A Woman Lost Two Partners to Guns—Then the N.R.A. Came to Collect

Stormy Kay was born in 1961, when her parents were young newlyweds, unprepared and thrust into adulthood. Stormy’s mother cut meat at a grocery store and taught classes at a beauty school, and her father was a construction worker. They couldn’t afford child care, so Stormy’s father took her with him to job sites. “My dad would hide me in the trucks,” Stormy told me. She spent a lot of time alone. “I was strange,” she said. “I liked rocks. I was very spiritual. I talked to animals. I talked a lot to God.” Every Sunday, her entire extended family attended church, and Stormy sang in the choir. Like many men in Frederick County, Maryland, where the family lived, Stormy’s father owned guns and went hunting. Her mother had a firearm, too, and occasionally took Stormy target shooting. When Stormy finished high school, she began commuting to a job at an insurance company in Washington, D.C. She started in human resources, then became a legal secretary there. She wore her curly brown hair down to her shoulders, with bangs that framed her blue eyes.

In her early twenties, she met Barry Morse, who was seven years older. He was Italian and Jewish, tall and handsome, clever and enterprising. He had skipped college and now worked for his father, who owned a McDonald’s franchise. Morse was married, but the relationship was breaking up. “As soon as I met him, a voice in my head said, ‘You will marry him,’ ” Stormy told me. “The voice of God. I know that sounds weird, but it was instant.”

Morse owned dozens of guns, and when he handled money for the family business he carried a firearm, even though he didn’t have a permit to do so. On Christmas Eve in 1984, while Morse was still married, he and Stormy smoked a little weed, and then he turned to her and proposed. “Barry said, ‘You know, we’re really good together,’ ” Stormy recalled. She agreed and said yes. Morse partied on the weekends and had bipolar disorder, but this did not especially trouble Stormy. A couple of months after they got engaged, Morse was arrested. He was later convicted of cocaine possession, intent to distribute marijuana, and carrying a concealed weapon. He was sentenced to thirty-four months in prison. That spring, while locked up, he finalized his divorce. On June 6, 1985, he and Stormy were married at the Frederick County Adult Detention Center. Morse told a reporter who covered the event for the Frederick News-Post, “She’ll be waiting for me at the gate when I walk out.”

In 1988, Stormy gave birth to a boy the couple named Myles. She stayed at home while Morse tried his hand at different businesses, including owning a video store and producing country music.

Morse frequently had outbursts of rage, and Stormy said that he abused her. One time, he slammed the butt of a pellet rifle on her foot and broke her toe; another time, he threw a glass that hit her in the head. When such episodes were over, Morse would cry, beg for forgiveness, and buy Stormy gold rings and necklaces.

Law enforcement had taken Morse’s weapons, and, as a felon, he was prohibited from owning a firearm, but he got Stormy to purchase a .38 Special revolver for him. She was reluctant to get him the gun, but was worried that he’d get in trouble if he tried to buy one himself. Firearms were a part of Morse’s identity, a characteristic no different from his love of country music. “He just always wanted a gun,” Stormy said. “He was just one of those guys.”

Early one morning, in June, 1991, Stormy was padding around their home in her pajamas. She went into the bathroom, while Myles, almost three, was in the hallway, and Morse was around a corner. He picked up the revolver, and Stormy heard it go off. She ran to him. “I smelled the gun, and saw him physically just hit the ground,” she said. Part of Morse’s head appeared to be gone. Without thinking, Stormy scooped up Myles and ran to a neighbor’s house. “I’m banging on the door,” she told me. “And when she opens it, I threw Myles into her hands and said, ‘Barry accidentally shot himself.’ ”

Stormy called an ambulance, then crouched beside Morse. “I said a prayer over his body,” she recalled. “I said, ‘God have mercy on his soul.’ And then, all of a sudden, lights flickered down, and I had this hand on my shoulder. A heavy voice said, ‘He’s with me.’ ” The paramedics arrived, and Stormy watched her husband get zipped into a body bag. At that moment, a repossession agent showed up. He told her that he was looking for Morse, who, unbeknownst to Stormy, was in debt. The paramedics were in the process of moving the body, so she told the man, “He’s coming down the steps.”

The repo man took the family car, leaving Stormy and Myles stranded. She called her mother, who drove over and retrieved them. Stormy felt that God had signalled that Morse’s soul was safe, and that she and her son would find a way forward.

