The typical exchange left little room for compromise.

“Here’s whom I blame,” wrote one participant in the Usenet newsgroup talk.politics.guns, “two boys with redneck parents and guardians who kept guns at home and raised their little rednecks-to-be with firearms as central values in their lives.”

“If that teacher … had been packing,” riposted another, “she could’ve perhaps returned fire. Ditto for any other teacher or adult on site.”

Arguably, more words have been exchanged online on the topic of gun control than on any other single subject. And for what? To an observer surveying the wreckage of a forum like talk.politics.guns, where the ratio of Nazi references to actual messages approaches 1-to-1, the hopeless sound and fury of online gun fervor truly does seem to signify nothing. What good is the greatest medium of communication ever invented if all we do with it is scream at each other?

Such surface hostilities, however, obscure the real role of the Net in the gun control debate: as a tool for grass-roots political activism. The Net’s potential for fostering political change is well-hyped — but examples are hard to find. Gun politics deliver on the promise: Gun rights activists in the United States are effectively employing the Net as part of a state-by-state campaign to push for legislation that will make it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons. While the yahoos on both sides blather on in the newsgroups and chat rooms, the gun rights activists are marching.

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The first thing one notices about guns and the Net is a gaping disparity: One side outnumbers the other.

“The information on the Net is overwhelmingly pro-gun,” says Bruce Gryniewski, executive director of Washington Ceasefire, a gun
control group in Washington state.

“There is a certain asymmetry,” says Jake Bassett, office manager for Californians for Responsible Gun Laws. “I think a lot of it is that the NRA has a long history of being a grass-roots movement that has been able to mobilize in every other medium, so the mobilization that they have achieved on the Internet is no surprise.”

Advocates of gun control are quick to attribute the preponderance of pro-gun information on the Net to their own lack of funding and dependence on volunteers, and they are eager to blame the deep pockets of the National Rifle Association for their own underdog status in cyberspace. To be sure, the NRA has an immense Web site, and NRA representatives have no qualms about taking credit for the high profile of gun owners on the Net.

But a good look at the Net shows that, if anything, there are far more dedicated volunteers active on the Net fighting against gun control than working for it. It isn’t just a matter of NRA funding; this passion runs deep.

“Many gun owners are absolutely driven by their gun ownership,” says Simon Chapman, a medical professor at the University of Sidney who maintains a set of pro-gun control pages in Australia. “It is almost a defining characteristic of their very being. I know very few people on the gun control side for whom it so dominates their lives. For many, gun ownership and the idea that there may be restrictions is fundamentally threatening to something profoundly psychological.”

The dominance of gun rights activists online is partly a result of the historical demographics of Net use. Until recently, the Net has been home to a disproportionately large number of libertarians for whom the right to bear arms is a first principle. According to Joe Olson, the organizer of a grass-roots group in Minnesota pushing for gun-friendly legislation, gun rights activism follows naturally from the computing background common to Net libertarians.

“It is incredible the number of people of our organization who list themselves as programmers, information managers and the like,” says Olson. “People who deal with factual information and make rational choices on the basis of real information tend to come down on our side of the issue, so I have a coterie of top-notch computer people who want to see the issue moved ahead.”

But demographics alone don’t explain the fervor of anti-gun control opinion on the Net. From the gun owner point of view, the Net offers the possibility to redress imbalances in how the gun control debate is presented by mainstream media.

“Gun control certainly is one of the issues on the Net,” says J. D. Tuccille, the “guide” for a Mining Company site devoted to civil liberties. “More than any other medium, the Net gave a voice to
supporters of the right to keep and bear arms. Most major newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets tend to show sympathy to emotionally satisfying, if brain-dead, ‘ban ‘em now’ reactions to tragedies like the Jonesboro massacre. Philosophical arguments and academic studies that tend to favor gun rights get short shrift on CNN.”

“The simple fact is, there is a wealth of information supporting the idea of private gun ownership that is not discussed in major media,” says J. Neil Schulman, author of the recently published book “SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control.”

