Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [93]
To mollify the nonvoting ranks, the NRA provides a broad array of practical services. NRA-certified instructors provide shooting courses and teach gun safety to adults and kids. Celebrated hunters tour the nation conducting NRA hunting seminars. The organization runs shooting camps for kids and for advanced shooters hoping for a berth on the U.S. Olympic shooting team. It helps shooting clubs establish skeet ranges and provides grants to affiliated state shooting associations.
The NRA of political legend is a relatively small group of insiders who control the NRA’s propaganda and lobbying apparatus and adhere to what is at heart a radical, Libertarian political orthodoxy—yet cloak their beliefs in familiar images that evoke mainstream American values and history. Eagles abound in NRA literature. The NRA cap bears an eagle. The NRA’s gun-safety program is named Eddie Eagle. The NRA’s famous bulletins, crafted to rouse the membership to write their legislators in response to some immediate threat, are called Minuteman Alerts. NRA executives lace their remarks and columns with allusions to the American Revolution, patriotism, and frontier history. At the NRA’s 1993 annual meeting in Nashville, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told the crowd, “You know, a couple of hundred years ago a group of citizen-patriots met at a bridge—Concord Bridge. You are no different from them. Because every day somebody still has to go to that bridge and stand there to defend freedom.”
During the same annual gathering, a John Wayne impersonator, Gene Howard, addressed a separate meeting of the NRA’s board. He wore a red cowboy shirt, brown leather vest, and a blue kerchief—tied at his neck in John Wayne fashion—and recited two of his own poems. One, titled “Do You Want My Gun,” reprised Cold War themes:
Today the majority of us are not politically correct
And what do the liberals want us to put in check?
That’s right, our guns, they want us to turn them in.
For as long as we have them socialism cannot win. …
Curiously, Howard then shifted battlefields and identified the NRA cause as nothing less than a fight to restore religion to America:
For today freedom of religion is no longer a right,
But a battle ground for which we must fight.
So if you ask me for my gun, the answer is no!
Try to take it, and if there’s a hell, you’ll know.
Central to the NRA’s rhetoric is opposition to the American media—both the press and the entertainment media—which the leadership perceives as antigun. In his Nashville speech, Wayne La-Pierre called the news media “a force that dwarfs any political power or social tyrant that ever before existed on this planet.” In a column in the June 1993 American Rifleman, NRA president Robert K. Corbin called the offending media “thought police” and warned such media “can unwittingly be manipulated by hidden, far-more-sinister forces.”
In 1993 the association launched a formal assault on television violence, joining a broad popular attack that culminated early in the year in a network decision to air content warnings before especially violent shows. The NRA’s attack, however, contained a curious twist. In testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, NRA lobbyist Susan R. Lamson complained that violent television shows unfairly stigmatized guns and gun owners. “This steady diet of stereotypes coupled with gratuitous criminal violence provokes a widespread bigotry against law-abiding gun owners and fuels the drive for restrictions that impact the law-abiding.”
The media—and I include here the gun press—bear at least equal responsibility for nurturing firearms violence in America. Gun writers, TV and movie producers, and the daily press directly and indirectly stoke demand for exotic firearms and accessories and orchestrate the bloodthirsty mood that infuses the gun culture.
The gun writers know what their readers want. The newsletter Gun Tests routinely rates the penetration power of handguns and ammunition the way Consumer Reports