According to a federal-data analysis by Cassandra Crifasi, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, 30,810 Americans died by suicide in 1991; sixty per cent of those incidents involved a firearm. Eighty per cent of those who shot themselves were white men, which is not surprising, since white men accounted for about two-thirds of gun owners in the United States.

A year later, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study that linked the ready availability of firearms to an increased risk of suicide. The finding came at a sensitive moment for the National Rifle Association, the country’s leading gun-rights group. Violent crime, often involving guns, was surging across the country. Gang-related shootings seemed ubiquitous, and there were also sporadic mass shootings, including a notorious 1989 incident in Stockton, California, in which a man carrying an assault rifle opened fire at an elementary-school playground, killing five children. Democratic lawmakers were in the process of passing bills that would establish a background-check system and an assault-weapons ban, and the N.R.A.’s membership had dropped from more than three million, in the mid-eighties, to less than 2.5 million.

Surveys of civilian gun owners showed that they mostly kept weapons for hunting; firearms were tools of leisure and sustenance. To grow, the N.R.A. needed to position the weapon more as a symbol of cultural defiance. Its messaging increasingly played up notions that the government was tyrannical, seeking to disarm law-abiding Americans and willing to kill those who refused to comply. The N.R.A. found common cause with anti-government conspiracy theorists at Ruby Ridge and religious extremists at Waco, and referred to law-enforcement officials as “jack-booted government thugs.” It mounted a campaign to restrict the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which funded The New England Journal’s suicide study, from underwriting gun research. The N.R.A.’s research coördinator asserted, “Worldwide, nationwide, regionally there is no relationship between gun availability and suicide rates.”

These public debates didn’t register with Stormy, even after Morse’s death was ruled a suicide. She and Myles had moved in with her parents. She gave her full attention to her son, who was in distress. He wasn’t interested in interacting with other kids, and he rarely spoke. When his grandfather gave him watercolors, he used the brush on his face, coloring it red, as if re-creating the last image of his father.

Stormy thought Myles was too young for therapy, so she looked for hobbies that might help him engage with the world. When Myles was about five, she noticed that he loved riding on her father’s A.T.V., so she enrolled him in a racing program for children, in which he rode a four-wheeler around a dirt track. “Motorsport opened me back up,” Myles told me recently. “Racing became therapy for me.”

By the time Myles was six, he was at the track so often that his four-wheeler began to break down. The vehicle required a special bearing, and the only place to buy it nearby was a machine-parts shop called Applied Industrial Technologies. When Stormy and Myles went there, a man named Lewis Tabler helped them. He was in his late thirties, short and wide, with an olive complexion, a neat beard, and a receding hairline. Tabler spent two hours searching for the bearing, and Stormy was impressed by his patience. Tabler ended up ordering the part, and when Stormy’s father came to pick it up Tabler asked for permission to call his daughter.

Tabler seemed responsible and kind, but also tough and fun. He had a number of tattoos: a cobra, a burning phoenix, a snake wrapped around a sword, and, on his backside, the Rolling Stones’ tongue-and-lips logo. Tabler was a Republican and a member of the N.R.A. who owned multiple guns, but he rarely discussed politics. Hunting was his passion, and he gave Stormy the impression that his firearms were merely a means to that end, just as they had been for the men in her family. Still, after Morse, she had concerns. “I did question Lew about his guns,” Stormy recalled. “But he kept telling me he was safe.”

Tabler told Stormy that he had left home at eighteen and never returned, and he avoided talking about his family. All Stormy knew was that his father’s heart had failed early, and Tabler had developed heart disease, too.

Tabler, Stormy, and Myles became a family. Stormy had a Yorkshire terrier Tabler called Toad, and the dog became his close companion. He took Stormy and Myles to restaurants, movies, concerts, and the Smithsonian. He went to Myles’s races and bonded with him over Nascar and baseball. For a while, Tabler coached third base for Myles’s Little League team. He also took him fishing and target shooting. “He was essentially my father,” Myles recalled.

Earlier in Tabler and Stormy’s relationship, Tabler had told her that he’d been married once before, but that the relationship ended when his wife ran off with his best friend. Tabler wrote Stormy a letter laying bare his feelings and insecurities. “When I first met you I knew you were the one very special woman that I could want, love, respect and desire for the rest of my life,” he wrote. “I’m not sure how I knew it but it was as clear as your blue eyes. You have changed me, changed my entire outlook on life. I am totally committed to you and everything I do and say and the way I am with you is due to the love I feel for you.” Tabler went on, “I want you to be my wife one day. I think we have something very special that can last forever but I need to know I’m the only man you want or it will never work.”