“But I don’t need the audience of the Los Angeles Times, or Dan Rather, or Tom Brokaw in order to put this information on the World Wide Web, or into Usenet newsgroups,” says Schulman. “Gun control advocates, when faced with these facts, dissemble and all but the most obstinately dishonest of them slink away in shame.”

But what are the facts? Even if consensus is impossible to achieve online — even if the medium does prove to be bankrupt as a forum for the swaying of undecided hearts and minds — that doesn’t mean that the Net, as a storehouse for information, can’t help facilitate a more informed debate, on or offline. But is there any connection between the deluge of factoids and infobytes available online and the real world of public policy and legislative change?

Tuccille thinks so.

“The best example of the impact of the Net is the ‘Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns’ study by John R. Lott and David B. Mustard of the University of Chicago School of Law,” says Tuccille. “The Lott-Mustard piece basically showed that letting people legally carry pistols helps to drive violent crime rates down. Now, that’s counter-intuitive if you’re a regular reader of Time magazine, but it’s a good, solid study. And when it came out it was buried deep inside of the New York Times, never to be heard from again.”

“The study’s power lies in the fact that it is, dare I say it, ammunition for gun rights advocates that appeared just as the Net was becoming the sort of mass medium that could spread such information far and wide,” says Tuccille. “Whereas 10 years ago you might’ve got into a chat with a good ol’ boy about guns and heard him tell you the old ‘you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers,’ which isn’t the most soothing argument ever heard, now he’s as likely to cite a few choice statistics from the Lott-Mustard study and other papers that he’s run across online. I actually had this happen to me at the counter of a gun shop — the clerk beat me to the punch with the study cites.”

The Lott-Mustard study examines crime data from thousands of U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992. The study examined what
happens to crime rates in counties that have passed laws letting citizens carry concealed weapons. It found that “allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes, without increasing accidental deaths.”

The implications of this study intersect with the Jonesboro tragedy. When the talk.politics.guns regulars started declaiming how lives could have been saved in Jonesboro if the teachers had been “packing” guns, those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the gun control debate might be excused for deeming the assertions ludicrous, if not criminally insane. But in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece published a week after the Jonesboro shootings, John Lott observed that the shootings had occurred in one of the “few places in Arkansas where possessing a gun is illegal” — within 1,000 feet of a public school. Lott then cited his own study as evidence supporting the thesis that if teachers in Arkansas could have borne concealed weapons, they might have been able to defend the students against attack.

The fight over the right to carry concealed weapons is perhaps the most hotly contested battleground in the gun world today. And while on the national level it may appear as if gun control advocates have been winning the gun control battle — with the passage of the Brady Bill and the ban on importation of certain models of semiautomatic weapons as the primary exhibits — on the state level, gun rights activists have been increasingly successful in getting “right-to-carry” legislation passed. According to Tanya Metaksa, chief lobbyist for the NRA, in the last three years alone, “We have doubled the number of states that have right-to-carry laws.”

And the publication of the Lott-Mustard study on the Net has played a role in that success, say both gun control and gun rights activists.

“I think it is very much being utilized by proponents of right-to-carry in those states that don’t have it as a further justification of why that legislation is needed,” says Metaksa.

“I think, on a grass-roots level, [the Lott-Mustard study] has had a great impact,” agrees Washington Ceasefire’s Gryniewski. “People always refer to it. I think there is a direct connection.”

The Lott-Mustard study is impossible to miss. It is widely linked (even by its opponents) and widely copied. According to Lott, its primary author, there were 46,000 downloads of the paper in the five months following its August 1996 Web publication.

“For me as an academic, lots of times you feel lucky if 10 people read your paper,” says Lott. “When you are talking about tens of thousands downloading a paper, it’s pretty overwhelming.”

“To the extent that people are better informed about an issue, and given that [this could be] the most debated topic on the Net, I think it helps dispel myths. I think it makes it harder for people to pass laws that may be well-intentioned but may actually accomplish the opposite of
what they want to do,” says Lott, whose book, “More Guns Less Crime,” is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

There is a downside to Net publication, of course. It’s easy to disseminate information but it’s just as easy to rebut it (although it must be noted that the rebuttals to Lott-Mustard are much scarcer than references and links to the study itself). Anyone who seriously digs into a hotly contested issue is likely to find more questions than answers.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Gun Policy and Research Center and at Georgetown University have attacked the Lott-Mustard study on numerous methodological grounds. Gun control advocacy organizations have taken the fight even closer to home. According to the Violence Policy Center, John Lott is a “biased” activist researcher who has also authored papers that attack environmentalism and promote smoker’s rights.

