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Meet the New NRA: It's About More Than Guns
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Meet the New NRA: It's About More Than Guns
5/8/2002
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
The National Rifle Association has long been an organization that fans and exploits members' fears, but the rhetoric at the organization's 131st annual meeting in Reno the last weekend of April reached new levels of provocation. While speakers congratulated members on their efforts to elect pro-gun office seekers in the 2000 elections and fight against every state and national effort to pass tougher gun laws, their strongest words were ones of warning about an enemy that leaders say is bigger and more insidious than any the NRA has encountered before.
The new NRA villain is largely a product of the War on Terrorism, but something much broader and much worse than just international terrorism itself. According to the NRA leaders who spoke in Reno, the new threat stems from how the organization's existing enemies--gun-control groups, liberals, the media, and much of the federal government--are supposedly taking advantage of the terrorist threat to attack not only gun owners' perceived rights, but all manner of personal freedoms.
NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told members that for the first time in NRA history, the report of his office would "extend beyond the traditional scope of gun rights" to encompass rights of privacy, free speech, free movement, and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. He said that a new and broader NRA agenda is necessary because the government has responded to the terrorist threat by seeking reductions in personal freedoms and because the "ailing gun-ban lobby" was trying to take advantage of the terrorist threat to create a "new reason to ban your guns."
LaPierre's vitriolic rhetoric was a clear attempt to attach hatred of terrorists to the NRA's longstanding traditional enemies. He described people and groups that work on gun-violence prevention, for instance, as "a shadowy network of extremist social guerillas" who "form a sort of Taliban, an intolerant coalition of fanatics that shelter the anti-freedom alliance so it can thrive and grow."
LaPierre directed his bitterest comments at the moderate group Americans for Gun Safety, in apparent part because AGS uses a term, "gun safety," that the NRA considers virtually a trademark of its own. He actually stated that AGS and its founder, Andrew McKelvey, "sound a lot like Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qeida." He said that the nation learned a lesson on September 11: America should have "taken out" bin Laden and Al-Qeida long ago--and then dropped the matter, leaving members to draw their own conclusions about gun-violence-prevention groups. Another speaker, NRA first vice president Kayne Robinson, apparently borrowing a piece from President Bush's incendiary line about terrorist nations, said that gun-violence-prevention groups and advocates comprise an "axis of abolition."
LaPierre criticized the federal government for tightening security at airports instead of merely arming pilots, for promoting a national ID card, for heightened electronic surveillance, and for not responding properly to threats of terrorism within the nation's borders. "The first target in homeland security shouldn't be the people of the homeland," he said. "It should be finding people who are not citizens of our homeland, who don't belong in our homeland along with aliens on work visas or green cards or student passes."
People who monitor the activities of extremist right-wing groups, like Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates of Somerville, MA, say that the kinds of messages from LaPierre, Robinson, and others at the NRA convention have a familiar ring. Berlet says that he's seen the NRA moving toward a broader political agenda for several years, to the extent now that he considers it "a kind of above-ground element of the patriot movement."
The patriot movement began to grow in the early 1990s, mostly in rural areas in large part due to the collapse of farm and ranch economies and a belief that sinister forces in the government were to blame. The more militant--and armed--militia movement branched off from the patriot movement. According to Berlet and other analysts of right-wing extremism, the militia movement has been declining in recent years, with many of its members migrating into less extremist groups--like the NRA. Berlet says that patriot groups typically contain various mixtures of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, anti-immigration, and anti-feminism, varying in degree.
But Berlet says that all patriot groups share two absolute core beliefs: "First, the characterization of the government as being controlled by some kind of special-interest elite, and the idea that the government is involved in some plan to impose massive oppression." Which comes very close to describing the NRA's essential belief. While the kinds of overt racism, homophobia, etc., that characterize many patriot groups don't seem to apply to the NRA, Berlet contends that the NRA has grown "increasingly tolerant" of that kind of rhetoric "by people who are connected with it or speaking on its behalf."
While LaPierre's anti-immigrant statements were probably the most egregious examples at the recent convention, past speeches by the group's president, Charlton Heston, are arguably worse. In 1997, Heston spoke at the conservative Free Congress Foundation's 20th Anniversary Gala and said, "Mainstream America is depending on you--counting on you--to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it's a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other..."
In 1998, Heston told listeners at a Christian Coalition banquet, "Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian middle class...They want an America where you can be white without feeling guilty."
Berlet said that the reaction to Heston at those events was mixed. Many people in the crowds "were stunned, shocked, by what he said." He said that messages like those from Heston create a different sort of image for the NRA. "So is the NRA now talking about defending gun rights or is the NRA talking about straight white Christian men defending America against the onslaught of alien others?"