The couple discussed marriage, but Stormy wanted to keep the last name Morse, to match her son. Then Tabler informed her that they didn’t have to get married at all, because if they stayed together they would be considered married in the eyes of the law. “He said, ‘I’ll take care of you, you take care of me, and I’ll leave you everything,’ ” Stormy told me. A marriage license, he told her, was “just a piece of paper.” She didn’t know that a couple can’t enter into a common-law marriage in the state of Maryland.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Are there any lions in the building?”

Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap

In 1997, Stormy used funds she’d received from Morse’s life insurance to place a down payment on a home in Hagerstown, a rural part of Maryland. Tabler, Stormy said, did not have any savings to contribute, but that was fine by her. Something good should come from Morse’s death, and the house was quaint, with a large domed skylight and a wooden footbridge that led to the front door.

Stormy and Tabler both signed the mortgage documents, and then, on the same day, signed an agreement they’d drawn up together. It contained twelve vows, including “I know I need to change some, but it must be my decision to change”; “I don’t want to be bossed around, I’ll try not to boss you, either”; and “I will try to be as honest with you as I can and be the kind of person you can count on.” The last vow read, “When I open up and tell you about my feelings, sometimes it will be like handing you a little baby bird—please hold and handle with care.”

The couple agreed that Tabler would earn their living while Stormy handled what she called “the woman stuff.” She cooked, cleaned, did laundry, and maintained their two acres of property. Tabler also needed help managing his heart condition, and required near-constant reassurance that Stormy was devoted to him. This insecurity, which Stormy attributed to his first marriage, soon became possessiveness, and her relationships with her family and friends gradually withered.

Tabler also became critical of Myles, whose presence seemed to irk him. Myles was skinny and, like his dad, had a prominent nose and dark features. As a teen-ager, he learned to skateboard and play the guitar. He sometimes got into trouble at school, but generally kept to himself. Tabler picked fights with him about chores. He was “just physically aggressive and in your face,” Myles said. “Trying to start an argument.” When Stormy wasn’t around and things escalated, Myles said, Tabler would hit him, either with a belt or with his fists.

In Stormy’s opinion, men were inherently violent. Once, when she and Tabler got into an argument, he shoved her. Myles, who was fifteen or sixteen, came to her defense. Stormy decided to let them fight. “I figured they just needed to get it over with,” she said. And, after surviving one traumatic relationship, Stormy said, she was trying to avoid more upheaval. Besides, she loved Tabler, and believed that he loved her, too. But the rift between him and Myles widened. After Myles graduated high school, in 2006, he moved out. He stayed with his grandparents and worked at Quiznos, and then at a movie theatre. Eventually, he got into car detailing.

Tabler’s clogged arteries kept death on his mind. He took numerous daily medications and was in and out of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, where doctors inserted multiple stents. Before every surgery, he shaved his forearms in preparation for I.V.s, and then drove to Applied Industrial, where a colleague would take him to the hospital, about an hour away. He didn’t want Stormy to drive him; it made him anxious.

In 2007, Tabler made Stormy the sole beneficiary of his life-insurance policy and his retirement account. He named her the executor of his estate, and, in his will, he said that he wanted to be cremated. A portion of his ashes, he wrote, should be scattered in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, a nature preserve on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that is a destination for hunters. The rest would stay with Stormy.

The next year, Barack Obama ran for President, signalling the potential end of a government that, under George W. Bush, had been friendly to the N.R.A. During Bush’s two terms, Republicans in Congress had allowed the federal assault-weapons ban to lapse, and passed a bill that shielded the gun industry from many liability lawsuits. In almost every way, Obama appeared to be Bush’s opposite. He represented progressivism and multiculturalism, and he didn’t appear to understand gun culture. Gun manufacturers and the N.R.A. jointly launched a membership campaign called “Prepare for the Storm in 2008.”

Tabler was an avid reader of the N.R.A.’s publications, and took the organization’s assertions as gospel. The group began feeding its audience an endless supply of outrage. It spent fifteen million dollars to blanket the country with television, print, and radio ads declaring that Obama “would be the most anti-gun President in American history.” In flyers and mailers, and on a website called GunBanObama.com, the N.R.A. described Obama’s “10 Point Plan to ‘Change’ the Second Amendment.” The claims, which were false, included allegations that he intended to “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns,” and the “use of firearms for home self-defense.”

