Lethal Passage (29 page)

Until the NRA began its attacks, most law-enforcement agencies considered the NRA their ally, McNamara said. Their allegiance, he said, reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the NRA’s attitudes and mission. “The NRA had gotten by for a lot of years on an
image that wasn’t really accurate, that they were supportive of law enforcement.” The attacks on police chiefs, he said, “educated law enforcement as to their true colors.”

Then the unthinkable occurred:
the NRA began losing membership.
From 1989 to 1991, its membership shrank from almost 3 million to about 2.5 million. Newspapers across the country began running stories that the NRA had lost its punch. The embattled association launched a campaign to restore the popular conception of its influence, drawing on frontier imagery to help. The annual meeting that was to mark its comeback was deliberately staged in San Antonio, home of The Alamo.
The historic site, according to Osha Davidson, author of
Under Fire
, “was the touchstone of all those American values the gun group liked to claim as its own: an uncompromising attitude, unabashed love for this country, and a readiness to fight her enemies—no matter what the odds.”

The NRA stepped up spending to bolster its influence, calling itself “The New NRA.”
Its political action committee—the NRA Political Victory Fund—spent $1.7 million on the presidential and congressional campaigns of 1992, more than twice as much as the $772,756 it spent in 1988.
Between the 1990 and 1992 election cycles, the Victory Fund increased its spending more than any other registered PAC. The NRA also stepped up its lobbying expenditures.
In 1992 it spent $28.9 million, 43 percent more than in 1988.

The centerpiece of its image-burnishing campaign, however, was a membership drive of unprecedented expense. The best way to refute reports of the NRA’s demise was to boost membership to record levels. The NRA set out to do so, and to spare no expense. In 1992 alone, PM Consulting, the direct-mail company chosen to manage the drive, spent $25 million—$10 million more than budgeted. The NRA lured members with all manner of appeals and devices, including no-fee credit cards, gun-safety videos for kids, even a “Sportsman’s Dream Gun Sweepstakes,” in which the grand-prize winner stood to receive ten different hunting rifles and ten all-expenses-paid hunting trips. For the first time, the NRA enlisted the help of firearms
dealers, offering them a substantial share of the $25 new-member fee for each recruit they managed to sign. For-profit gun shows waived their admission fees for anyone who joined
the NRA on the spot.

The drive worked. In 1992, the NRA had a net gain of 616,000 members. As of October 1993, its membership had risen to a record high of nearly 3.3 million. The NRA was indeed bigger than ever before, but its campaign to boost membership and bolster its member programs had resulted in a 1992 operating deficit of $31.6 million, larger than ever in its history.

Despite all this spending and the surge in membership, by the middle of 1993 the NRA still seemed to have lost important ground. The association remained estranged from the nation’s law-enforcement community. And it faced a series of unaccustomed setbacks.
In 1993, Virginia passed its one-gun-a-month law, despite the $500,000 the NRA spent to defeat the legislation. Connecticut passed an assault-gun bill that outlawed the sale of certain assault guns, including the AR-15 made by Colt’s Manufacturing, headquartered in Connecticut’s own “Gun Valley.” New Jersey passed an assault-gun bill. The New York assembly did likewise. Politicians and pundits began talking of a “sea change,” a new distaste for gun violence as pervasive as the antigun mood of the late 1960s.
One New York assemblywoman, Naomi Matusow, won her seat in 1992 after campaigning with an explicitly anti-NRA slate. “It may just be,” she said, “that the NRA had cast a longer shadow than the reality.”

Far from adapting to the changing mood, the NRA continued its shift to the right. In 1993, a hard-right faction headed by Neal Knox, a former NRA executive who heads his own firearms lobbying group, further consolidated its hold over the NRA’s board and helped win a seat on the board for Harlon Carter’s widow, Maryann Carter. The board already included such hard-liners as Robert K. Brown, cofounder of Paladin Press and publisher of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, but Maryann Carter’s election symbolized a return to first
principles. No gun controls; no compromise. The “New” NRA seemed a reincarnation of the old NRA of Harlon Carter’s day.

The NRA went on the offensive. It saw
in the shifting national mood an opportunity to raise money and membership by sounding an especially urgent alarm. A four-page ad inserted in gun magazines showed President Bill Clinton and Sarah Brady shaking hands and on the verge of an embrace. “If you still need convincing reasons to guard your guns,” the ad said, “here’s a couple.” Striking a familiar note of hysteria, the ad cried: “All conditions are ripe for 1993 to be the worst year for gun owners in American history. No holds are barred. No one’s guns are safe. No one’s hunting is protected. No one’s ammunition is off limits. No one’s firearms freedoms are secure.”

It is a mistake, however, to think of the NRA as one uniform block of hard-right, pro-gun zealots.
A survey by Louis Harris in 1993 found that of those NRA members captured in the sample, 59 percent supported registration of handguns and 49 percent favored limiting handgun purchases to one a month.

Why this division in attitude between the leadership and the ranks? And how does the NRA manage to avoid blowing apart from internal pressures?

For one thing, turnover among the rank and file is high. In the 1992 membership drive, for example, the NRA actually recruited more than one million new members, but lost more than half a million. Such turnover helps account for why the hard-core faction is able to retain control, despite a far more moderate member pool. For under the bylaws of the NRA, only members who have maintained their membership for five years in a row, or who have acquired a life membership, are permitted to vote in elections of board members. Thus only a small percentage of members are eligible to vote. And a small percentage of these ever bother to use the privilege. Those who do vote tend to be the most ardent of the NRA’s Constitution-thumpers. They field slates of hard-line candidates in each board election and campaign aggressively to see that these candidates win.

