Guns, Paranoia and Obama Assassination Jokes: Inside the NRA's Annual Convention
In recent years, the NRA's leadership has expertly cultivated a very
profitable hatred and paranoia among its membership.
April 18, 2012 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
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ST. LOUIS -- The hotel minibus had barely left the airport
when the guy to my left dropped the Obama assassination joke.
There were eight of us on our way to the National Rifle Association's
annual convention downtown, rolling past a domino-row of highway
billboards advertising the event's "Acres of Guns and Gear." The
banter suggested the minibus crew was microcosmic of the NRA's claimed
four million members, more than 70,000 of whom made the election-year
pilgrimage. There was a soft-spoken father from Long Island and his
teenage daughter headed to the University of Akron on a Division-I
marksmanship scholarship. There were retired New Hampshire hunters
from NRA families going back generations. There was a Russian
immigrant whose only hobby is fully automatic machine guns.
And there was a professional Second Amendment extremist named Stephen
Burke. An Endowment Life Member of the NRA and an attorney from
Springfield, Massachusetts, Burke specializes in getting guns into the
hands of ex-cons whose licenses have been revoked or downgraded for
criminal activity.
Burke is a loud and boastful retired lance corporal who displays a
photo of himself with NRA Executive Vice President & CEO Wayne
LaPierre on his professional website. The only thing he abhors more
than gun control is silence. When a conversation about former New York
Governor George Pataki's pro-gun record entered a lull, he asked the
group what sounded like an American history riddle or piece of trivia:
"What do Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama have in
common?"
The collective intelligence of the minibus was stumped. After a few
beats, he delivered the answer: "Nothing. Yet."
Most of the bus erupted in laughter, but the father from Long Island
looked out the window, embarrassed.
Parents who want to shield their children from presidential
assassination jokes should consider vacation destinations other than
NRA conventions. The group's leadership has in recent years expertly
cultivated a very profitable hatred and paranoia among its membership.
This fact was on majestic display in St. Louis, where NRA officials
painted the president as a dedicated "enemy of freedom" quietly
implementing the early stages of a master gun confiscation plan. The
convention marked the opening salvo in the group's campaign to defeat
Obama and his gun control allies in November. The official battle cry
for this effort, unveiled on Friday, is "All In."
The NRA's election-year slogan is meant to evoke a bit of the Wild
West tough guy imagery that remains central to American gun culture.
The phrase comes from poker, the card game of the frontier, and the
desired picture is that of a noble, steely-eyed gun lobby pushing its
mountain of chips across the table of America's destiny, betting
everything on one last high-stakes hand. In NRA land, where impending
Second Amendment Apocalypse is a state of mind and a business
strategy, the next election is always the final hand. As he did in
2008, chief NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre describes 2012 as "the most
important election of our lifetime."
For a group with a self-replenishing supply of chips, the slogan "All
In" is absurd. Recent years have seen record profits for the gun and
ammo industries, of which the NRA is an integral part. During
Saturday's Leadership Forum, two grateful firms -- Ruger and
MidwayUSA, the sponsor of the convention -- together donated more than
$8 million to the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative
Action. These two gifts alone -- raised through a "round-up" campaign
on sales -- nearly equal the group's record spending for the 2008
cycle.
Flush with cash from the Obama-era gun boom it's done so much to fuel
and drive, the NRA is today a very different beast than when it faced
the possibility of bankruptcy in the mid-1990s. It has even mutated in
large and important ways since 2007, when one of its former lobbyists,
Richard Feldman, described the organization as a "cynical, mercenary
political cult." Today's NRA is less a lobbying and campaigning
organization than a highly profitable, multi-division industry,
merchandising, and fundraising machine. It has an annual budget of
between $220 and $250 million and executives eligible for the Buffet
Rule. An election year for them is a night at the blackjack table for
Michael Jordan.
"All In" works better as a slogan if considered in terms of the
group's maximalist -- which is another word for extreme, and in the
gun context, possibly insane -- interpretation of the Second
Amendment. While the NRA once focused on playing national defense
against major gun control legislation, it now plays ferocious
legislative offense at the state level, where it has expanded gun
rights beyond what actors in previous gun debates could have imagined.
Its top national legislative priority at the moment is a Senate bill
introduced by South Dakota's John Thune that would force all states
that issue concealed carry permits to recognize those of every other
state. (Carry a laser-sighted 9mm Glock in Laredo? Bring it to
Brooklyn.)
Better known is the group's work pushing controversial "Stand Your
Ground" legislation at the state level, which a growing number of
critics and a growing body of evidence says encourages vigilantism,
increases gun violence, and complicates the prosecution of the
perpetrators of violent crime.
