The Woman Who Took On the N.R.A. After Two Gun Suicides

0:05Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, Tyler. Thanks for having me. Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides, and white men are thought to account for something like 80 % of those deaths. Why do you think it is that that fact hasn't really broken through in the national gun debate the way that mass shootings have? I think part of the reason is suicide in particular seems to be like thought of something other than gun violence, like it's something someone does to themselves. And so it's somehow for that reason viewed as like less of a societal concern because it feels really personal.

0:45And mass shootings in particular are terrifying because while they're like very infrequent, they can happen to you and they can happen anywhere and they sort of capture the public's imagination. And I think also that the gun industry itself has not been particularly keen to discuss the fact that its top customers are also the ones who are most likely to die by their own hand. And I guess it's also the case that it's easier, like when we think about victims, innocent victims, we think of people who have been shot, you know, by assailants or by someone who's carrying out a mass shooting or like something like in the context of a crime.

1:25and again, suicide is sort of a personal act. And so I guess it just sort of fades into the background. But interestingly, for a long time, the industry used to say, when we would talk about how many gun deaths there are every year, they would sometimes point out, well, most of them are suicide. Like as if that were the, you know, like it's not so bad. Like, you know, it's mostly two thirds, you know, whatever it is, like people are killing themselves. Like, it's not, they're not actually killing other people. Those aren't people being violent. Right, right, right, right, right. That's Mike Spees, who just wrote a piece for The New Yorker in collaboration with The Trace about a woman named Stormy who lost two partners to gun suicide and the aftermath that led her to file a lawsuit against the National Rifle Association.

2:16The details of this story are harrowing, and they provide a snapshot of some of the most tragic realities of American gun culture. The relationship between firearm ownership and suicide, and the decades-long effort by the gun lobby to cast doubt on evidence linking the two, all while continuing to rely on the deep cultural and emotional attachment that many Americans have to gun ownership. I wanted to talk with Mike about his reporting, how one woman's story points to larger truths about America's relationship with guns, and what it all reveals about the current state of the gun lobby and the broader fight over gun rights and gun control.

2:51This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

3:01We're here today to talk about your most recent piece, which is an extremely troubling account that I honestly haven't been able to stop thinking about ever since I read it. And I'd really encourage everyone listening to this episode to read the article itself. But you focus on a woman in Maryland named Stormy K and her relationships with two different men who died by firearm suicide. Can you take us through the first of those relationships? Yeah. So Stormy is from, like, rural Maryland. He sort of grew up around firearms where, like, her father and the other men in her community all had guns and they all hunted.

3:36And even her mom had a firearm. And they went target shooting sometimes together. And when she finished high school, you know, she started working and got linked up with a guy who also was local. His name was Barry Morse, and Morse then became Stormy's, like, last name eventually. And their relationship was kind of like a whirlwind. It happened, like, very fast. He was somebody who also had, like, he was an avid gun enthusiast, but also, like, a number of issues like drugs. He also suffered from bipolar disorder. had alcohol issues and also generally had impulse control issues, violent tendencies, anger management problems.

4:21But she loved him. He also was very charming, very clever, just sort of really eclectic. Could be a music producer, also was into car detailing and just kind of like a jack of all trades. His father owned a bunch of McDonald's, so he was in that for a while. And then he got arrested, got caught with guns and cocaine and weed, I think, too. And he spent some time in jail where they actually got married when he was in prison. And then he got out, and his volatility obviously was still there. The underlying issues that perhaps landed him in prison in the first place had not gone away. And he was someone that always wanted a gun.

5:06so even though he wasn't technically allowed to own them anymore because he was a felon he kind of forced Stormy to buy one for the home and she did it because she didn't want him to get one illegally and then he thought it would be less of a problem and in short order he was still having his mental health struggles also like while she didn't know had taken on a great amount of debt and when they were renting a home in Maryland with her at the time their two-year-old son one morning they were upstairs she was around the corner their son was in a different room and and he and he ended up shooting himself um and and of course dying um which was eventually ruled a suicide and you know from there that sort of like set her life on a certain trajectory that ended up resulting in everything that happened after.