Ideally, the Net allows interested parties to research any topic endlessly. Not only are rebuttals available, but there are also rebuttals to the rebuttals, ad infinitum. The charge of bias can be reversed in a flash: The researchers at Johns Hopkins, for example, are primarily funded by the Joyce Foundation, which specifically grants funds from its “gun violence” program to “foster broader public understanding of the health implications of gun violence, including an understanding that will lead to strategies that emphasize prevention and do not rely solely on punishment.”

The more information, the less truth? Ultimately, there is support for every argument somewhere on the Net. That, in turn, makes it more important to examine how the information is used than to simply celebrate the Net’s ability to make all that information available.

“[The Lott-Mustard study] puts steel in the spines of gun rights supporters,” says Tuccille. “Now, they don’t just have strong feelings at odds with the talking heads on TV. They have access to studies, research, online publications and information that might have been missed by the major media. It’s a community that reaches everywhere that somebody has a .22 rifle, a PC and a phone line.”

Joe Olson, whose Minnesota right-to-carry Web site has a prominent link to the Lott-Mustard study, says, “We now have the ability, for example, to contact about 300 people directly in an instant and their turnaround is to contact an average of 50 each. We can generate an enormous number of phone calls in an afternoon. We now reach close to 20,000 people, and those people reach their legislators, and we couldn’t have done it without the Net. An average mailing is 50 cents a piece. It would cost $900 to send out a mailing, and take a week to 10 days to get it there. The problem in the past with political activism has been cost and time, and the Internet resolves both of those very favorably.”

There is no Web page devoted to gun control advocacy in Minnesota. Jake Barnett, of Californians for Responsible Gun Laws, admits that gun control activists lag far behind their gun rights competitors.

“There’s a long way to go,” says Barnett. “They need to catch up on a number of fronts, and the Internet is merely one of them. The NRA is a model of what grass-roots activism can do — to get legislation passed and interest in these issues as widely distributed as possible.”

Indeed, that is the lesson to be learned from the gun control debate –
beyond the discouraging stalemate in the endless flame wars over the issue online, political action is taking place. Whether you agree with the gun rights activists or not, you can’t ignore that they have recognized this vital power of online communication, and are among the first to make effective use of it.

“What it boils down to is that the Net favors freedom,” says Tuccille. “By empowering individuals, making communication easier and easing the dissemination of information, the Net bypasses political and media gatekeepers and advances the cause of personal liberty. Free speech, medical marijuana, encryption, financial information — it’s not just guns; it’s everything that we use guns to defend.”

Tuccille’s rhetoric will make gun control advocates wince. But if they hope to prevail, they’ll need to learn to use the Net as adroitly as their opponents.

Indeed, given Gates’ current obsession with prying the Department of Justice off of his corporate back, one might assume that if the man has any political sympathies, they would most likely be of the techno-libertarian bent. Certainly, his struggle with the federal government has been adopted as a cause cilhbre by many Net-based libertarians.

But for once let’s try to separate the man from the Microsoft. Look at the personal checkbook record: pro taxes, pro birth control, against guns. The evidence is clear — Bill Gates is a bleeding heart do-gooder liberal.

Of course, you’ll never hear him say so, nor are you likely to find any of the recipients of his largesse eager to utter the dreaded L-word. His own father, Bill Gates Sr., who administers the approximately $300 million William H. Gates III Foundation, summed up the situation most succinctly: “If you think you’re going to get me to characterize what he does as liberal or conservative, you’re crazy.” Bill Jr.’s politics are not for public consumption. (Ignore those Roman numerals after Bill’s name; to avoid confusion we’ll refer here to Gates pere as Sr. and Gates fils as Jr.)