"If the NRA weren't comfortable with him doing that, they would have yanked his chain," Berlet said. "So I think it's fair to say that the NRA has gone out of its way to continue to promote Charlton Heston at a time when even extremely rigid ultraconservative groups have been offended by his xenophobia."
At the convention in Reno, Heston, 77, accepted the NRA's request that he remain as president for one more year. In brief remarks accompanying his acceptance of the post, he suggested that it would be nice if President Bush would attend next year's convention in Orlando.
Curiously, there weren't many references to Bush at the NRA convention--and the ones that were made typically were those congratulating members for their work in getting him elected. To Joe Sudbay, public-policy director at the Violence Policy Center (which was singled out by name for special criticism by several NRA speakers), the paucity of positive comments about the Bush Administration was noteworthy. He said that LaPierre's speech included a "litany of things they're upset with the Bush Administration for"--even though, he pointed out they didn't assign blame to the Bush Administration by name. Prominent among those objections, he said, are Bush's decision to ignore the NRA's arm-the-pilots airport-security plan and his signing of the Campaign Finance Reform bill, which the NRA vehemently opposed. Their disappointment with Bush over those two decisions, at least, lent itself to what Sudbay calls "a sort of negative tone to the convention-certainly more so than last year."
In addition, Sudbay contends that other than its success in a few states, where legislatures passed or broadened such NRA-backed measures as concealed-carry laws and legal protections for the gun industry, the organization didn't achieve much in the last year. "They're supposed to be the top lobbying group in Washington, but what do they have to show for it?" he asked. "Granted, John Ashcroft has bent over backward for them, but in terms of legislation ... certainly, our side hasn't passed anything, but neither has theirs."
The other reason for NRA doom and gloom is simply that this is what the NRA does. It is their modus operandi, their method for fueling the anger of their membership and energizing them to work against the sinister forces that threaten their ways of life. Throughout the convention, the rhetoric was that of an organization that was concerned with far more issues than just gun rights. "We must expand our mission to shelter all freedoms," LaPierre said. "We must move the front lines of our fight beyond the Second Amendment to guard the First, and the Fourth, and all of them. We must declare that there are no shades of gray in American freedom. It's black and white, all or nothing. You're with us or you're against us."
The NRA claims that it now has more than 4.2 million members, an all-time high. But at the same time, the average gun owner in the U.S. is growing older and older--the overwhelmingly white male NRA crowd in Reno was strikingly old--and the organization is looking for new sources for prospective members. To that end, it has launched a new campaign aimed at the NASCAR auto-racing crowd called "NRA's Race to Five." The campaign seeks to sign up enough people to reach the five-million membership mark by entering new members into drawings for Winston Cup races, a special "NRA Sports" pickup, vacations, and other prizes.
The NASCAR crowd would seem a naturally fertile recruitment field for the NRA, but it's far from the only population it is eyeing. According to Sudbay, and evident from the convention rhetoric, the NRA is striving to strengthen its appeal to a broad swath of the American hard right wing. He contends that the weakening of Christian Coalition power has left somewhat of a vacuum on the right. Perhaps the movement of the NRA toward that void is a natural development. It also may be natural that a man like Grover Norquist, the highly influential president of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading anti-affirmative-action voice, would become a member of the NRA Board of Directors.
The NRA has a proven track record as a highly effective lobbying force. Its methods for successful political mobilization of its members, as outlined at the convention, are remarkably simple. NRA leaders cite their successful track record, pledge to continue their hard work, and instruct members to do essentially what they're told.
"The NRA and its members don't get distracted," Sudbay said. "They stay very focused. They know that what they need to do is stay focused on elections and get their people to vote. That's the message that people on our side need to learn from them. We don't need to do anything but stay focused on elections."
He also contends that the gun-control side might benefit from its own version of the NRA's extremist core as a countering force. "They have a hard-core base within their organization who want no gun laws. We need to build a hard-core coalition of members who want to ban handguns and assault weapons. They're out there; the question is getting them involved."
The messages coming from this year's NRA convention were truly ominous--by comparing people involved in gun-violence-prevention work to Osama bin Laden, the NRA has clearly ratcheted up its demonization of them. As Berlet says, "It's the milieu that's created by that kind of rhetoric that prompts people to act out in violence. That's just a fact of social life."