To many conservative, working-class white men, Obama’s ascendance was a sign that the social hierarchy had been reordered and that the future did not include them. The N.R.A. tapped into this sentiment. On the campaign trail, Obama had talked about how blue-collar men had been uniquely harmed by a convergence of economic and social changes, leading to a loss of status and of sense of self. As a result, Obama said, “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Though it was intended as an expression of sympathy, the language was coarse, and the N.R.A. exploited it. One prominent ad featured a hunter who said, “Because I believe in traditional American values, go to church, exercise my right to own a firearm, Barack Obama says I’m bitter. Well, I’m not bitter, I’m blessed.” The N.R.A. printed yard signs and T-shirts that read “I’m a ‘bitter’ gun owner and I vote.” Another ad included another hunter who asked, of Obama, “Where is this guy from?,” a nod to the conspiracy theory that Obama had been born in Africa.

The N.R.A.’s campaign successfully rejuvenated the gun-rights movement, framing it as a fight against cultural erasure. Obama’s election led to a historic surge in firearm sales, and Tabler saw himself as part of this movement—a kind of resistance soldier. His response to the messaging seemed quick and stark. “Like the flip of a switch,” Myles said. He began referring to Democrats as fascists and Obama as a “common nigger.” He fretted about the prospect of the government confiscating his guns. Tabler told Stormy, “If they come for mine, I’m shooting out of the window.” He added, “You’ll be reloading for me.”

Tabler also talked about hiding in the woods of Camp David, the Presidential retreat, which was nearby; he could use one of his rifles to assassinate Obama. Killing the President, Tabler told the family, would make him an “American hero.” Myles said, “I saw him become unhinged.”

Tabler increasingly loathed his job. “I’d feel bad every morning,” Stormy said. “He would go out and say, ‘I’m going to a fucking job I don’t even like, doing stuff I don’t fucking even want to do.’ ” He banned Stormy’s family, including Myles, from the house. She had one good friend, whom she would sometimes visit while Tabler was at work. They hung out and smoked pot, which provided a respite from the tension. “It came down to—he wanted me home all of the time,” Stormy said. “He wanted me all to himself.”

Myles bounced around various jobs and homes, and by 2010 he was living out of his car. One night, he didn’t have a safe place to park, and Stormy said he could come over. But, when he pulled into the driveway, Tabler came to the front door and screamed, “You need to leave now!” He raised a handgun and fired in Myles’s direction, hitting some rocks. Myles fled. Tabler told Stormy that he’d shot a plastic round, not a real bullet, but she felt he was using his guns as a means of control, and she was overwhelmed with thoughts that he would one day kill Myles.

Toad, the dog, had died, and Tabler had replaced him with two new Yorkshire terriers. He spoiled them with treats, but kept an inventory of all the food in the house to make sure that Stormy wasn’t secretly feeding Myles. Stormy worried that Myles would wind up on the street, so to pay for his car insurance she sold the gold jewelry that Morse had bought her.

In 2011, Tabler began carrying a concealed handgun, though he didn’t have a permit. On several occasions, when he and Stormy were in the car together, he grew enraged and flashed the weapon at other drivers. He weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds, and drank whiskey to ease his insomnia. His heart was packed with stents and a pacemaker. Surgical scars ran down his chest and inner thighs.

Stormy remembered that sometimes, at night, Tabler would wake in a panic, grab a firearm, run to the front door, and check for intruders. He was scared to be alone in the house, and started tracking the odometer of Stormy’s car. One of his guns, a silver Taurus Judge revolver, had a laser sight. At home, he often held the loaded weapon and pointed the red dot at Stormy. “Because of Barry, I was used to having a gun in my face,” she said. “So I always told him, ‘If you accidentally shoot me, you’ll have to report it to 911.’ ”

Around this time, Tabler learned that he could leave his life savings to the N.R.A., through its planned-giving program. The N.R.A. was by then among the most significant advocacy organizations in the country, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. The group made constant appeals to its members for contributions, and it lured big donations by offering photographs in a vanity magazine, commemorative jewelry, and gold blazers.