6:05Did you get the sense when you were talking to Stormy that this loss of Morris, that it changed her relationship to guns at all? Or if she started to think about the connection between suicide and gun deaths, like the one that we're going to be talking about later? Or was that something that still was just like very much in the background? Interestingly, she would tell you that she never really liked guns. Like she didn't, she hated hunting. She didn't want to hunt, didn't like the idea of killing animals, didn't get any joy out of like target shooting either but she also at the same time was sort of socialized into accepting and understanding that this was something to her mind that just like men did so it didn't really occur to her that one the gun could have been the issue the reason for his death and two there was like a larger debate that was happening i guess you could say within the the social science community there was a time when like this was like in the early 90s where like a link was first being drawn between gun ownership and suicide death meaning that like if you owned a firearm your risk of dying by suicide went up somewhat exponentially um and that was playing out in the background but it didn't it just didn't reach her it didn't connect with her at all, or most people.

7:27I mean, I still think most people don't really realize like how it works, which is to say it's not that owning a gun makes you suicidal, obviously. It's just that because suicide is often impulsive and relying on what you have access to, if you use a gun, unlike most other methods, you'll die. And it's also like much easier to use a gun than it is to follow through with like similarly deadly methods. But that really didn't register with her at all. She just, I mean, the whole thing I think was, of course, like super shocking and traumatizing. And she's also like very religious. And, you know, I think even though that happened, felt like she had some kind of like spiritual closure, some kind of connection with God.

8:15Like, you know, after he died, she said, she said, she said a prayer over his body and she felt like she had some sense that like that they were going to be okay. And so she moved forward, you know. And then how did Stormy meet Louis Tabler, her second long-term partner? Well, when she met Lou, she'd been single for a while and she'd been living with her parents. She and her son, Miles, had been living with the parents. And Miles, seemingly as a result of his father's death, had like a significant speech delay. You know, it was just like sort of super quiet. There was an incident where like his grandfather gave him paint to like paint a picture and instead he painted his face red and there was some thought that that was like him recreating the last image he had of his dad.

9:00But at the same time, while they were living on Stormy's father's or parents' property, her dad had an ATV and Miles had access to and he started riding an ATV with his grandfather and then on his own. And Stormy noticed that he just like was kind of delighted by it. You know, he was like five or six. So she got him into like a program for like kids and four wheelers, which he loved. And he got his own four wheeler and he was just like running it into the ground and it broke down and he needed a bearing. So they went into like a machine shop where it turned out Lou was working. And he was really nice to them.

9:43He said, you know, kind of like tried to help them find the part for a couple hours. And when they couldn't find it, he ordered it for them. And then her dad came to pick it up. And he asked Stormy's dad if he could like take out his daughter. And he said, yes. And at first, Lou was kind of like a breath of fresh share. You know, like he was just like a positive influence. He took them a lot of places. He, you know, was sort of very fatherly and paternal to Miles. And it didn't matter, by the way, she knew that Lou was like an avid gun owner himself, but like that was in the context of hunting.

10:23And she saw that as like the same as the men that she knew. And, you know, he was a Republican, which doesn't mean anything one way or the other, but he was not like a, like politics was not at the forefront of his life. In the 90s, he didn't, like, talk about it at all. And it seemed, like, very positive for her until they moved in together. And, you know, it's worth pointing out that the reason they were able to move in together and buy a house was that she had life insurance money from her husband's death, so she was the one that bought the place. And once that happened, there was, like, a real transition in Lou's behavior where he showed, like, a very different side of himself.

11:02Yeah, I mean, can you talk a little bit about what prompted that? Like you mentioned that when Stormy and Lou first got together, he wasn't that outspoken about politics. Like he was a Republican, but that was kind of the extent of it. And he was a member of the NRA. But it seems like as time went on, he got, you know, very immersed in the NRA and that became his politics. And so I guess maybe we should start by talking a little bit about what the NRA actually does and what being a member generally entails. And then we can talk a little bit about how Lou's relationship with the NRA changed and became a bigger part of his life as time went on.