It’s the very opacity of Bill Jr.’s politics that makes them intriguing, and the money trail of his gift-giving sheds the only light available on them. Gates’ more grandiose gestures — $20 million for a computer center here, $12 million for a biotechnology building there and a whopping $200 million for wiring up rural libraries to the Internet — get the headlines. But his smaller philanthropic statements give us the few clues we have to what Gates, the man — as opposed to Gates, the software marketing machine — really cares about. And we ought to pay attention to what the richest man in the world thinks is socially important — especially if he lives up to his own oft-made promise to give away nearly all of his wealth before he dies.

To be sure, judging Bill Gates’ politics by what he gives away is an exercise in tea-leaf reading that teeters on the brink of absurdity. After all, 35 grand for gun control adds up to about .000001 percent of his total current wealth. Until just a few years ago, the rap on Gates had always been that of the skinflint supreme, our nation’s leading subscriber to the miser persuasion. Especially locally.

“There has been a lot of pressure to have him make donations that impact the region that has allowed him to become so wealthy,” said Don Chalmers, a fund-raising consultant and editor of the Northwest Nonprofit newsletter.

Few people in a position to know the details will go on record criticizing the pattern, or lack thereof, of Gatesian charity. Seattle Foundation president Anne Farrell dismisses local sniping as generated “more out of ignorance than anything else.” But the facts are hard to ignore. Sure, Bill Gates has given away close to $600 million. But more than 90 percent of that sum has been disbursed since 1994, and more than half the total was given away in 1997 alone.

1994, incidentally, was the year Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Gates, died of breast cancer. A longtime United Way board member, Mary Gates, by all accounts, persistently encouraged her son to do more with his wealth than simply accumulate it. After years of single-minded, voracious focus on the Microsoft bottom line, Bill Gates appears to finally be heeding his mom’s advice. Charity does, it seems, begin at home.

Since 1994, the philanthropy tap has been jacked wide open. Hardly a soul in the wired world can have escaped hearing the much-ballyhooed pledge from Bill and Melinda Gates to spend $200 million over the next five years on library Internet access. Less well publicized has been Bill’s 1997 gift of $115 million worth of Microsoft stock to the Gates Foundation, which has brought the total endowment of the foundation up to around $300 million. After a slow start, the foundation gave away some $40 million in 1997, a big jump from 1996′s $6.5 million.

Microsoft spokesman Greg Shaw said that in addition to the library grant and the foundation endowment, Gates has also given away at least another $100 million. This includes large-scale donations, such as $12 million for a law school library at the University of Washington (to be named after his father), $10 million for student scholarships in the name of his mother (also at Washington) and $1 million to Ursuline Academy in Dallas (where his wife, Melinda French Gates, was high school valedictorian) and smaller scale grants to museums, theaters, playgrounds and even a Seattle area rowing club.

The big-ticket donations do not come without associated waves of skepticism from Gates’ stable of critics. That $12 million grant for the new biotech building at the University of Washington? Just the price tag necessary to lure a star biotech professor to the Seattle area, where he can serve as Gates’ informal advisor on biotech investments. Last year’s $20 million pledge (through the Gates Foundation) to Cambridge University for a new computing center? A fine way to keep a close eye on one of the world’s most illustrious centers for cryptography research — and an investment sure to pay huge dividends as digital security becomes ever more paramount. And that oh-so-noble deal to wire up the libraries? An insidious scheme: Hook the poor kids on the Net, and then make sure that they’re all using Internet Explorer as the browser of choice. Future generations of Microsoft market domination will be assured.

No businessman as famous for being as ultra-competitive as Bill Gates can ever escape cynical accusations that his every move is motivated by greed. Nor should he. But the smaller details of Gates’ giving lead us to a different truth. It is much more difficult to discern strategic Microsoft advantage in his support for handgun safety. And his cold-cash concern for family planning could even be construed as asking for trouble. The groups that the Gates Foundation is giving money to have close ideological and organizational ties with pro-choice bastions like Planned Parenthood. Religious right zealots are already beginning to pay attention. Who needs that kind of controversy today?