On August 1, 2011, without alerting Stormy, Tabler called the N.R.A. and left a message. Pierce Shields, an assistant director of planned giving, got back to him that afternoon, and later recounted the conversation in a signed affidavit. “Lew informed me that; he had heart disease since 1988,” Shields wrote. “That he hated liberals, that his girlfriend was the current beneficiary of his 401k, that it was valued around 462k, that his ‘yorkies’ were his children, that he sold industrial equipment, that he did not want his girlfriend ‘to receive a dime of his retirement plan,’ and that she was ‘a crazy bitch.’ ” Shields went on, “He said that he loved freedom and what the N.R.A. stood for and there was no better place for him to leave his money.”

The next day, Tabler e-mailed Shields his latest retirement statement. He wrote that he “wanted to get this ball rolling,” adding, “I would hate to check out without having fulfilled this pledge. There is no organization that reflects my own personal views on freedom or that I feel is more deserving of my hard earned money than the N.R.A.”

The two men continued to correspond over the next few weeks, and on August 26th Tabler made the beneficiary change official. On a form that inquired about “spousal consent and acknowledgment,” Tabler wrote, “N/A.” When asked to describe his relationship to the gun-rights group, he said, “Friend of all Americans that care about the U.S. Constitution.” Tabler e-mailed the form to his employer, and then gave permission to the N.R.A. to put his name on display at the group’s headquarters.

“Ma’am, this is a landscape.”

Cartoon by Liana Finck

On the afternoon of August 31st, Shields and his boss, Tim Fisher, the N.R.A.’s director of planned giving, ate lunch with Tabler at a seafood restaurant in Frederick. “Lew told me how his girlfriend ‘Stormy’ was a ‘low-life’ and that her first husband committed suicide,” Shields recalled of their meeting in his affidavit. “He said that he would kick her out but she would end up on the street. He also joked that if something ever happened to him she was probably involved.” Fisher added, in an affidavit of his own, that during lunch Tabler was “adamant about who he did not want to benefit from his 401-K and that of course was Stormy.” He wrote that Tabler “expressed his dismay that Stormy did not work outside the home and did not contribute financially.”

Fisher later sent Tabler a handwritten note. “I want to thank you again for your passion for freedom and for the very significant gift you have made as evidence of that passion,” Fisher wrote. He informed Tabler that a gold “Benefactor ring” symbolizing his generosity was arriving soon.

Tabler checked in with Applied Industrial to make sure that the company had registered the change. “I’ve been in the hospital for my heart twice in the last two months,” he e-mailed. “My spirit will never rest if my girlfriend and her bumb [sic] son end up with all that money I’ve been saving for 30 years.”

Myles now had a place to live and a steady job working on cars. But he felt a sense of family was still missing. A friend gave him a vinyl copy of Jimi Hendrix’s “Rainbow Bridge,” and, on December 23, 2011, he bought a six-pack, drove to his mother’s house, and presented both the beer and the album as gifts to Tabler. “He invited me to stay,” Myles recalled. “We split the six-pack and fully listened to both sides of the album before I left that night. We actually had a good time together.”

It turned out to be an anomaly. The day after Christmas, Myles abruptly left work because his stomach was troubling him. He had to use the bathroom, and didn’t think he could wait until he got home. His mother’s house was on the way, so he called and asked if he could stop by. She said yes, but, while Myles was on the toilet, he heard Tabler screaming that he was unwelcome and an “intruder in his home.” Before Myles could pull up his pants, Tabler kicked in the door and pointed his revolver at him. “I’ll fucking shoot you, boy,” Tabler said, according to a police report.

Myles lunged at Tabler, and the two wrestled. The report said, “Myles grabbed Tabler’s gun hand, and pointed it towards the ceiling, and Tabler told him to let go because the gun might discharge.” Stormy intervened and managed to take the gun away. At some point, Tabler had dialled 911, but then hung up before speaking to an operator. The police showed up at the house, where an officer interviewed everyone and concluded, “I did not see any reason for Tabler to resort to the threat of deadly force.” The revolver had been fully loaded, and Tabler was charged with first-degree assault, second-degree assault, and reckless endangerment.

Soon after the incident, Stormy recalled, Tabler met with his attorney, who told him that he was going to lose his guns because of the case. When Tabler got home, he was sullen and quiet.

But Tabler had a small consolation prize: he’d received his N.R.A. ring, and appeared delighted to wear it in front of Stormy. The jewelry represented a secret that would enable him to control her even after he died. On New Year’s Eve, Stormy went with Tabler to the home of a hunting friend. In handwritten notes from around that time, Stormy wrote that Tabler didn’t drink that night and that they had fun. It was “the last time we had sex!!” she recalled.

