Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [102]
With his polished bald head, barrel chest, “piercing ice-blue eyes,” and marksmanship trophies, Harlon Carter was the sort of man you’d expect to fend off black helicopters with an AK-47 and a copy of the Constitution. At the 1977 NRA National Convention, Carter orchestrated a parliamentary coup known as the Cincinnati Revolt against the old guard leadership of the NRA—a namby-pamby collection of sportsmen and hunters who wouldn’t have recognized a jackbooted minion of government if one had leapt from a black helicopter screaming, “Happy Kwanzaa, Motherfucker!”
Carter transformed the NRA from a low-key advocacy group for hunting, gun safety, and marksmanship into a lobbying juggernaut that bitterly attacked every gun control proposal before Congress as if it were America’s death warrant. Testifying before Congress to oppose a fourteen-day waiting period on gun sales, Carter explained the complex theoretical underpinnings of the slippery slope principle to America’s leadership:
It is kind of like the old Bert Lahr commercial that used to be on television. He used to eat a potato chip and say “I’ll bet you can’t eat just one.” . . . It is a little nibble first, and I’ll bet you can’t eat just one.4
Thanks to NRA lobbying, the government not only refrained from eating the whole bag, it even regurgitated some previously ingested potato chips in 1986 when Congress watered down the Gun Control Act of 1968.cm
Jackbooted Thugs
But for all its explanatory power, the potato chip analogy is not very scary. For effective fearmongering, you need a secret plot to drive the slippery slope. When Wayne LaPierre took over as executive vice president in 1991, he warned NRA members of just such a plot, writing:
A document secretly delivered to me reveals frightening evidence that the full-scale war to crush your gun rights has not only begun, but is well under way . . . not just to ban all handguns or all semi-automatics, but to eliminate private firearms ownership completely and forever.5
Neal Knox, who directed the NRA’s lobbying wing, had an even more elaborate theory. He suggested that the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, as well as various infamous murder sprees, had been planned by antigun conspirators. “Is it possible that some of those incidents could have been created for the purpose of disarming the people of the free world?” he wrote. “With drugs and evil intent, it’s possible. Rampant paranoia on my part? Maybe. But there have been far too many coincidences to ignore.”cn6
So we’ve got the slippery slope and the secret plot. What about the persecution? That’s where Harlon Carter’s “jack-booted minions of government” come in. Jackboots are knee-length leather combat boots. Though worn by soldiers and police in many nations since the days of Napoleon, they acquired special significance when the Nazis issued them to soldiers and SS officers. American gun rights activists are terrified of jackboots, which they associate with scary agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—known as the ATF. (According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, the ATF does not issue footwear to its agents, so either the agents have been purchasing their own jackboots, or the gun rights activists are slightly confused on this point.7)
One of Wayne LaPierre’s accomplishments at the NRA has been to expand the organization’s focus from ATF footwear to the entire ensemble. For example, in a 1995 fundraising letter, he warned of bucket helmets and black uniforms, not to mention copious bloodshed and the obliteration of every right in the Constitution:
Not too long ago it was unthinkable for Federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today . . . You can see it when jack-booted government thugs, wearing black, armed to the teeth, break down a door, open fire with an automatic weapon and kill or maim law-abiding citizens