Sarah Brady's husband, Jim, was severely wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. But that's not what prompted her to become a gun-control advocate.
The moment came four years later, when Brady and her son, Scott, climbed into a friend's pickup truck. The 6-year-old picked up a gun he'd found on the seat and pointed it at his mother. "We both thought it was a toy," Brady recalls."I took it from him and realized it was a fully loaded little .22," the same caliber would-be assassin John Hinckley had used in the 1981 shooting.
"I just kind of went crazy. How could anybody leave a gun where a child could find it?" Brady recounts in a recent interview.
Shaken by the incident, she made a quick call to Handgun Control Inc., a Washington-based lobbying organization that pushes for stronger federal, state and local gun-control laws.
She's been working with the group since, becoming its chair in 1989. She also leads the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, a research and advocacy group affiliated with HCI.
Brady, 55, grew up in Alexandria, Va., with what she calls "a very healthy respect for guns." Her father, an FBI agent, regularly carried a gun, "but I never laid eyes on it," she says. "It was locked up and kept away." Brady has shot a gun twice in her life: as a child, firing a tommy gun at the FBI firing range ("I hated the noise,") and as an adult, shooting at targets with a rifle ("I was pretty good, but to me, shooting pool is much more fun.").
After graduation from the College of William and Mary, she was a public school teacher for four years. For the next decade, she worked in national politics, including stints at the National Republican Congressional Committee, as a congressional aide, and, for four years, as coordinator of field services for the Republican National Committee.
But now, after 12 years fighting for tougher gun-control laws, Brady says party politics "seems rinky dink." "To work for something that you truly believe in . . . which helps people, seems much more important than working for a party platform," she says from her office in downtown Washington, where the sounds of passing sirens occasionally cut the quiet.
After years as active Republicans, Jim and Sarah Brady attended the 1996 Democratic National Convention, thanking President Clinton for his support of gun control laws and endorsing his proposal to prohibit people convicted of domestic violence from buying handguns.
Today, she hesitates when asked about her own political beliefs.
"I don't really like labels too well," she says. "I think I'm a pragmatist or a moderate." Over the years, Brady has worked with lawmakers from both parties. Among her biggest accomplishments, for which she carefully shares credit with others at Handgun Control: passage of the Brady Bill, which imposed a five-day waiting period and background check for all prospective handgun purchasers.
"I think we've been successful in changing the dialogue," she says.
Handgun Control's motto is "Working to keep handguns out of the wrong hands," though many of Brady's critics charge that her ultimate goal is to outlaw all guns.
Not so, Brady insists. "Unless they're a fugitive or a felon, or adjudicated mentally ill, we're not against them buying guns at all," she says.
Brady said her group's objective is simply to cut down gun-related deaths and injuries.