(Photo: Brian Snynder/Reuters)

The ransom note looks straight out of a Hollywood thriller. “We have your President and Congress,” it says in letters that look cut from a magazine. It is signed “NRA”, referring to the 4-million-member National Rifle Association, the nation’s biggest gun rights group. The mock note is the latest in a 12-year campaign by Massachusetts gun control advocate John Rosenthal to regulate handgun sales. It’s hard to miss in Boston traffic, stretched across a 252-ft billboard unveiled this week on the Massachusetts Turnpike near Fenway Park.

“Toy guns and teddy bears have more federal regulations than firearms that will kill 80 to 90 Americans a day, or 30,000 to 40,000 a year,” said Rosenthal in an interview with Reuters. “When you multiply that times 30 years, that’s more Americans killed by guns in the United States than all American service men and women killed in all foreign wars combined.”

A recreational gun owner himself, Rosenthal does not meet the stereotype of an anti-NRA campaigner. “I’ve been a trap shooter the whole of my adult life,” says the self-described supporter of the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines the right to bear arms. He’s also a prominent businessman as head of Massachusetts real-estate developer Meredith Management. But he believes the NRA exerts too much power over U.S. gun laws. The net effect, he says, is that convicted criminals and suspected terrorists can buy easily concealable, high-powered weapons from unlicensed arms dealers and at thousands of gun shows without a basic background check.

“Fifty-percent of guns sold in the U.S. are sold by private individuals from their homes or at thousands of gun shows annually without an ID or a background check every year,” he said. “Only federally licensed gun dealers are required to run background checks…. You need an ID (card) to cash a check at a grocery store but convicted felons and even people on the suspected terrorist watch list can buy an unlimited number of handguns or military-style weapons without an ID or background check in 32 states,” he adds. “It’s a failed national policy.”

The ransom billboard is the 11th gun-control message posted by his group, Stop Handgun Violence, on the back wall of a parking garage facing the highway since 1995. “I started this when I learned that 15 kids and 106 Americans died every day from guns in 1995,” he said. “I said ‘how can this be?’. And I looked into it. There’s no consumer product safety or marketing standards,” he said. “Why is that happening? The only reason that I can come up with is that Congress will not even enact a national law requiring background checks for all gun sales including criminals and terrorists because they are intimidated by the NRA and are allowing themselves to be held hostage by tens of millions of dollars of NRA money.”

(Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Local officials in Massachusetts, which has among the nation’s toughest handgun laws and lowest rates of firearm-related deaths, have rallied behind him. Lieutenant Gov. Timothy Murray, Public Safety Secretary Kevin Burke, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, and State Police Colonel Mark Delaney all attended the unveiling ceremony.

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam dismissed the sign as a publicity ploy. “The fact that the gun control movement need to put out a sign with that tone is not surprising, when groups are challenged politically and they get defeated repeatedly,” he said. “It tends to breed a sense of desperation.”

Rosenthal, however, reckons many Americans want handguns better regulated to prevent a reprise of April’s shooting at Virginia Tech, the worst gun-related massacre in U.S. history. He said the NRA has spent $22 million in direct expenditure on Congressional candidates in the last four election cycles — including $4 million to U.S. President George W. Bush. The NRA said that figure is “tiny compared to the larger picture in politics”.

“What the NRA has what the other groups don’t have is a core group of dedicated members. Our members go out there and vote and go out there and volunteer for candidates they believe in. The reason is NRA is successful in state legislatures and Congress is that it reflects what the people want, and members of Congress vote according to what their constituents want them to do,” said Arulanandam.

Some federal legislation is in the works. In June, the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to help keep guns out of hands of the mentally ill, sending the legislation to the Senate for needed concurrence. The legislation, written in consultation with the NRA, would provide financial incentives for states to provide mental health and criminal records to a database used for federal background checks on gun buyers. The 1968 Gun Control Act prohibits anyone found by a court to be “a mental defective” from possessing a gun. It also bars felons, fugitives, drug addicts and wife beaters. But because of state privacy laws and fiscal restraints, most states have failed to fully report such records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Rosenthal notes that only federally licensed gun dealers use the NICS. “This won’t do anything about the unlicensed arms dealers that sell up 50 percent of the guns in our country,” he wrote on his blog. There are an estimated 250 million privately owned guns in the United States, which has a population of about 300 million.