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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal: How the NRA has changed

The new gun guys

By James Knudsen

There’s an old saying, “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” Put that to the side for a moment.
    I began my career at Moristotle & Co. with a piece about guns following the Sandy Hook shooting. The focus of that article was to make gun owners aware of their culpability in that tragedy. Dan Baum’s new book, Gun Guys (which I review in tomorrow's column), points out that that sort of finger-pointing makes the gun community, of which Mr. Baum and I are members, feel put upon for something that wasn’t really our fault. Well, fear not, fellow gun guys, this month I’m picking on the liberal anti-gun crowd of which Mr. Baum and I are members—at least, of its liberal part.

    More particularly I want to look at a movement that was afoot when I was growing up in the ’70s. It was a great time to be a kid, it really was. The baby-boomers think the ’50s or the ’60s were it, but what do they know?—they elected Nixon...twice. The seventies, now there was a decade. All the feel good stuff those stoned-out-of-their-mind hippies talked about at Woodstock and Altamont and...those are the only two anyone can remember—all that stuff, the war in Vietnam, women’s rights, gay rights, and the environment…things were beginning to happen in the seventies.
    Now that last one, the environment, that was really big. That whole “green” movement that happened during the last decade, boooooooring, been there, done that. I went to an Earth Fair, right here in Tulare County in 1970. I had a board game called Dirty Water, never figured out how to play it, but it was about pollution and improving the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency started operating in 1970. Iron Eyes Cody shedding a single tear with trash at his feet in the Keep America Beautiful PSA—all these things were happening. And, hunting was becoming uncool.
    Growing up in a small, rural California town, I could name half a dozen families that hunted regularly. Guns were kept in a wood cabinet with a glass door often in plain view. Early September, dove season, the shotguns would come out and the surrounding countryside would have hunters, young, old, and in between waiting for sunrise and scanning the horizon for faint dots. Later, deer season, and if your family was really into hunting, a trip to Utah where the hunting was really good. I remember a classmate who was gone for a week each year for just such a trip. Hunting was the reason people owned guns. But no more.
    A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 48% of gun owners now own guns for protection/self-defense, compared with 32% who said they own guns for hunting. More significant is that in 1999 only 26% cited protection/self-defense as their reason for gun ownership, and 49% cited hunting. The trend is clear and it’s safe to assume that those who were paying attention in the 1970’s could see what was happening and decided to prepare.

    In September of 1975 CBS ran a 90-minute special, “The Guns of Autumn.” Today it is generally regarded as a shoddy piece of journalism. But it is notable that in 1975 the news division of a major network felt it could air a piece that took clear aim at the sport of hunting. In 1977 the National Rifle Association met in Cincinnati and, in what is often described as a coup d’etat, a new group of leaders who wanted to focus on legislation ousted the old group who focused on hunting and marksmanship. The modern-day results of that coup are made clear in Baum’s book when he visits NRA headquarters. There he meets two of the five people who work in the training department. The legislative wing of the NRA, the ILA (Institute for Legislative Action) has hundreds of employees. But even more significant than that, I believe, have been the bigger and more harmful changes in the members—the gun owners themselves and their reasons for owning.

I began this piece with a warning about what we wish for. As a kid, I received literature from Defenders of Wildlife, World Wildlife Fund, Audubon Society, Greenpeace—there are probably others I’ve forgotten. Like many others I felt hunting was wrong. And let me clarify, I’m talking hunting for sport not harvesting for financial gain. I suspect that many adults of my generation from hunting families came to feel the same way. Others just found they didn’t have the time, desire, or resources. But with the loss of these thousands and by now millions of potential hunting gun owners looming, those in the gun business knew they had to change.
    And they have. Where walnut used to reside we now find polymer stocks, and tactical is the word everyone wants attached to their gun, holster, ammunition, cargo pants, and golf shirt—“hidden pocket for concealed carry.” And along with advocating for the relaxation of “carry laws,” the NRA does its part to stoke the fires of fear. And this is all played out against the backdrop of a falling crime rate.
    I will stop short of saying that there is a grand conspiracy at play. Many have made that leap without my help. Baum has stated in interviews that the NRA no longer serves its four million members but rather the gun manufacturers. That suggests at least collusion. And one can easily find other factors that were at play when the NRA changed course. But I will insist that someone who owns for the purpose of hunting is markedly different from someone who owns and perhaps even carries for the purpose of self-defense. The former takes her rifle out in the fall and her trigger finger gets a scratch. The latter carries, daily, his trigger finger itchy. In the end we’ve traded a group of gun owners who enjoyed smoking a pipe and reading about hunting bullets for a group that reads about meth heads smoking a pipe and wonders if they have the right bullet to stop them. We didn’t like Elmer Fudd, now we have George Zimmerman.
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Copyright © 2013 by James Knudsen

