Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [89]
The NRA accomplished this bit of intellectual gerrymandering by deftly marketing an ideology that posits any and all firearm regulation as a direct challenge to the U.S. Constitution and, by inference, to America itself. In this ideology, all guns are equal, be they Cobray pistols having no utilitarian value or the Glocks now embraced by so many police departments; guns are to be kept in readiness to repel invaders or—and this is a real prospect to the hard-liners who run the NRA—to resist the U.S. government itself; regulation of firearms is necessarily the first step toward confiscation of all firearms. Soon after I joined the NRA in 1993, I received my official NRA “Member Guide,” which stated the NRA’s position in unequivocal terms: “Any type of licensing and computer registration scheme aimed at law-abiding citizens is a direct violation of Second Amendment rights, serves no law enforcement purpose, and ultimately could result in the prohibition and/or confiscation of legally owned firearms.” In a 1975 fund-raising letter to NRA members, retired general Maxwell E. Rich, executive vice president, warned of the true consequences of gun control: “My friend, they are not talking of ‘Control’; they want complete and total ‘Confiscation.’ This will mean the elimination and removal of all police revolvers, all sporting rifles and target pistols owned by law abiding citizens.” He asked, “What would the crime rate be if the criminal knew our police were unarmed …?”
At times the NRA has even sought to link support for firearm regulation to Communist sympathies, as in 1973 when the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine described the “Rules for Revolution,” a never-authenticated document purported to set out the principles by which Communist cells could attain world control. The tenth rule, the magazine said, called for “the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless.”
On this battlefield anyone who advocates firearms regulation finds himself immediately on the defensive, forced into arcane debate over the exact meaning of the Second Amendment, and branded an enemy of The People.
An important effect of the NRA’s propaganda was to arm even the least articulate of gun owners with a snappy response that allows them to readily deflect unfriendly challenges from the unpersuaded and at the same time to avoid having to think about what kinds of firearms regulations might indeed ease the national crisis. (To the NRA, of course, guns are not the crisis. People are. More jails and swifter prosecution will solve the problem of gun violence.) In this intellectual desert, the mere act of possessing or manufacturing a gun, even a Cobray M-11/9, becomes a noble and patriotic undertaking.
The NRA was not always the paranoid, Constitution-thumping entity it is today. Nor is its current radicalism shared by the great mass of its members, many of whom simply join to take advantage of the organization’s broad array of grass-roots services or merely to get the NRA hat (mine is black with the NRA eagle insignia stitched in gold thread). The NRA is not the monolithic, omnipotent force of popular imagination. It is two organizations, and only by understanding this can one come to understand the fervor with which the association opposes even the simplest efforts at impeding the flow of guns from the good guys to the bad.
The NRA was founded in New York in 1871 by William Conant Church, a former New York Times war correspondent and soldier, and Gen. George Wingate, with the