The first overtly political statement on the Bill Gates balance sheet is his $80,000 contribution to a coalition working against the passage of Washington state ballot initiative 602. Robert Edie, a lobbyist for the University of Washington who also fought the initiative, recalled that its demand of an immediate, “really large” tax rollback was overwhelmingly supported by Washington business leaders.

But not by educators, who led the fight against 602, worried that passage of the initiative would hurt the quality of public education in Washington — just as Proposition 13 had similarly gutted public schools in California decades earlier.

Bill Gates has frequently emphasized the importance of education — both in speeches and in his book “The Road Ahead.” Seattle political reporter Mark Gardner argues that even here his motivations were selfish: Microsoft needs quality programmers and expects universities to provide them, and will oppose anything that could hamstring the university system. Gardner even suggests that all of Gates’ huge donations to universities are aimed at improving relations with potential sources of programming talent.

But the personal reasons explaining Gates’ support of the fight against the 602 tax cut turn out to be somewhat more complex. Gates has always been protective of the University of Washington: Both of his parents attended, and his mother served as a member of the Board of Regents. Furthermore, Teresa Moore, a spokeswoman for the Washington Education Association, remembered that Gates had been alerted to 602′s potential negative impact on the University of Washington by a professor named Leroy Hood.

And who is Leroy Hood? None other than the William H. Gates III chair of the UW biotechnology department — which is housed in the brand new biotech building that stands as Gates’ first multimillion-dollar act of philanthropy.

Was Gates just trying to keep Hood happy? Or was he really concerned about ensuring state support for public education? Microsoft spokesman Shaw couldn’t respond to the question and Gates himself was unavailable for comment, so there’s no real way to know. But the pattern is clear: The direction in which Gates’ money flows satisfies a network of personal connections and concerns; it is as natural as water going downhill.

The anti-602 campaign was victorious. Gates’ next foray into initiative politics met with less success. Initiative 676, a handgun safety bill in 1997 that would have increased licensing and training requirements for new handgun purchasers, went down to overwhelming defeat. In a campaign where the National Rifle Association spent $4 million, $35,000 turned out not to be enough. Still, Gates had made his stand on a classic hot-button issue — gun control.

Did that classify Gates as a liberal? Joe Waldron, chairman of WeCARE, a coalition of anti-gun control activists that led the local opposition to 676, refused to speculate.

“I don’t want to put it in those terms,” said Waldron. “It’s like kicking Superman in the kneecap: You can do it, but you may not like the consequences.”

And $35,000 doesn’t add up to chump change for Bill Gates, anyway, added Waldron. “I wouldn’t read too much into it. You must recognize that with the money that Mr. Gates has, that he is going to give to any number of causes, and in this case the amount of money is relatively small.”

Yes, the sum was small. But no, Gates does not give to “any number of causes.” Although the past few years have seen him rapidly increase dollar totals devoted to building computing centers, wiring up libraries or funding student scholarships, the instances in which one could say he was contributing to a cause are extremely rare. And there is absolutely no evidence of Gatesian financial support for measures that could be considered “conservative” in a political sense.

But again the specter of personal motivation rises. Was this really Bill Gates’ own issue? After all, his own father contributed $150,000 to support Initiative 676 — more than four times as much he did.

“I suspect it was as much his father asking for it as anything else,” said Waldron.

“That’s dead wrong,” snapped Gates Sr. when asked about Waldron’s speculation — clearly unappreciative of any supposition that Gates Jr. isn’t his own philanthropic man.

But Gates Sr. did acknowledge that he and Mary Gates exerted pressure on their son to do more with all his billions.

“His mother and I always pushed a little,” said Gates Sr. Like Mary Gates, Gates Sr. has long been involved in philanthropy — ever since “I first gave a nickel to the Salvation Army man,” he joked.

Ultimately, separating out what is attributable to the parents and what to the son may be pointless. It’s a joint venture. Nothing better illustrates that fact than the William H. Gates III Foundation.

Gates Jr. created the foundation in 1994, the same year his mother died of breast cancer. One of the first two grants made by the foundation was to the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, for a “cancer pain management” study.