Early on the morning of January 10th, while it was still dark, Tabler, who was then fifty-six, told Stormy that his heart was bothering him. He planned to go into the office, he said, and then, following his custom, drive with a colleague to Johns Hopkins for surgery. Tabler shaved his forearms and dressed in bluejeans and a camouflage fleece jacket, but did not wear his N.R.A. ring. As he walked out the door, he was holding his twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun in a case. Tabler told Stormy that he was lending it to a friend. He hugged and kissed her. They both said, “I love you,” and then Stormy added, “Don’t worry about your surgery. I’ll be there.” She heard him drive off in his company-issued white Chevy pickup.

Around forty-five minutes later, Tabler drove into the empty Applied Industrial lot and parked behind the loading dock. He unlatched the tailgate of his truck. In one hand, he held the shotgun. In the other, he held a stick with a “V” shape carved into one end. He positioned the gun’s butt against the open tailgate and the muzzle against his chest. Then Tabler pushed the stick against the trigger, sending a round of bird shot through his heart.

Soon afterward, a colleague arrived and found Tabler lying beside a dumpster. Blood trickled out of the corners of his mouth and covered his clothes. The colleague touched Tabler’s hand, which he later described as “ice cold.”

Stormy was still at home. As the morning wore on, she had called Tabler to check in, but he hadn’t picked up. She tried him many more times and became concerned. A friend of hers worked across the street from Applied Industrial, and Stormy asked her to check on him. “She kept saying to me, ‘There’s police over there. Somebody’s dead behind a trash can. All I can see is sneakers,’ ” Stormy recalled. She knew it was Tabler, and, when the authorities finally notified her, Stormy’s first thought was “You motherfucker you. How did you hug me when you walked out the door knowing what you were about to do?”

When a person enters a state of suffering and has thoughts of self-harm, they tend to reach for what is readily available. A firearm requires little effort to use and is almost certain to result in a fatality, which helps explain why gun suicide has accounted for a majority of suicide deaths in the United States every year since at least 1968. When Morse shot himself, in 1991, gun fatalities in America were more or less evenly split between suicide and homicide. In 2012, when Tabler shot himself, there were 20,666 gun suicides in the U.S., or sixty-two per cent of all gun deaths. This ratio remains stable, and the victims of these suicides have hardly changed, either: nearly eighty per cent of them are white men.

The N.R.A. has never released demographic information about its members, but research continues to show that white men are, by a wide margin, the Americans most likely to own firearms. Until recently, after the organization was beset by corruption scandals, it was the center of the Second Amendment movement and guided the behavior of millions of followers. Since 2013, it has lost at least two employees, both white men, to gun suicide. A third died the same way in 2020, soon after the N.R.A. fired him. Three years later, an article published in one of the organization’s magazines declared, “It is simply not proven that gun control will significantly reduce suicide rates.” Acknowledging otherwise would mean recognizing that a public-health crisis has been unfolding among the gun industry’s top customers.

On January 11th, the day after Tabler’s suicide, Stormy contacted Applied Industrial. There was a little more than two thousand dollars in Tabler’s checking account, and Stormy needed money to live on, to pay the mortgage, medical debts, and credit-card bills. When she reached someone at the company, she learned that she would receive about forty-one thousand dollars in life-insurance money, but that the nearly half a million dollars in Tabler’s retirement account would go to the N.R.A. The irony that Tabler had died by gun suicide only deepened her devastation. “I just bawled,” Stormy said.

Still, she assumed that, given the circumstances, the N.R.A. would refuse the money. She sent a handwritten fax to Applied Industrial, informing the company that she was contesting the beneficiary change. In the meantime, Myles moved home to be with his mom, and they began to sell everything of value.

In early March, Fisher, the N.R.A.’s planned-giving director, learned that Tabler had died. He e-mailed Applied Industrial, pointing out that Tabler had been dead for two months, and that “accounts with properly designated beneficiaries” are “generally available for distribution within 7-10 business days.” He went on, “We want to do whatever is needed to make this a smooth process.”

As a favor, a neighbor of Stormy’s who was a lawyer spoke to the N.R.A.’s assistant general counsel, Sarah Gervase, on her behalf. The neighbor raised the possibility that the organization might give up some of the money, according to Gervase, who recounted the exchange in an e-mail with Applied Industrial in early June. Gervase wrote that she “informed” Stormy’s neighbor that the “NRA is not willing to settle this.” Tabler’s cause of death did not seem to have any bearing on the organization’s position.