Please comment

18 comments:

  1. Wonderful piece. I believe what needs to change is the idiots, working together, to disguise what changes, in the gun laws, we really need.
    No changes to "the right to bare arms", it's the type of arms. Who needs an automatic rifle to hunt? You could not eat what was shot, too many bullets in the animal. It is automatic weapons and the after-market clips that hold more ammunition.
    The only persons who need automatic weapons are our troops engaged in a war.
    Ban automatic weapons and all their after-market items that make the weapon able to kill crowds with one pull of the trigger.
    The right to bare arms does not mean shoot anyone you please, it was meant to give citizens the ability to protect their family against enemy combatants. Have we been invaded? Has Martial law been declared?
    Gun manufacturers only care about profit and it seems our government is doing their best to insure the manufacturers get rich.

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  2. Bravo, James! Now, "Giù la testa". Nothing is more dangerous than talking sense to the senseless.

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  3. George Zimmerman was the "go-to guy" in his Florida neighborhood's community watch program. Before he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, who knew that that meant he carried?
        Also before that, I too was known as the "go-to guy," but only because I serve as our community watch coordinator. I don't carry; I join my neighbors in calling the local police immediately one of us observes "suspicious activity."
        I hope that enough time has passed since Trayvon Martin's death that I can once again be referred to as the "go-to guy" without its causing people's eyes to narrow.

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  4. James, excellent piece! I think/hope I was able to fully follow it despite your artsy Citroenish style phrasing sometimes going a bit over my rock-slow Volvoish type thinking. (Sorry everyone, lame inside joke.)

    Ironic that you grew up thinking that hunting was wrong, and you are now, if I recall correctly from your past posts, an NRA member -- and I grew up thinking hunting was right, and I quit the NRA over the 1977 coup, and subsequent change of direction, that you so well describe. For those who may not know the story, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's chief executive since 1991, joined the organization in 1978 in the wake of the overthrow. At the time he knew next to nothing about guns, and was recruited because of his political background and master's degree in political science from Boston College. Coincidentally, he grew up in my hometown of Roanoke, Va.

    The one point in your post that I think may be off target (pun intended) is the possibility that the "NRA no longer serves its four million members but rather the gun manufacturers." I think that is the other way around: The gun manufacturers do what the NRA tells them, or else. In the wake of the horrific shooting of the Sandy Hook children, when LaPierre's media rhetoric seemed insensitive at best, even the management at the Mossberg gun factory - based less than 30 minutes away from the scene of the tragedy - were timid about speaking up, for fear they might contradict him in some way and draw his ire.

    There is precedent: In 2000, the management of famed Smith & Wesson crossed LaPierre, and the NRA organized a boycott that would have put the venerable company out of business had they not capitulated and come back into the fold.

    Based on that, what we all need to remember is the NRA exists to serve the needs of the NRA. And the main need of the NRA is to constantly agitate the base to keep money coming to the NRA. To accomplish this, LaPierre says whatever it takes to make the most waves, create the most buzz, and bring in the most money. After the Columbine massacre in 1999, for example, LaPierre came out in favor of gun-free schools. When that hurt fundraising he went the opposite direction, as seen in his plea for more guns in schools after the Sandy Hook tragedy.

    When a society is dealing with a small but potent juggernaut like the NRA, people need to realize they have an NRA problem to address first. With that done, a common-sense approach to guns, and gun laws, will follow. The trick is for the other 300-million people in this country to figure out how to get together and overcome the political clout of the 4-million members of the NRA.

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    1. Motomynd, your comment makes me realize that I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND what it is about the NRA that gives it so much clout, especially if its central reason for existing (as you seem to be saying) is simply to create wealth for the NRA. I assume that its 4,000,000 members don't receive any of the in-flowing loot—they must pay a membership fee to belong, right? Who actually pockets the money? What does whoever pockets the money actually DO to "earn" it?
          You can tell from the questions that I really DO NOT UNDERSTAND. So, please, you or James, start with the A,B,C's of this and give us a "101" introduction to the business economics involved. Thanks!

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  5. Morris, yes, NRA members pay a membership fee. And assuming the organization is still run as it was back when I was a member, in addition to the base dues, members are constantly harangued to raise their membership level, to donate for the fight against whatever new gun threat the NRA has unearthed, to donate to political campaigns, to become life members, and so on.

    OpenSecrets.org has some good basic information at this link http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000082 about the amounts of money the NRA spends on directly supporting politicians, trying to defeat politicians, and general lobbying efforts. These numbers earn the NRA "heavy hitter" status and it almost always ranks in the top 10% of contributors to causes and elected officials it supports. According to OpenSecrets.org, 14 out of 29 NRA lobbyists in 2012 previously held government jobs. While the NRA portrays itself to grassroots supporters as an outsider fighting for their cause, it is obviously very much a Washington, DC insider organization.