But as a report on the growth of the NRA by the Violence Policy Center's new lobbying entity, the Violence Prevention Campaign, concludes, the NRA's expansion into a broader right-wing agenda also presents it with a potential liability: "The NRA can be defeated. Its own words and extremism, beyond solely the gun issue, may well be the best tool in that effort."
http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/features/reader/0,2061,550831,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
5/8/2002
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
The National Rifle Association has long been an organization that fans and exploits members' fears, but the rhetoric at the organization's 131st annual meeting in Reno the last weekend of April reached new levels of provocation. While speakers congratulated members on their efforts to elect pro-gun office seekers in the 2000 elections and fight against every state and national effort to pass tougher gun laws, their strongest words were ones of warning about an enemy that leaders say is bigger and more insidious than any the NRA has encountered before.
The new NRA villain is largely a product of the War on Terrorism, but something much broader and much worse than just international terrorism itself. According to the NRA leaders who spoke in Reno, the new threat stems from how the organization's existing enemies--gun-control groups, liberals, the media, and much of the federal government--are supposedly taking advantage of the terrorist threat to attack not only gun owners' perceived rights, but all manner of personal freedoms.
NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told members that for the first time in NRA history, the report of his office would "extend beyond the traditional scope of gun rights" to encompass rights of privacy, free speech, free movement, and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. He said that a new and broader NRA agenda is necessary because the government has responded to the terrorist threat by seeking reductions in personal freedoms and because the "ailing gun-ban lobby" was trying to take advantage of the terrorist threat to create a "new reason to ban your guns."
LaPierre's vitriolic rhetoric was a clear attempt to attach hatred of terrorists to the NRA's longstanding traditional enemies. He described people and groups that work on gun-violence prevention, for instance, as "a shadowy network of extremist social guerillas" who "form a sort of Taliban, an intolerant coalition of fanatics that shelter the anti-freedom alliance so it can thrive and grow."
LaPierre directed his bitterest comments at the moderate group Americans for Gun Safety, in apparent part because AGS uses a term, "gun safety," that the NRA considers virtually a trademark of its own. He actually stated that AGS and its founder, Andrew McKelvey, "sound a lot like Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qeida." He said that the nation learned a lesson on September 11: America should have "taken out" bin Laden and Al-Qeida long ago--and then dropped the matter, leaving members to draw their own conclusions about gun-violence-prevention groups. Another speaker, NRA first vice president Kayne Robinson, apparently borrowing a piece from President Bush's incendiary line about terrorist nations, said that gun-violence-prevention groups and advocates comprise an "axis of abolition."
LaPierre criticized the federal government for tightening security at airports instead of merely arming pilots, for promoting a national ID card, for heightened electronic surveillance, and for not responding properly to threats of terrorism within the nation's borders. "The first target in homeland security shouldn't be the people of the homeland," he said. "It should be finding people who are not citizens of our homeland, who don't belong in our homeland along with aliens on work visas or green cards or student passes."
People who monitor the activities of extremist right-wing groups, like Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates of Somerville, MA, say that the kinds of messages from LaPierre, Robinson, and others at the NRA convention have a familiar ring. Berlet says that he's seen the NRA moving toward a broader political agenda for several years, to the extent now that he considers it "a kind of above-ground element of the patriot movement."
The patriot movement began to grow in the early 1990s, mostly in rural areas in large part due to the collapse of farm and ranch economies and a belief that sinister forces in the government were to blame. The more militant--and armed--militia movement branched off from the patriot movement. According to Berlet and other analysts of right-wing extremism, the militia movement has been declining in recent years, with many of its members migrating into less extremist groups--like the NRA. Berlet says that patriot groups typically contain various mixtures of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, anti-immigration, and anti-feminism, varying in degree.
But Berlet says that all patriot groups share two absolute core beliefs: "First, the characterization of the government as being controlled by some kind of special-interest elite, and the idea that the government is involved in some plan to impose massive oppression." Which comes very close to describing the NRA's essential belief. While the kinds of overt racism, homophobia, etc., that characterize many patriot groups don't seem to apply to the NRA, Berlet contends that the NRA has grown "increasingly tolerant" of that kind of rhetoric "by people who are connected with it or speaking on its behalf."
While LaPierre's anti-immigrant statements were probably the most egregious examples at the recent convention, past speeches by the group's president, Charlton Heston, are arguably worse. In 1997, Heston spoke at the conservative Free Congress Foundation's 20th Anniversary Gala and said, "Mainstream America is depending on you--counting on you--to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it's a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other..."
In 1998, Heston told listeners at a Christian Coalition banquet, "Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian middle class...They want an America where you can be white without feeling guilty."
Berlet said that the reaction to Heston at those events was mixed. Many people in the crowds "were stunned, shocked, by what he said." He said that messages like those from Heston create a different sort of image for the NRA. "So is the NRA now talking about defending gun rights or is the NRA talking about straight white Christian men defending America against the onslaught of alien others?"