11:37Well, you know, I think starting like in the late 70s and then becoming like way more the case over the ensuing decades, you know, the NRA became an organization that sort of evolved around like agitprop. You know, like the idea was to grow as much as possible and to push gun rights as like a hardcore political issue as opposed to focusing on like gun safety and sportsmanship and marksmanship, which was like for most of the NRA's history, the point. And when that transition happened, it increasingly became like a messaging organization. and in order to be a successful messaging organization, you have to, and especially a membership one, you have to keep your membership constantly engaged and a really effective way to do that is to frame everything around like perpetual existential threat and that became the impending prospect of government tyranny specifically via the Democratic Party, you know, that they were going to come, they were going to take your guns away, they were going to impose their will on you.

12:52And then, you know, there were some famous incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco, which really didn't work out well for the government, but was used politically by groups like the NRA to suggest, like, see, like, they can show up at your door anytime. They can shoot you. They can take your weapons away. There's a storm coming, like you need to be prepared. And that notion just became more potent over time for them and more intense. And that also translated into, you know, that was sort of the animating purpose of their lobbying, this notion of like, why can't groups compromise on restrictions and that kind of, I mean, any compromise on a restriction would mean giving like the government power.

13:33and it also would mean that like there's no cause to enlist in right if like if we're gonna like accept that like some rules are okay i mean they're just they need something to do and they need in order they need a reason to raise money and so the reason to raise money is to like push the fight forward and i think that like it's it's really underappreciated the extent to which that messaging especially pre-trump had like a real radicalization effect on a lot of men And especially blue-collar men who were like in the midst of like very complex societal changes, it like provided a positive identity.

14:14This notion that like they could be, you know, there's a sociologist that has coined the term like citizen protector. You know, like, well, you may not be like a breadwinner anymore, but you can protect your family and you can save America. Like to somebody who's not ensconced in that, it could sound like silly to you. Like how could that be appealing to anybody? How does that feel real? But like if you're in that position, it feels like super real. So when you fast forward to 2008 and that presidential election and the rise of Barack Obama, who of course on top of everything else was like a highly educated black man, that became the new foil.

14:56You know, this idea like that here's like, you know, in every way, this is like an outsider who represents someone who's like skipping ahead of the line, doesn't come where you come from, isn't connected to the history that you're connected to, and he's going to like rule your life. and the propaganda just like really escalated and spent you know the organization spent you know at least 15 million dollars on this like massive messaging campaign that really revolved around like you know had a website that was just like here are all the things that barack obama's going to do none of them were true but it but it really it really resonated and worked with people like louis tabler who then like developed i mean that that became like a an inflection point where they all of a sudden became not just politicized, but like, you know, had jumped headfirst into extremism.

15:46And then there was like no coming back from it. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, we'll hear the rest of Stormy's story. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

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16:43So, Mike, you were explaining how Tabler was sort of radicalized by the entry of Barack Obama into office and just this idea that he was going to be incredibly anti-gun. And while that kind of political change was happening, I guess I'm wondering what was happening at home. Like, how is this affecting Tabler's relationship with Stormy and with Miles? Well, I mean, as they would say, you know, as he continued to absorb the new messaging, he increasingly was like spinning out of control. You know, like really, especially again, if you think about like the sort of anticipated the moment we're in now, really buying into like conspiracy theories.

17:26And again, the notion that like he was going to be subjected to some kind of like tyrannical regime. and he was also really sick. You know, he had a lot of heart trouble and stuff like that. And this idea he really took personally, this becomes clear, you know, by virtue of what he wound up doing, he could be a soldier in this righteous cause, that he could be on the front lines of saving the United States of America. But it also made him increasingly untethered from reality and angry and volatile and unpredictable. So after Stormy and Miles, after they all moved in together, you know, as Miles recounted, you know, Lou was violent toward him.

