Any organization that horrifies the kind of people who embrace seat belt laws and Big Mac nutritional labels has a corkscrew appeal for those who delight in tweaking liberal sensibilities. But aside from the pleasure of an alliance with a group considered positively Satanic by their common ideological opponents, some conservatives are getting tired of the National Rifle Association. Indeed, the NRA has proved itself capable, in the year since it began its very public assault on federal law-enforcement agencies, of scaring off many of its natural supporters.
For those who believe private gun ownership is an unalloyed constitutional right that needs a strong defense against prohibitionist forces, the NRA’s continuing status as the second-most controversial public-interest group in Washington (the first, of course, is the Tobacco Institute) poses a problem. Since many Americans favor Second Amendment rights but are uncomfortable with absolutist posturing, the NRA’s image as a radical organization may incline the public to distance itself from its natural sympathies. That is why it becomes more than a parochial matter if former NRA board member Dave Edmonson, among others, is correct in charging that the NRA’s current political leadership is too extreme for all but the hard core.
The NRA’s opponents recognize this, of course, and their strategy takes advantage of it. They use diversionary tactics; rather than risking the kind of head-on confrontation required to ban private ownership of guns, they seek to roll back gun ownership one step at a time. The first step is to weaken the NRA, and the way to do that is to accuse the 3.2 million-member organization of working to protect the rights of dangerous fringe elements, not the Constitution.
Mike Beard, head of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, suggests that the NRA may be divided into two camps. “I think there are two NRAs. The average member and the highly politicized leadership in Washington.” He believes it is possible to convince the “average member” that the “highly politicized leadership in Washington” is simply too radical. And that is what he tries to do.
For its part, the NRA and its defenders argue that its successes against the gun prohibitionists speak for themselves. The group has long struggled against a biased press — and won time after time, especially in Congress. ” This idea that the NRA has marginalized itself is popular with people who believe that the only way to get respect inside the Beltway is to be Gergenlike,” says David Kopel, author and editor of several books on gun control, policy analyst with the Cato Institute, and a lifetime member of the NRA. Kopel also argues that NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre was not entirely out of line when he referred to federal agents as “jack-booted thugs” in a fund-raising letter. Instead, says Kopel, the line took on a life of its own after the Oklahoma City bombing, thanks in large part to the Clinton administration’s willingness to exploit the horror felt at the killing of hundreds of people, many of them government employees.
NRA board member Robert K. Brown, most famously known for publishing Soldier of Fortune, agrees: “LaPierre didn’t say that all law enforcement people are jack-booted thugs. But he’s right to say that some are, which is why I wouldn’t have apologized for the statement.”
To complete the chorus, NRA spokeswoman Tanya Metaksa defends LaPierre’s blast by saying that the line wasn’t a LaPierre original anyway. “John Dingell used it first,” she says, as if referring to the liberal congressman from Michigan closes the issue. Anyway, asks Metaksa, if the NRA is so extreme, why is it doing so well, both in total membership and the ability to get its legislation passed?
Metaksa’s seems a bold statement in light of the group’s widely reported loss of 300,000 members, including George Bush, who bailed out because of the “jack-booted thug” crack and earned himself a torrent of editorial praise unseen since the day he promised to raise taxes. Metaksa has a more mundane explanation for the membership decline: “We raised dues from $ 25 a year to $ 35 a year and actually lost fewer people than we expected. What hasn’t been reported is that membership is rising again. During the month of June, we gained new members — not renewals but new people — at a rate of 2,000 a day. ”
In fact, she explains, NRA membership is claimed by millions of people who aren’t on the offcial rolls. Metaksa cites a 1994 New York Times exit poll indicating that 37 percent of respondents believed themselves to be affliated with the organization. Exit polls by Harris, Gallup, the Tarrance Group, and Times Mirror, she adds, discovered that as many as 27 million voters are under the impression that they are either members, affiliated members, or associate members of the NRA. The true number is 3.2 million, says Metaksa, dwarfing Handgun Control Inc.’s 1 million and less than a tenth of the imagined figure.
Membership rolls, of course, can be manipulated easily enough, but the bottom line is that the NRA often prospers after criticism for staking out an “extreme” position, suggesting that in many places the organization’s positions and methods are considered reasonable. Kopel offers a case study from 1988. The issue was plastic guns, which can pass through metal detectors unnoticed. The NRA, to the horror of many, opposed an outright ban and instead backed legislation that would not affect guns already in circulation but would require future guns to contain a verifiable amount of metal. Newsweek took to dreaming aloud: “That kind of tunnel vision could damage the NRA more than any gun-control group has managed to do . . . This time the gun lobby may have shot itself in the foot.” The Senate rejected the plastic gun ban and accepted the NRA compromise.
To rub in the point, Kopel resurrects a poll by former Carter aide Patrick Caddell which asked, among other things, if Americans would be more likely to back gun legislation supported by such prominent people and organizations as Martin Luther King Jr., the National Center to Control Handguns, and the NRA itself. Endorsement by any of these entities, the poll discovered, would improve the prospects of a bill’s passage. At the same time, the pollsters found, an endorsement by the wrong party would incline a majority to support the opposing position. Three such negative influences were the Smith & Wesson Company, “business groups,” and “your local paper.”