In pushing its no-limits reading of the Second Amendment in
statehouses across the country, the NRA has enjoyed paradigm-shifting
success. "Thirty years ago, there was a national conversation about a
national handgun ban, and today we're having a conversation about
nationwide right-to-carry [handguns]," bragged Chris Cox, executive
director of the NRA's Institute of Legislative Action, more than once
during the convention.
It is unclear whether the NRA's side in this conversation is a winner
on the national stage. Alone among the speakers at Friday's
"Leadership Forum," Mitt Romney declined to toss bloody cuts of steak
at the NRA audience. Now in general election mode, Romney, who only
joined the NRA in 2006, has seen the recent data indicating the
group's impotence in national elections. (Though its SuperPAC
potential in the wake of Citizens United is huge.) Romney knows most
NRA members sniff him with suspicion for signing an assault weapons
ban and tripling gun registration fees as governor of Massachusetts.
But he's probably right in thinking he can survive these suspicions,
or at least that he has much bigger problems. Romney took no chances
pandering at an event featuring swing-voter-kryptonite clowns like
Glenn Beck, (Ret.) Gen. Jerry Boykin, and Ted Nugent.
(Nugent, an NRA board member who worked the convention plugging his
new book and branded line of ammunition, made headlines and drew
Secret Service attention after video emerged of himurging a crowd
there to "ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in
November" and saying that he "will either be dead or in jail by this
time next year" if Obama is re-elected. He has since saidhe will
"stand by" those comments; asked about an effort by Democrats that
Romney (who sought and received Nugent's endorsement) distance himself
from Nugent's comments, Nugent claimed that "Mitt Romney knows what
I'm saying is true.")
Romney's speech could have been delivered before the National
Restaurant Association -- heavy on "freedom" and nearly bereft of the
word "gun" or its synonyms. Aside from a call to fire Attorney General
Eric Holder, which sent the crowd to its feet, he left the NRA
rank-and-file cold.
Don Craiger, a retired Lt. Colonel from Rockford Illinois, could only
muster a shrug after Romney's speech. "He can't be any worse than what
we've got," he said. "Anybody would be better." Back in the media
room, writers for the gun press were withering in their assessment.
"We should title our pieces 'The content of Mitt Romney's NRA Speech,'
and then just have a giant blank space underneath," sneered a feature
writer for leading handgun magazines. "Lackluster," said Roy Kubicek,
the pro-gun blogger behind Days of Our Trailers. "I wasn't impressed.
He said as little as he could that could be used against him in the
general. Because of his actions as governor, I have little faith in
him. He's a politician to the core, he'll blow whichever way the wind
is blowing."
"Hell no I don't trust him, the guy is an empty shell -- but what am I
gonna do, vote for Ron Paul?" said Ross Davis, a 30-year-old
landscaper from Tennessee standing in line to meet Ted Nugent.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the gun business, Romney's failings as a gun-rights champion may
offer the best of both worlds in the event of his election: highly
unlikely to pursue gun control measures as president, but leaving
enough doubt to keep alive embers of panic about gun confiscation.
Manufactured panic is the undisputed basis of the industry's recent
growth, which research suggests would have otherwise stalled.
Throughout the convention's seven-acre display floorshow,
manufacturers and dealers reported record sales following Obama's
election and the spread of conceal-and-carry laws. Those in the gun
industry can't afford to be anything but "All In" when it comes to the
NRA's two-track operation of politics and propaganda that inflates
fears of impending gun confiscation while simultaneously expanding
opportunities for carrying and using them.
(Exactly what the NRA is doing with the fruits of this strategy is the
subject of some gnawing questions raised by a Bloomberg Businessweek
investigation into the group's finances. The magazine revealed
numerous instances in which the donation amounts stated in the NRA's
2010 tax filings well exceeded the amount actually received by the
charities named, sometimes by as much as one half.)
There's no lack of self-awareness about panic-production on the
industry side of the equation.
"There's a lot of panic buying when Democrats are in power, and a lot
of it is driven by the NRA and the gun press," said convention
exhibitor Steve Johnston, a manager at Graf's Reloading, a gun and
ammo shop in St. Charles, Missouri. "But then after a while
[following] the election, people start to get depressed and think, 'Oh
wait, I don't really need three AR-15's. I need to pay for food.'"
