Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [92]
The drive worked. In 1992, the NRA had a net gain of 616,000 members. As of October 1993, its membership had risen to a record high of nearly 3.3 million. The NRA was indeed bigger than ever before, but its campaign to boost membership and bolster its member programs had resulted in a 1992 operating deficit of $31.6 million, larger than ever in its history.
Despite all this spending and the surge in membership, by the middle of 1993 the NRA still seemed to have lost important ground. The association remained estranged from the nation’s law-enforcement community. And it faced a series of unaccustomed setbacks. In 1993, Virginia passed its one-gun-a-month law, despite the $500,000 the NRA spent to defeat the legislation. Connecticut passed an assault-gun bill that outlawed the sale of certain assault guns, including the AR-15 made by Colt’s Manufacturing, headquartered in Connecticut’s own “Gun Valley.” New Jersey passed an assault-gun bill. The New York assembly did likewise. Politicians and pundits began talking of a “sea change,” a new distaste for gun violence as pervasive as the antigun mood of the late 1960s. One New York assemblywoman, Naomi Matusow, won her seat in 1992 after campaigning with an explicitly anti-NRA slate. “It may just be,” she said, “that the NRA had cast a longer shadow than the reality.”
Far from adapting to the changing mood, the NRA continued its shift to the right. In 1993, a hard-right faction headed by Neal Knox, a former NRA executive who heads his own firearms lobbying group, further consolidated its hold over the NRA’s board and helped win a seat on the board for Harlon Carter’s widow, Maryann Carter. The board already included such hard-liners as Robert K. Brown, cofounder of Paladin Press and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, but Maryann Carter’s election symbolized a return to first principles. No gun controls; no compromise. The “New” NRA seemed a reincarnation of the old NRA of Harlon Carter’s day.
The NRA went on the offensive. It saw in the shifting national mood an opportunity to raise money and membership by sounding an especially urgent alarm. A four-page ad inserted in gun magazines showed President Bill Clinton and Sarah Brady shaking hands and on the verge of an embrace. “If you still need convincing reasons to guard your guns,” the ad said, “here’s a couple.” Striking a familiar note of hysteria, the ad cried: “All conditions are ripe for 1993 to be the worst year for gun owners in American history. No holds are barred. No one’s guns are safe. No one’s hunting is protected. No one’s ammunition is off limits. No one’s firearms freedoms are secure.”
It is a mistake, however, to think of the NRA as one uniform block of hard-right, pro-gun zealots. A survey by Louis Harris in 1993 found that of those NRA members captured in the sample, 59 percent supported registration of handguns and 49 percent favored limiting handgun purchases to one a month.
Why this division in attitude between the leadership and the ranks? And how does the NRA manage to avoid blowing apart from internal pressures?
For one thing, turnover among the rank and file is high. In the 1992 membership drive, for example, the NRA actually recruited more than one million new members, but lost more than half a million. Such turnover helps account for why the hard-core faction is able to retain control, despite a far more moderate member pool. For under the bylaws of the NRA, only members who have maintained their membership for five years in a row, or who have acquired a life membership, are permitted to vote in elections of board members. Thus only a small percentage of members are eligible to vote. And a small percentage of these ever bother to use the privilege. Those who do vote tend to be the most ardent of the NRA’s Constitution-thumpers. They field slates of hard-line candidates in each board