The “extreme positions” argument has also failed to diminish the NRA’s relationship with state legislators — a fact granted by many of the NRA’s most dedicated enemies, including Bill Clinton. “Approving concealed-carry laws has nearly become a national pastime,” says Metaksa, who points out that I0 states passed laws this year making it possible for citizens to obtain concealed weapons permits. She also points to Oregon as a good example of NRA clout: “We supported three pieces of legislation: an instant check bill, a preemption bill to make state laws uniform, and a bill to protect shooting ranges. The governor signed the instant check and vetoed the other two. Then the legislature attached the shooting range measure to an appropriations bill and the governor signed it. The legislature overrode the veto on the pre- preemption bill, and they were successful in overriding vetoes in only one of 57 attempts.”
The 1994 elections are an even greater source of pride for the NRA. Though their analysis is disputed by gun-control groups, especially the assertion that former Speaker Tom Foley was felled by the gun lobby, the fact is, the NRA’s version has been endorsed, at least in part, by Clinton himself. As Kopel relates in his book, Guns: Who Should Have Them?, several weeks after the November 1994 elections, “President Clinton telephoned one of the leading Democratic supporters of the “assault weapon” ban. After congratulating the Congressman on his reelection, the president opined that the ‘assault weapon’ ban had cost the Democrats twenty-one seats in the House of Representatives. Clinton later told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that the ‘assault weapon’ issue and the NRA’s efforts had given the Republicans 20 additional seats. If the president was correct, then the gun ban was a decisive factor in the Republicans’ taking of the House of Representatives. (The Republicans won a fourteen-seat majority meaning that without the twenty or twenty-one “assault-weapon” victories, they would have remained in the minority.)”
Kopel further supports his analysis by citing an election roundup in Campaigns and Elections magazine “which identified numerous congressional races in which the winning (pro-gun) candidate’s margin of victory was smaller (often much smaller) than the number of self-identified NRA supporters in the district (or state).”
Soldier of Fortune‘s Brown recollects, with some glee, that opposing the assault-weapon ban was also said to be a sign of extremism, when, in fact, supporting it turned out to be costly. “Look at that ridiculous piece of legislation,” he says. “All it did, pretty much, was say you couldn’t have a gun with a flash suppressor and a bayonet mount. Now, how many Americans are being robbed at bayonet point? Not too damn many. But for those two things, Clinton gave up control of Congress.”
All of this may be true, and yet the NRA could still be in for difficult times. If concern about gun-related violence reaches a desperate pitch, attitudes toward gun-control could change. Desperate people are inclined toward desperate actions. The number of adolescent males is going to rise 20 percent or so by the year 2015. Even in the best of circumstances, adolescent males tend to be the most violent members of the human family, and many of the upcoming generation will grow up without the benefit of fathers. Given these circumstances, it isn’t difficult to imagine the violent crime rate rising significantly in the coming years, and if it does, gun prohibitionists will find it easier to make their case.
Mike Beard cites a University of California study which concludes that in the last seven years of this century there will be 300,000 deaths by firearms in the U.S. — 100,000 of those will be children under the age of 15. The solution offered by Beard’s organization will appeal to increasing numbers of panic-stricken citizens, including some gun owners, especially those who own only rifles and shotguns: “We say up front that our ultimate goal is a ban on the manufacture, sale and private possession of handguns.”
If more and more children are injured or killed in gun-related deaths, legions of Sarah Bradys will come forward, and their efforts will not be easily rebuffed. In such an environment, pro-gunners who consider rhetorical excess a necessary component of firm advocacy will have a difftcult time of it.
And that is not the only difficulty the NRA will face. The opposition intends to take the battle over gun ownership to the NRA’s own turf. Beard acknowledges that the NRA has tremendous clout at the state level and concedes that part of the reason for the NRA’s success is the decision by gun- control groups to concentrate their efforts on Washington. Increasingly, Beard promises, his compatriots will take their cause to the provinces — which is why the NRA, though the membership favorite today, will need to attract supporters from beyond the hard core.
A good way for the NRA to accomplish this would be for it to continue programs that appeal to mainstream Americans. Besides its purely gun-related victories, the NRA has been involved in judicial reform and crime prevention programs. Its “Refuse to be a Victim” program for women, for instance, has enjoyed significant popular support. These are the types of activities that will go a long way toward helping the NRA stake out its position as a group dedicated to preserving the Second Amendment and make it more difficult for opponents smear campaigns to succeed.
Tanya Metaksa remains confident the NRA is on the right track, and not just because of its crime-prevention programs: “We are not some extreme, antigovernment organization. We advocate changing laws through the legislative process, and changing legislators’ minds through the political process. If people are really interested in protecting their Second Amendment rights, they are going about it in a strange way by going after the NRA, whose critics use a hostile media to spread rumor and innuendo based on half- truths.”
Perhaps, but voters will have to continue to see it Metaksa’s way as well. If hubris leads the NRA to make decisions that jeopardize its standing, and allows itself to be easily characterized as a fringe group by the media and gun-control advocates, then it should be expected that citizens will find some other group to do their bidding. With annual revenues approaching $ 150 million, the NRA is a tempting target for competition from gun advocates who may be willing to temper their ire as they defend their Second Amendment rights.
By Dave Shiflett; Dave Shiflett is a writer living in Virginia