Stormy started cold-calling lawyers in the hope of finding anyone to fight one of the most powerful political organizations in the country. Everyone she called turned her down, until she happened on Paul Jorgensen, an attorney who had moved to Maryland in the nineteen-seventies, after a stint in San Francisco during the height of the counterculture. He wore enormous glasses and worked in a dim, ramshackle office, among stacks of old storage boxes and piles of paper. “The law is bullshit,” he told me. “It favors whoever has the most money.”

Jorgensen matched the N.R.A.’s tenacity. Recounting the experiences of Stormy and Myles, and compiling records to substantiate their stories, he argued that his client, as Tabler’s dutiful partner for some twenty years, was entitled to his savings. The fight dragged on for eighteen months. Stormy’s debts grew alongside Tabler’s 401(k) account balance, which, by February, 2014, had reached nearly five hundred and forty-five thousand dollars. That month, Stormy signed a settlement with the N.R.A. She felt that it was her only choice; her financial burdens were too large, and she didn’t want to lose her home. She received a hundred and five thousand dollars, and the organization took the rest. Her portion didn’t last long. She covered the family’s debts, and said she paid Jorgensen tens of thousands of dollars.

Stormy was grateful for her attorney’s work, but remained consumed by feelings of rage and injustice. “It’s a total mindfuck,” she told me. “The N.R.A. fucking played Lew. They viewed him as a sucker, filled up his mind with a bunch of bullshit, and scammed him.”

(The N.R.A., Sarah Gervase, and Pierce Shields did not respond to requests for comment. Tim Fisher could not be reached. He and Shields no longer work for the organization.)

In 2015, Stormy got her first job since giving birth to Myles, as a cashier at a local gas station. After a disagreement with her boss, she was fired, and took a position at a nursing home. Her responsibilities there, she said, included bathing patients and changing their bedpans. During the pandemic, in 2021, a patient asked her to take some clothes to Goodwill, which was a breach of company policy. Stormy obliged, and again was fired. She then found a job at FedEx, as a package handler. She is now sixty-four and works night and early-morning shifts, from 10:30 p.m. to 9 a.m., six days a week.

Myles still lives with Stormy. For the past eight years, his girlfriend and her daughter, who is going into fifth grade, have lived at the house, too. Myles considers the child his own. He’s found a bit of solace in his closeness with her, and in being attentive, patient, and kind. He suffers from intense anxiety, which he manages with medical marijuana.

The adults in the house pool their resources. “We’re surviving,” Stormy told me, in February. She and Myles sat across from me at their dining-room table. Sunshine poured through the domed skylight. After her night shift, Stormy’s eyes were raw and red-rimmed. As she talked about money, she began to cry. “I’m not going to be able to retire,” she said. “I’m just catching up. I want to make sure I keep this house.”

The roof needs urgent repairs, and the siding needs a fresh coat of paint. The deck was rotting but Stormy couldn’t afford to fix it, so she had it torn down. There’s also still a hole in the bathroom door, where Tabler had kicked it during his final confrontation with Myles.

Not long ago, Stormy dislocated her shoulder at work, and workers’ compensation accidentally overpaid her by three thousand dollars. She didn’t realize it, and used the money. Now she has to pay it back. Last year, she had a mild stroke. “You’re worried about every day,” Stormy said. “Just to make sure that everything’s taken care of and bills are paid or what else can fucking happen.”

I asked about Tabler’s firearms, and Stormy told me that, immediately after his death, she stored them with a friend. She did not want guns in her home. Myles, she said, gets depressed, and “he’s only seen men take care of issues by killing themselves.” I asked Myles if he thought he would have died by gun suicide if he had access to weapons. “I definitely do,” he answered.

Before Tabler died, he composed an e-mail on his work account that he never sent. “I woke up at 2:30 this morning,” it read. “Decided not to go to the hospital again. This isn’t life.” He signed off, “Tell everyone I’m sorry. I couldn’t take it any more.” The e-mail surfaced during Stormy’s fight with the N.R.A. When she was forced to sell the family’s valuables for money, one of the items she pawned was Tabler’s gold benefactor ring. For her, it symbolized deception and heartlessness. But for Tabler it was proof that he had served the cause of freedom. His ashes are in a box in Stormy’s cluttered garage, while Morse’s are inside the house. ♦

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America.