And so maybe a couple of those AR-15s end up on the newly saturated
secondary gun market, where prices come down and tracking the guns get
harder, thanks to the NRA's efforts to lower the bar for federal gun
licenses, which has proliferated the number of "kitchen table" gun
dealers. But soon there's another election cycle to hype, and more
gun-confiscation bogeyman to invent. The process begins anew, just in
time for the new models. "Having a Democrat in office is sort of like
a double-edged sword," said a representative with a major handgun
manufacturer who asked not to be identified. "You want your guy to
win, but it's not as good for business. There will be a sales dip if
the Republican wins."
Whether the NRA and its industry allies really want to defeat Obama is
a question worth asking. So is the question of whether they are
capable of making it happen. The last few cycles have been unkind to
the NRA's self-image as a grassroots-driven get-out-the-vote
powerhouse to be feared and placated. Whatever the truth about the
NRA's oft-cited role in ushering in the Republican Congress of 1994
and defeating Al Gore in Tennessee in 2000, that's all in the
rear-view. In 2006 the NRA bet on losing candidates with 80 percent of
its money spent on independent expenditures. Two years later, the
group spent more than $7 million only to see its chosen "A"-rated
Congressional candidates go down in flames in 80 percent of their
races against candidates endorsed by the NRA's nemesis, the Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The gun lobby would love to chalk
those painful drubbings up to larger Democratic waves, but the trend
continuedeven amidst the GOP's 2010 resurgence.
According to NRA rhetoric, 2008 should have meant the death of the
Second Amendment and the start of a new era of liberal darkness at
midnight. In the run-up to Obama's victory, Wayne LaPierre, America's
best-paid Little Shepard Boy, had seen wolves everywhere, calling 2008
"arguably the most important year in [the NRA's] history." It's a
dog-eared script for the NRA that precedes LaPierre's arrival on the
scene in 1977. A decade earlier, NRA president Harlon Carter warned
that the 1968 Gun Control Act augured a time when "our children will
not be able to enjoy the shooting sports."
As any gun control advocate can tell you, that didn't happen.
Three-and-a-half years after Obama's victory, gun owners have more
rights than ever, as well as a friendly landmark 2010 Supreme Court
decision in the form of MacDonald v. Chicago finding state handgun
bans unconstitutional. Yet the NRA's script is more shrill than ever.
The group continues to hype a discredited slippery-slope argument to
the soundtrack air-raid sirens and chinging cash registers. Obama's
election has been such a boon for membership dues and gun sales, you
get the sense the NRA is upset mostly over its wounded ego.
"We didn't do so well last time, and need to reclaim our title," said
Miranda Bond, Coordinator for the NRA-ILA's Grassroots Division.
"Obama is the most dangerous president we've ever faced, and we need
to do more."
Neither Bond nor her colleagues in St. Louis mentioned "the most
dangerous president they've ever faced" has earned an "F" rating from
the Brady Campaign. To be fair, there were a few mentions of Obama's
failure to advance the cause of common-sense gun regulation, even
after the shooting of a U.S. Congresswoman by a deranged Army reject
who legally purchased a Glock with extended magazine like he was super
sizing a burger meal. But these recognitions were uniformly couched in
warnings of a stealth attack just over the horizon -- Barack Obama as
the billion-dollar B-2 bomber of gun control. Unless the gun lobby's
"brassroots" can recruit the 96 percent of America's 100 million gun
owners who do not belong to the NRA, officials warned, the mask will
slide off after Obama's reelection, the ATF confiscation army
unleashed on God-fearing gun owners across the land.
The group's get-out-the-vote strategy in 2012 involves closing what
the NRA worries is a yawning social media gap between its members and
progressive and Democratic groups. The NRA knows that a large and
growing portion of its four million members are in, or soon to be in,
the market for hearing aids and mechanized mall carts. Just as
worrying, many of the younger attendees in St. Louis weren't
interested in flashlight-on-the-chin ghost stories about Obama II or
UN blue helmets. "We're here because we're into guns, not politics,"
said one 20-something attendee, to the nods of her friends. If the NRA
wants to reach millennials, they should start by replacing whichever
new media comm outfit they hired to run the group's online efforts.
The face of NRA's would-be viral 2012"Trigger the Vote" campaign is
68-year-old actor R. Lee "Gunny" Ermey, best known as the donut-hating
drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.
