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

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