    In other reports I have seen that the NRA spends more than one-third as much as AARP, and more than three-fourths as much as pro-Israeli lobbyists. Think of the wide variety of topics AARP is addressing, and the narrow focus of the NRA, and you can begin to imagine the clout the organization wields in its tight circle.

    If $4.5 million seems a lot of money for the NRA to be spending on political campaigns and direct lobbying, consider the organization's "outside spending" is another $20 million or so. How do they manage this? The NRA's annual budget is reportedly $250 million, so perhaps the question backers - and not just opponents - should be asking, is where does the other $225 million go?

    For starters, the NRA reportedly has 600 or so employees, so presumably a huge chunk of NRA funds goes to payroll, in large part so they have enough people to maintain the pace of fundraising. Numerous seemingly reliable new sources consistently claim that NRA leader Wayne LaPierre earns nearly $1 million/year from the NRA, plus much more from sitting on the boards of various affiliated organizations, plus even more from writing and speaking engagements - all of which adds up to a net worth reportedly upwards of $20 million.

    That probably doesn't answer all your questions - specifically, I'm not sure anyone knows who pockets exactly how much money or what they do to "earn" it - but as you can see, the NRA has its own reasons to keep the gun debate going, for it makes a fortune from it.


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    1. THANKS much! The NRA's reason for being (besides making someone very rich), seems certainly to be (as James says in his column) to fund the ILA.
          Also, this 2012 article was just brought to my attention: "Standing Its Ground: The NRA Announces "All In" At Annual Meeting." Excerpt:

      Parents who want to shield their children from presidential assassination jokes should consider vacation destinations other than NRA conventions. The group's leadership has in recent years expertly cultivated a very profitable hatred and paranoia among its membership. This fact was on majestic display in St. Louis, where NRA officials painted the president as a dedicated "enemy of freedom" quietly implementing the early stages of a master gun confiscation plan. The convention marked the opening salvo in the group's campaign to defeat Obama and his gun control allies in November. The official battle cry for this effort, unveiled on Friday, is "All In."

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  6. Morris, yes, the NRA is "all in" for the good of the NRA. The point I was trying to underline, for lack of a better term, is that I don't think the NRA is working on behalf of the gun manufacturers, or even with their blessing. It is basically holding them hostage for its own purposes. The gun manufacturers may benefit in gross sales, but I don't know that they benefit on their bottom line. They have to plow so much of their profit into NRA dictated donations, especially to fund the fight against attempted political crackdowns that are a result of NRA actions, they may actually net less on the bottom line due to the NRA, rather than more.

    The whole situation is basically a case of one lunatic taking over an entire asylum.

    Common sense tells us that a long-time family-owned business like Mossberg doesn't want to in any way be affiliated with killing children 30 miles away, but they don't dare speak up. Why don't the manufacturers revolt against the NRA? Smith & Wesson tried that in 2000, and the NRA put them out of business. S&W management had to give in and come begging the NRA leadership to save the company.

    The LaPierre transformation through all this is possibly the most interesting aspect. He was reportedly basically a "bookish nerd" when he first became involved in Virginia political circles, and last I heard was still non-confrontational and soft-spoken in private. His public persona, on the other hand, has been described as an "Elmer Gantry like" presence. My guess is that LaPierre cares about nothing beyond the clout and the money, and that he views it all as basically the same shtick as that of Rush Limbaugh or a "professional" wrestler.

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    1. It boggles my mind that gun manufacturers might be being held hostage by the NRA.
          Even more astonishing to me is that no U.S. President or Congress has acted to dismantle the charade. There's something very house-of-cards sounding about the NRA as you describe it. I mean the picture you're painting is so absurd, I don't see how it could be seen in the light of day and survive, so why hasn't a President or a Congress unveiled it?

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    2. What the NRA is doing isn't that much different than pharmaceutical companies running massive ad campaigns to make people think they need the latest, greatest drug the company just put on the market. The patient doesn't need the drug, their doctor knows they don't need the drug, but when the patient comes in demanding the drug, what can a doctor do but prescribe it? If they don't, some other doctor will, so why lose a client? That process no doubt kills a lot more people than guns, and legislators haven't done anything about that - so why should they risk the wrath of voters over freedom of speech, freedom of commerce, and touchy Second Amendment issues?

      The NRA is creating a furor for lethal weapons of self-defense despite a falling crime rate and the minimal real risk most people face in this country. If people fall for that and demand military-style tactical weapons for home defense - just as they clamor for the latest cholesterol medication or digestive aid - then if one company doesn't supply them, another one will. If legislators wouldn't even maintain an existing ban on assault weapons, can we really expect them to tackle an organization that is acting within the laws - perverse as they may seem to be in this case - and donating millions of dollars a year to their campaigns?