"Democrats can win the gun control war in 50 years if they just get
wise and back off and let age take its course," said Terry Joggerst, a
retired NRA member who had a 40-year career with Winchester. "When
these 50-year-olds are all dead, and the young people who are more
video game oriented replace them, the balance of power will swing. The
people who feel most strongly about guns and gun rights are not the
young."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The love in St. Louis that dared not speak its name was "Stand Your
Ground." Speaker after speaker, including Romney, made direct and
oblique references to the "Castle Doctrine," which allows people to
defend their homes, but not one uttered the name of the Castle
Doctrine's radical son, known as "Shoot First" or "Kill at Will" to
its critics. This is because the shooting death of Trayvon Martin blew
the lid off the NRA's state-level efforts, and the group understands
it is rapidly becoming a losing issue nationally and possibly within
its own ranks. Two days after the conclusion of the conference, the
NRA's partner in pushing "Stand Your Ground" bills, the American
Legislative Exchange Council, announced it was disbanding its Task
Force on Elections and Public Safetyand moving forward would focus
only on economic legislation.
Even before the ALEC announcement, there were signs the NRA is nervous
about defending "Stand Your Ground" laws against an avalanche of bad
press. Chris Cox of the NRA-ILA is usually an articulate spokesperson.
But when confronted by a member who worried the controversial laws
were outside the group's founding mission and risked hurting the
larger cause, Cox lapsed into incoherence and noticeably did not
mention either the law or ALEC by name:
There's support across the board for the Second Amendment, there's
support across the board, even post-media hysteria over the last few
weeks, there's support across the board for legitimate self-defense.
We don't apologize for support -- whether you call it a national right
or a God-given right, legislation that recognizes our right to defend
ourselves. The fact that other groups and other business entities and
others are supportive of that concept of constitutional freedom, or
that they're concerned about it from a Second Amendment standpoint or
an economic freedom standpoint, that's not my position to be, you can
call them and ask them, that's not my position to take, for debate,
for them. We stand in strong defense of any effort to allow
law-abiding, good people to defend themselves against criminal attack.
We don't apologize for that. It's not a problem in this country. We
will defend our efforts. We will defend those laws, and if others want
to join that fight, we will. [Listen to the audio here.]
While Cox refused to engage with the details of Trayvon Martin's
death, his members were more open. Jon Alexander, an NRA member and
organizer from Illinois, said he supported the law in theory but
admitted to becoming wary of it in practice. "We should have a right
to defend ourselves anywhere we have a right to be," he said. "But I
think what happened in Florida, I don't think [Zimmerman is] eligible
for that kind of protection. I don't think he was standing his ground.
I think he was looking for trouble. But I'm not a lawyer."
Neither is Wayne LaPierre, who closed out the Leadership Forum by
blasting the media over its coverage of Martin's death. Attacks on the
media were a running theme of the convention, and walking its halls
with a "MEDIA" badge felt just slightly safer than wearing antlers. On
the exhibition floor, major-gun manufacturer Remington mounted a large
television display that looped a Remington-branded video lambasting
the major networks. Singling out Brian Williams and NBC, one
screenshot described the network as "agenda-driven, flawed,
irresponsible, alarming, deceptive, [and] misleading."
"We're very worried about this so-called 'Stand Your Ground' law here
in St. Louis," said McCowan of the NAACP. "It's gaining traction and
it's clear that it encourages people to shoot first, then tell the
police what you want to tell them, because you just killed your
witness. We hope the pushback will grow."A few hours before LaPierre's
anti-media tirade, an alliance of local and national activists
gathered in the marble foyer of St. Louis City Hall to release
a218,000 signature petitioncalling for the repeal of Florida's "Stand
Your Ground" legislation. "These citizens believe, as we do, that it
is long past time to repeal these reckless laws, and to fight for
every reasonable effort to keep our children safe and gun violence out
of our lives," said gun violence prevention activist Joe Grace, who
launched the petition. Democratic State Rep. Jamila Nasheed asked
Missourians to join her in the fight against NRA-backed legislation
currently pending in the Missouri House. Flanking Nasheed were three
survivors of last year's mass shooting in Tucson, and Rev. Elston
McCowan of the St. Louis NAACP. Nasheed's coalition can expect
support from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's new initiative to
repeal "Stand Your Ground" laws wherever they have passed.
Patricia Maisch, a native of St. Louis and survivor of the Tucson
massacre, had traveled to her hometown in hopes of meeting with NRA
executives. "We used to say we didn't want their guns, we wanted their
help, but I don't think that's possible anymore," she said. "The
leadership has gone beyond the pale. If you talk to older members of
the organization, they'll tell you the NRA is not what it was when
they were a kid. Now it's all about making money and selling guns and
frightening their members. They have no incentive to stop the cycle."
How could they? The NRA and its industry partners are the cycle. As
Chris Cox likes to say, "The fight is never over."
More:
http://www.alternet.org/story/155043/guns%2C_paranoia_and_obama_assassination_jokes%3A_inside_the_nra%27s_annual_convention?page=entire
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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