18:12When Stormy wasn't around, he would hit him. They had vicious fights. And he even, I mean, also had like really heated confrontations with Stormy too. But especially after 2008, his thinking about gun ownership, it changed. You know, he was talking about shooting the president at Camp David. He got a laser guide for one of his pistols, and he would hold it on Stormy. He, you know, once Miles moved out of the house because he couldn't stand to be there anymore after he graduated high school, he was banned from the property. And when he showed up, you know, one day because he needed somewhere to go, Lou shot at him.

18:54And it was just sort of like this unraveling that was gradual at first and then like really immediate. And he became impossible to live with. He started rationing the food that Stormy had access to. He would keep inventory because he was worried that she was feeding Miles. He didn't have a concealed carry permit, but he started carrying his handgun on the road and he would flash it at people on the highway. And he just, you know, in addition to hunting, which was still really important to him, his life became about advancing this cause of freedom that was defined by the NRA. So before we talk a little bit about the end of Tabler's life, I want to go back to a really key part of your piece, which is just that during this period where it's sort of like the walls are closing in around him, he decides to start participating in the NRA's Planned Giving Program.

19:48Can you explain a little bit about how that program works and how long it's been around? Just because I feel like planned giving is a phrase that we tend to associate with universities or hospitals and not so much with an ideological organization. Right. So, you know, first and foremost, the NRA is a nonprofit. So one aspect of sustainable fundraising for nonprofits is to do it like with hospitals that you're talking about. One aspect of fundraising is called planned giving. And that's, you know, basically like opening the door to people signing over their estate after they die or they sign it over and then it goes to the nonprofit or the hospital after they die.

20:29And that program, I think, became more significant in like the, you know, mid-aughts. The NRA was sort of really investing in the idea that it needed more like large donations. So at some point, Lou, who, you know, when you're an NRA member, among the things you get is, you know, one of their magazines. and it's not clear that this is where he saw it, but I think it probably was where he saw it. He, at some point in 2011, learned that the NRA had a plan-giving program and that it was possible to sign over anything. I mean, you know, whether it be your retirement account or your life insurance, I mean, anything.

21:16So he contacted the phone number that, you know, he found presumably in his magazine and a representative from there got back to him. And he just, I mean, it was like almost immediate. You know, he got his email address and right away he was like, I want to leave my 401k to the National Rifle Association. There's no more important cause that I could sign over my hard-earned money to. And again, that should give you the sense of like, this person was someone who was seeing this group and this cause as providing meaning to his life. Like he was just someone who was in like existential crisis. Like think about what it takes to do that.

22:02But in order to sign over his 401k to the NRA, that meant removing the person who was the sole beneficiary, the person who was supposed to get that money, and that person was supposed to be Stormy. and he and Stormy had been together for nearly 20 years, and they had roles in their relationship. It wasn't just that, by the way, that she's the one who bought their house and that it wouldn't have happened without the money she got from her first marriage, but the roles were Lou was somebody who worked and made money, and Stormy was somebody who did all the other stuff. She calls it the woman stuff in the piece, right?

22:39Right, the woman stuff. It was like taking care of the house, a few acres of property. And then Lou was the more stereotypical breadwinner. Just to clarify, I know that they never legally got married. Did that make it easier for Lou to do this, or could any NRA member who is married and have children, does it not matter, basically? Can they just do this if they want to, just give away their estate to the NRA? No, you're right. I mean, that is, if they were married, it wouldn't have been able to happen without her knowledge. But because they weren't, it enabled him to remove her as the beneficiary of his retirement plan and replace her with the National Rifle Association.