Bill Gates Sr., with the part-time help of one private secretary, administers the foundation from the comfort of his home. It is, he said, “the thing that occupies the largest percentage of my time.”

The foundation does not accept unsolicited requests for funding nor does it give out grant-giving guidelines. But a review of its tax returns, which are public record, reveal some clear points of social concern.

All told, the foundation has disbursed about $55 million, with some $40 million, according to Gates Sr., having been “committed” in 1997, mainly for the establishment of academic computing centers.

The grants fall into three categories. First, there are the big-ticket donations — the general fund grants, the grants allocated to building improvements and all the money distributed to institutions that the Gates family has personal connections with (like Gates’ own high school, or the Seattle Art Museum, where Gates has sponsored an exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks). Second, there are a large number of penny-ante donations — $10,000 for refugee relief, $6,000 to the Magnolia Adult Day Center in Seattle and so on. But the third and smallest group, medium-sized donations, stands out: They’re the only ones with political import.

The Gates Foundation has given $750,000 over three years to the Seattle-based PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) — funding that has in part been used for such work as “a quality assurance survey of contraceptives in 22 countries.” The Alan Guttmacher Institute received $1 million over three years for “an international examination of issues facing young women around the world.” And finally, most recently, the Department of Population Dynamics at Johns Hopkins University received $2.3 million for an array of programs aimed at training international specialists in “reproductive health and family planning.”

“Reproductive health and family planning” is a buzz phrase that emerged out of the 1994 United Nations Cairo conference on population issues, said Dr. Gordon Perkin, president of PATH. In the past, the research topic used to be referred to as “population control” — though, said Dr. Perkin, “the words ‘population control’ are not used any more, except by people who don’t know the field.”

Billionaires have always had a fond spot in their hearts for population control: Ted Turner is a big supporter, as is Warren Buffett, a Gates family friend.

“If you think about what people like Buffett, Turner and Gates all have in common — they are more global in their thinking, more risk-taking, more revolutionary in their business practices,” said Beth Frederick, development director at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, “and as such they look for larger answers to some of the problems that seem so close to home.”

But whatever you call it — “population control” or “family planning” — this isn’t just a billionaire fad for the Gates family.

“Bill Gates Sr. has been deeply involved in this issue for decades,” says Laurie S. Zabin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Zabin, who served with Gates Sr. on the national board of Planned Parenthood, was instrumental in getting the Gates Foundation grant for Johns Hopkins.

But that doesn’t mean Gates Sr. is the only one who cares about overpopulation, said Zabin: Gates Jr. “has supported issues of real social concern and certainly this is one of them.”

Gates Sr. agreed: “It’s an interest he has had since he was a kid. And he has friends who are interested in supporting research into world population problems, people whom he admires — it’s just a matter of a fit between his proclivities and mine.”

A “proclivity fit” is one way to put it. Or one could surmise that Bill Gates is growing up to be the man his parents raised him to be.

“His parents were involved in charitable activity, and I’ve heard him talk about it quite a bit,” said Microsoft spokesman Shaw. “I think that set a strong tradition and ethic of giving back and I should say that we are only seeing the beginning of that now.”

One can always count on corporate public relations executives for a positive spin, but Shaw’s point is not without merit. Gates has spoken many times about how he intends to give away 95 percent of his wealth before he dies. So far, he has loosened the reins on a mere fraction of his massive bank account. But just this week, on a Silicon Valley tour, he repeated his promise: “I’m just a steward of this wealth and someday I will return it to society.”

The Gates Foundation is likely to be the vehicle for most future Gatesian philanthropy, at least according to Gates Sr. If it continues to give away money according to the principles by which it was established, the possibilities for social impact are spectacular.

“The potential is enormous,” said Anne Farrell, president of the Seattle Foundation.

We may never definitively pin Gates down as “liberal” — but actions speak louder than words.

“When we start to look at labels we miss the significance of individual action,” says Bryce Gryniewski, executive director of Washington CeaseFire, the leading sponsor of Initiative 676. “Obviously he is concerned about the society he lives in. He’s not only a business owner but he’s a father and a family man, and he’s concerned about the kind of world he’s going to raise his daughter in.”