To mollify the nonvoting ranks, the NRA provides a broad array of practical services. NRA-certified instructors provide shooting courses and teach gun safety to adults and kids. Celebrated hunters tour the nation conducting NRA hunting seminars. The organization runs shooting camps for kids and for advanced shooters hoping for a berth on the U.S. Olympic shooting team. It helps shooting clubs establish skeet ranges and provides grants to affiliated state shooting associations.

The NRA of political legend is a relatively small group of insiders who control the NRA’s propaganda and lobbying apparatus and adhere to what is at heart a radical, Libertarian political orthodoxy—yet cloak their beliefs in familiar images that evoke mainstream American values and history. Eagles abound in NRA literature. The NRA cap bears an eagle. The NRA’s gun-safety program is named Eddie Eagle. The NRA’s famous bulletins, crafted to rouse the membership to write their legislators in response to some immediate threat, are called Minuteman Alerts. NRA executives lace their remarks and columns with allusions to the American Revolution, patriotism, and frontier history.
At the NRA’s 1993 annual meeting in Nashville, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told the crowd, “You know, a couple of hundred years ago a group of citizen-patriots met at a bridge—Concord Bridge. You are no different from them. Because every day somebody still has to go to that bridge and stand there to defend freedom.”

During the same annual gathering, a John Wayne impersonator, Gene Howard, addressed a separate meeting of the NRA’s board. He wore a red cowboy shirt, brown leather vest, and a blue kerchief—tied at his neck in John Wayne fashion—and recited two of his own poems. One, titled “Do You Want My Gun,” reprised Cold War themes:

Today the majority of us are not politically correct
  
And what do the liberals want us to put in check?
  
That’s right, our guns, they want us to turn them in
.
  
For as long as we have them socialism cannot win.
 …

Curiously, Howard then shifted battlefields and identified the NRA cause as nothing less than a fight to restore religion to America:

For today freedom of religion is no longer a right
,
  
But a battle ground for which we must fight.
  
So if you ask me for my gun, the answer is no!
  
Try to take it, and if there’s a hell, you’ll know
.

Central to the NRA’s rhetoric is opposition to the American media—both the press and the entertainment media—which the leadership perceives as antigun.
In his Nashville speech, Wayne La-Pierre called the news media “a force that dwarfs any political power or social tyrant that ever before existed on this planet.”
In a column in the June 1993
American Rifleman
, NRA president Robert K. Corbin called the offending media “thought police” and warned such media “can unwittingly be manipulated by hidden, far-more-sinister forces.”

In 1993 the association launched a formal assault on television violence, joining a broad popular attack that culminated early in the year in a network decision to air content warnings before especially violent shows. The NRA’s attack, however, contained a curious twist. In testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, NRA lobbyist Susan R. Lamson complained that violent television shows unfairly stigmatized guns and gun owners. “This steady diet of stereotypes coupled with gratuitous criminal violence provokes a widespread bigotry against law-abiding gun owners and fuels the drive for restrictions that impact the law-abiding.”

The media—and I include here the gun press—bear at least equal responsibility for nurturing firearms violence in America. Gun writers, TV and movie producers, and the daily press directly and indirectly stoke demand for exotic firearms and accessories and orchestrate the bloodthirsty mood that infuses the gun culture.

The gun writers know what their readers want. The newsletter
Gun Tests
routinely rates the penetration power of handguns and ammunition the way
Consumer Reports
compares new cars.
American Handgunner
’s 1992 “Combat Annual” reviewed six new high-caliber revolvers, calling them “The Ultimate Manstoppers!” Regular issues of the magazine are full of tales of combat tactics and police shoot-outs, part of a running series by Massad Ayoob, the magazine’s star reporter. “Gory True Story,” teased the cover of the October 1991 issue. “REAL-LIFE TERMINATOR! Soaking up bullet after bullet, a cop-killing PCP freak just won’t die! Massad Ayoob’s chilling account on page 70.”

Gun writers often skirt the gory reality of gunshot injury by driving euphemism to new heights, deftly avoiding the words
kill, murder
, and
death
, using instead such etymological eunuchs as
knockdown, stopping power
, and—this is my favorite—
double-tap
, meaning to shoot a guy twice. (Double Tap also happens to be the name of a Virginia Beach gun store, whose sign features a black human silhouette with two red holes over the heart.)

To the gun press, no firearm is unworthy of praise, not even the Saturday night specials made by the now defunct RG Industries, one of which was used by John Hinckley when he shot James Brady in the head.
In its “Combat Annual”
American Handgunner
included a defense of RG’s guns written by Mark Moritz, special projects editor. Moritz, who noted that his first gun was an RG, tested a .22-caliber RG revolver against an expensive Smith & Wesson .22, comparing their performance in both head and body shots.

The RG was a little slower.

However, Moritz wrote, “even out of the box we are only talking about two-tenths of a second for multiple headshots at the relatively long range of seven yards.”

Moritz won’t win any awards for sensitivity in journalism. Early on in the story, in an angry denunciation of the “slimebucket” lawyers who sued RG Industries out of business after the Reagan-Brady shootings, he wrote: “When John Hinckley shot James Brady, with
an RG .22 revolver, his wife, Sarah, head spokesnut at Handgun Control, Inc., sued RG. She was offended that her husband was shot with a cheap, low-powered gun. I guess she wanted him to be shot with an expensive, high-powered gun.”

A writer for
American Survival Guide
even had nice things to say about S.W. Daniel’s Ladies’ Home Companion shotgun, the gun the Maryland state police ballistics expert refused even to test-fire. “When we first came across the Ladies’ Home Companion at a large gun show earlier this year, we found it a highly interesting and unique firearm,”
the author wrote. He never commented on the inappropriate name of the weapon. The gun’s heavy trigger pull, he wrote, “makes the LHC a very safe gun.”