      "House of cards" is a good term for the situation. Same as the pharmaceutical situation, and many, many others. We live in a country where the National Football League still qualifies for non-profit status despite having an annual income upwards of $9 billion, so why should anything make sense?

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    3. I thought I already had optimism ready for burial, but you've just driven two or three more big, heavy, nails into its coffin lid. And you said you were a starry-eyed optimist? Let"s just go toil in our own gardens, shall we?'

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  7. Morris, if by "go toil in our own gardens" you mean for all of us to remain calm and not worry beyond what we think we can control, then I fear you are endorsing the very strategy that got us in this mess in the first place. For generations, one class of people, one type of personality, has looked for every opportunity to create coalitions to help them prosper, and the rest of the people have sat back and believed the system would work for them as individuals.

    The elite prosper from exploiting what is, the middle and lower classes lose from believing in what never was.

    Billionaire owners of NFL football teams get taxpayer assistance for building and rebuilding stadiums by pushing hard for it. Individual taxpayers gripe to each other about it, but how many of them actually bother to contact their elected representatives and tell them their feelings?

    While the NRA consistently finds enough political backing to push a legislative agenda that polls show less then 20% of voters approve of, how many of the other 80% of voters bother to let their elected representatives know how they feel about that?

    Toiling determinedly and alone is a noble thought. Joining with others to create activist groups that pursue a planned agenda is what balances the scales.

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    1. Motomynd, very well said, and you have my sympathies.
          But at this point, I don't have the energy to get het up, but can only support what little nobility seems available to me. I leave it to younger people to let their calm be disturbed and involve themselves in activist groups.
          However, I do sign 5-10 web petitions a week now, and the number of petitions I am asked to sign seems to be growing fairly fast.
          Signing these petitions is an act of faith, in the sense that I am not that confident signing them will make any difference.

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  8. Morris, and you have my sympathies...since I am still officially a resident of Virginia, you are contributing many more tax dollars to the billionaire ownership of the Carolina Panthers than am I.

    Signing petitions can't hurt. And it may help. Not only does every signature give a bit more clout to the group effort, it encourages the person circulating the petition to keep the faith and maybe even fight harder and think bigger.

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    1. Your second paragraph is sufficient reason for me to keep signing. Thanks!

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  9. To all who have commented my apologies for being absent- sometimes I'm kind of like that god who winds the clock and walks away.
    Motomynd, you're very well informed on the NRA and thank you for adding to this discussion. I wasn't aware of Smith & Wesson's past dealings with the NRA. I do know that a company once known for revolvers now has a full line of AR-15 knock-offs. And just to be clear, that is not a jab at the AR- Dan Baum has made clear in numerous interviews he's done since the release of his book that the perception about the AR platform in the non-gun world is that it's owned only by a few radical nut-jobs. In truth, it's all anyone wants to own.
    On the political spending of the NRA, Baum cites figures that put the NRA's outlay in the halls of congress on par with the Pipefitters Union. And as far haranguing me for money... most of the emails I receive come from the various arms of the DNC.
    The long view is that shooting sports are in decline for much the same reason the GOP is in decline: it's base is old, white and dying. And I'm not old... yet.

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  10. I too have been away James. Trying to catch up. Both you and Moto have given a picture of the NRA few of us cared enough about to look into. Very good rotation of the pot. I believe at one time the gun manufactures happy supported the NRA. It turn it seems the NRA courted the manufactures. As in a lot of cases, the marriage turned out less agreeable for the manufactures than the courtship. The doctors did the same thing with the insurance companies.
    As for being an activist. If you enjoy having your heart broke over and over, your beliefs and hopes crushed, and in the end change nothing---become an activist by all means. Right does not make might, only money does that. There have been marches against and activist movements against all the things that have ended up hurting our country, but there are not enough marches in the world to overcome the amount of money that support these things.
    We changed nothing in the 60s with all the marching and petitions, it only helped cover over the dirt. It makes people think they have some control. It the end, change comes only when somebody makes money because of that change.
    San Rayburn took a lobbyist into his office and pointed at a wall. "What do you see on that wall?" he asked.
    "Nothing," replied the lobbyist.
    Sam put is hand on the lobbyist shoulder and smiled. "That is what you will get from this office. Nothing for nothing."
    This same lobbyist, who lobbied for 20 years, said the only difference between the Dems and Reps was the Dems would take the money in their office while the Reps wanted to meet you around the corner. He pointed out that no bill gets through Congress without someone paying for it.
    Good luck with that Activist thing. Pura Vida

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