, meanwhile, nominated self-funding businessman David Perdue over Rep. Jack Kingston in a July runoff vote. The primary is a major reason why more than 36,100 ads have already been aired in the race — Republican candidates and GOP-aligned groups account for about 78 percent of them.

Nunn’s own campaign, however, has aired more ads than Perdue’s campaign, which reported about $780,000 in the bank as of July 2.

Special note: if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote in November — Libertarian Amanda Swafford could complicate matters if the vote is extremely close — the top two candidates have a runoff in January.

9) Iowa

Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley is running against Republican state Sen. Joni Ernst in this open seat race, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin is retiring. Ernst succeeded in uniting several factions of the GOP during the primary, and she gained nation attention for promising to make Washington “squeal” in one notable campaign ad that touted her background castrating hogs among her credentials for knowing how to “cut pork” in Congress.

About 31,500 ads from candidates, parties and other politically active groups have run so far in this Senate race, according to Kantar Media/CMAG, with conservatives accounting for 56 percent of them.

The top non-candidate spender in the race? The Concerned Veterans of America, a veterans-oriented group that is part of the Koch brothers’ political network, which has aired about 3,300 ads.

But as of late June, it was Braley’s campaign that had stockpiled more cash. The Democrat had raised $7.1 million and reported $2.7 million in the bank, while Ernst had raised $2.5 million, with $1.1 million cash on hand.

Best of the rest:

New Hampshire

Freshman Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen will likelyface former GOP Sen. Scott Brown, who briefly represented Massachusetts and has now gone north to the Granite State in a bid to reclaim his political fortune. He lost his office in 2012 to Democrat Elizabeth Warren.

Although Brown is expected to the Republican Party’s nominee next week, he nevertheless faces a pair of plucky challengers in one of the calendar’s latest primaries: New Hampshire’s former two-term U.S. Sen. Bob Smith and former state Sen. Jim Rubens, who’s so far received about $1.2 million in support from Mayday PAC, according to FEC filings. Mayday PAC is an anti-super PAC super PAC founded by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig.

Montana

Among all the issues that could affect a Senate race — the economy, energy, military conflicts — plagiarism isn’t typically among them. Except, that is, in Montana, where interim Democratic Sen. John Walsh quit the race in August amid accusations he lifted other people’s work in writing his master’s degree thesis.

Now, Amanda Curtis — a high school math teacher and Montana state representative with meager political resources — stands as Democrats’ emergency replacement against Republican Steve Daines. The Republican congressman’s campaign has already aired more than 10,100 ads in his bid to be the Silver State’s next senator. That’s nearly half of the 21,100 ads in the entire race.

So far, Curtis has received little outside support for what’s now an implausible bid to keep this Senate seat blue.