"If the NRA weren't comfortable with him doing that, they would have yanked his chain," Berlet said. "So I think it's fair to say that the NRA has gone out of its way to continue to promote Charlton Heston at a time when even extremely rigid ultraconservative groups have been offended by his xenophobia."
At the convention in Reno, Heston, 77, accepted the NRA's request that he remain as president for one more year. In brief remarks accompanying his acceptance of the post, he suggested that it would be nice if President Bush would attend next year's convention in Orlando.
Curiously, there weren't many references to Bush at the NRA convention--and the ones that were made typically were those congratulating members for their work in getting him elected. To Joe Sudbay, public-policy director at the Violence Policy Center (which was singled out by name for special criticism by several NRA speakers), the paucity of positive comments about the Bush Administration was noteworthy. He said that LaPierre's speech included a "litany of things they're upset with the Bush Administration for"--even though, he pointed out they didn't assign blame to the Bush Administration by name. Prominent among those objections, he said, are Bush's decision to ignore the NRA's arm-the-pilots airport-security plan and his signing of the Campaign Finance Reform bill, which the NRA vehemently opposed. Their disappointment with Bush over those two decisions, at least, lent itself to what Sudbay calls "a sort of negative tone to the convention-certainly more so than last year."
In addition, Sudbay contends that other than its success in a few states, where legislatures passed or broadened such NRA-backed measures as concealed-carry laws and legal protections for the gun industry, the organization didn't achieve much in the last year. "They're supposed to be the top lobbying group in Washington, but what do they have to show for it?" he asked. "Granted, John Ashcroft has bent over backward for them, but in terms of legislation ... certainly, our side hasn't passed anything, but neither has theirs."
The other reason for NRA doom and gloom is simply that this is what the NRA does. It is their modus operandi, their method for fueling the anger of their membership and energizing them to work against the sinister forces that threaten their ways of life. Throughout the convention, the rhetoric was that of an organization that was concerned with far more issues than just gun rights. "We must expand our mission to shelter all freedoms," LaPierre said. "We must move the front lines of our fight beyond the Second Amendment to guard the First, and the Fourth, and all of them. We must declare that there are no shades of gray in American freedom. It's black and white, all or nothing. You're with us or you're against us."
The NRA claims that it now has more than 4.2 million members, an all-time high. But at the same time, the average gun owner in the U.S. is growing older and older--the overwhelmingly white male NRA crowd in Reno was strikingly old--and the organization is looking for new sources for prospective members. To that end, it has launched a new campaign aimed at the NASCAR auto-racing crowd called "NRA's Race to Five." The campaign seeks to sign up enough people to reach the five-million membership mark by entering new members into drawings for Winston Cup races, a special "NRA Sports" pickup, vacations, and other prizes.
The NASCAR crowd would seem a naturally fertile recruitment field for the NRA, but it's far from the only population it is eyeing. According to Sudbay, and evident from the convention rhetoric, the NRA is striving to strengthen its appeal to a broad swath of the American hard right wing. He contends that the weakening of Christian Coalition power has left somewhat of a vacuum on the right. Perhaps the movement of the NRA toward that void is a natural development. It also may be natural that a man like Grover Norquist, the highly influential president of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading anti-affirmative-action voice, would become a member of the NRA Board of Directors.
The NRA has a proven track record as a highly effective lobbying force. Its methods for successful political mobilization of its members, as outlined at the convention, are remarkably simple. NRA leaders cite their successful track record, pledge to continue their hard work, and instruct members to do essentially what they're told.
"The NRA and its members don't get distracted," Sudbay said. "They stay very focused. They know that what they need to do is stay focused on elections and get their people to vote. That's the message that people on our side need to learn from them. We don't need to do anything but stay focused on elections."
He also contends that the gun-control side might benefit from its own version of the NRA's extremist core as a countering force. "They have a hard-core base within their organization who want no gun laws. We need to build a hard-core coalition of members who want to ban handguns and assault weapons. They're out there; the question is getting them involved."
The messages coming from this year's NRA convention were truly ominous--by comparing people involved in gun-violence-prevention work to Osama bin Laden, the NRA has clearly ratcheted up its demonization of them. As Berlet says, "It's the milieu that's created by that kind of rhetoric that prompts people to act out in violence. That's just a fact of social life."
But as a report on the growth of the NRA by the Violence Policy Center's new lobbying entity, the Violence Prevention Campaign, concludes, the NRA's expansion into a broader right-wing agenda also presents it with a potential liability: "The NRA can be defeated. Its own words and extremism, beyond solely the gun issue, may well be the best tool in that effort."
http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/features/reader/0,2061,550831,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
I'm with the NRA and to hell with the socialist gun grabbers.
PC=BS