23:25And that's what he did. And he did it and it happened over like a series of meetings. You know, it was like the representatives from the NRA walked him through the process, the forms, told him what to do. You know, he was sort of dazzled by the idea that he could get recognition for it. He checked a box saying he wanted to be, you know, his name to be displayed somewhere at NRA headquarters. And for his service, he got like a gold ring. you know and these things like ended up really meaning something to me he got the gold ring shortly before he died and he was wearing it everywhere and stormy had no idea why you know in retrospect to her it seemed like he delighted and kind of like waving it in her face like as if he knew that he had this secret that even after he died he would be able to like control her and also screw up her life because it's also worth noting that he was like a hyper-controlling, possessive man.

24:22You know, she, as is common in any abusive relationship, her social contacts dwindled to nothing. You know, like her family wasn't allowed over. She wasn't really allowed to have friends. As she would say it, he just wanted her all to himself. And in part, that seemed to be why he grew to really hate Miles. But also Miles looked like his dad, and Lou hated that too, I think. Like Lou hated just the idea that Stormy was married before him and maybe loved someone more than him. And then things just headed in one direction, you know, which was his eventual suicide. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about his suicide.

25:00You mentioned earlier that there was this violent interaction between Lou and Miles where Lou, I think, turned a gun on Miles. And then it was investigators, you know, looked into this and basically found that there was no possible claim of self-defense here. that basically no justification for what Lou did, and he was then facing a possibility of losing his guns altogether, right? Which is then what sort of led to what happened next. Right. So right before Lou died, Miles had to drop by his and Stormy's house because he was having stomach troubles at work and had a bathroom emergency, and he didn't know Lou was going to be there, and Stormy said he could come over.

25:42And while he was on the toilet, All of a sudden, Lou just surfaced out of nowhere, screaming that Miles was an intruder and kicked the bathroom door down while Miles was on the toilet and held a loaded gun on him like he was going to shoot him. And a huge scuffle ensued. Miles charged Lou, didn't want to die. And they wrestled. And somehow he got away. The gun was wrestled away from him. and at some point Lou called the police and they came and they determined that Lou had actually committed a felony a felony assault and Lou found out a day or two later that you know if he was charged he was going to lose his gun rights and that was kind of like in Stormy's mind the final you know turn of the screw where like if he didn't have his gun rights sort of you know what was his life and she saw that as like the thing that finally put him over the edge.

26:46And then a short while later, in early January 2012, he then woke up one morning. Stormy thought that he was going to the hospital to get a procedure because he had like lots of stents in his heart. He had a pacemaker. He had, you know, a million surgeries. And, you know, his custom was to, he didn't like Stormy driving him to the hospital. It made him nervous. So his custom was to drive to his office, 45 minutes away, and then one of his colleagues would drive him to the hospital. But instead, on that very early morning, he drove to the parking lot, and this time he brought along one of his hunting rifles, and he had told Stormy that he was lending it to a friend.

27:30But instead, he turned it on himself, and most specifically, he aimed it at his heart. How soon after his death did the NRA come to collect, basically? Well— Like, how did Stormy find out about him leaving his money to the NRA? Right. So, Stormy found out the next day because she didn't have money. You know, she wasn't working, hadn't worked since Miles was born. And to her mind was still the beneficiary of the 401k and also some life insurance money. And that's a whole other story. But she called his company to inquire, to figure out what were the steps that needed to be taken. And they told her then.

28:19She had no idea. They told her it was just like the complete devastation and shock of hearing that less than 24 hours after your partner had killed himself in like a very, not just public, but, I mean, to do it with like a, I mean, he literally obliterated his heart. Like it was just a very intense ending. And she's still absorbing that. And then she finds out that he left his money or he secretly removed her to like hurt her and left his money to the NRA. And this sort of irony settled on her right away that he had just used a gun to kill himself. And now the money was going to a gun rights organization.

29:02so she very quickly she didn't have any resources but she had a neighbor who was an attorney who felt very badly for her and wanted to like help her in some way he started to try to figure out like what needed to be done and then I think either two months or a little less than two months later one of the NRA representatives that had met with Lou got wind of the fact that he died and I mean they certainly I know came to understand that, but I assumed that they knew it then and sort of just without a thought, without ever reaching out to Stormy, without ever thinking about how the organization could have steered him into this place.