(By Tim Dickinson,
Rolling Stone, February 14, 2014)
Eleven days
after the massacre, Wayne LaPierre – a lifelong political operative who had
steadied the National Rifle Association through many crises – stood before an
American flag and soberly addressed the nation about firearms and student
safety: "We believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe
schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period," LaPierre said,
carving out a "rare exception" for professional law enforcement.
LaPierre even proposed making the mere mention of the word "guns" in
schools a crime: "Such behavior in our schools should be prosecuted just
as certainly as such behavior in our airports is prosecuted," LaPierre
said. This speech wasn't delivered in an
alternate universe. The date was May 1st, 1999, at the NRA's national
convention in Denver. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's rampage at Columbine High
School in nearby Littleton, Colorado, had just killed 13 students and teachers,
shocking the conscience of the nation.
The disconnect between the NRA chief's conciliatory address
on that day 14 years ago and his combative press conference in the aftermath of
the slaughter of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, could hardly be more
jarring. In his now-infamous December 21st tirade, LaPierre ripped the gun-free
zones he once championed as an invitation to the "monsters and predators
of this world," advertising to "every insane killer in America that
schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum
risk." LaPierre then offered what
he called a "proven" solution to school gun violence – one that would
open a lucrative new market for the gun industry while tidily expanding the
power of the NRA itself. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun
is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre insisted, before proposing that armed,
NRA-trained vigilantes should patrol each of the nation's nearly 100,000 public
schools.
The shift in LaPierre's rhetoric underscores a radical
transformation within the NRA. Billing itself as the nation's "oldest
civil rights organization," the NRA still claims to represent the
interests of marksmen, hunters and responsible gun owners. But over the past
decade and a half, the NRA has morphed into a front group for the firearms
industry, whose profits are increasingly dependent on the sale of military-bred
weapons like the assault rifles used in the massacres at Newtown and Aurora,
Colorado. "When I was at the NRA, we said very specifically, 'We do not
represent the fi rearm industry,'" says Richard Feldman, a longtime gun
lobbyist who left the NRA in 1991. "We represent gun owners. End of
story." But in the association's more recent history, he says, "They
have really gone after the gun industry."
Today's NRA stands astride some of the ugliest currents of
our politics, combining the "astroturf" activism of the Tea Party,
the unlimited and undisclosed "dark money" of groups like Karl Rove's
Crossroads GPS, and the sham legislating conducted on behalf of the industry
through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council. "This is
not your father's NRA," says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the
Violence Policy Center, a top gun-industry watchdog. Feldman is more succinct,
calling his former employer a "cynical, mercenary political cult." The NRA's alignment with an $11.7 billion
industry has fed tens of millions of dollars into the association's coffers,
helping it string together victories that would have seemed fantastic just 15
years ago. The NRA has hogtied federal regulators, censored government data
about gun crime and blocked renewal of the ban on assault weaponry and
high-capacity magazines, which expired in 2004. The NRA secured its
"number-one legislative priority" in 2005, a law blocking liability
lawsuits that once threatened to bankrupt gunmakers and expose the industry's
darkest business practices. Across the country, the NRA has opened new markets
for firearms dealers by pushing for state laws granting citizens the right to
carry hidden weapons in public and to allow those who kill in the name of
self-defense to get off scot-free.
The NRA's unbending opposition to better gun-control
measures does not actually reflect the views of the nation's gun owners or, for
that matter, its claimed 4 million members. A May 2012 poll conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz
revealed surprising moderation on behalf of NRA members: Three out of four
believed that background checks should be completed before every gun purchase.
Nearly two-thirds supported a requirement that gun owners alert police when
their firearms are lost or stolen. "Their members are much more rational
than the management of the NRA," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, tells Rolling Stone.
"They're out of touch."
That's by design. Today's NRA is a completely top-down
organization. It has been led since 1991 by LaPierre, its chief executive, who
serves at the pleasure of a 76-member board that is all but self-perpetuating.
Only one-third of the board's membership is up for re-election in any given
year. Voting is limited to the NRA's honored "lifetime" members and
to dues-payers with at least five consecutive years of being in good standing.
Write-in candidates occasionally pepper the ballot, but in practice, the tiny
slice of eligible members who bother to vote rubber-stamp a slate of candidates
dictated by the NRA's 10-member nominating committee – one of whose members is George Kollitides II, CEO of Freedom Group, which
manufactures the Bushmaster semiautomatic that Adam Lanza used to slaughter
children in Newtown.
The NRA's
board is stocked with industry brass. Pete Brownell, president of Brownells
– an Internet arms superstore that features "ultrahigh-capacity
magazines" – campaigned for his seat touting the importance for the NRA to
have "directors who intimately understand and work in leadership positions
within the firearms industry." Another board seat belongs to Ronnie
Barrett, CEO of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, whose company produces
.50-caliber sniper rifles capable of piercing armor from nearly a mile away.
Barrett's firm also sells scope-mounted ballistics computers that enable
clueless civilians to hit targets like they were special-forces snipers. The
ammunitions side of the industry finds a voice in board member Stephen Hornady,
whose company peddles armor-piercing bullets and trades on the slogan "Accurate.
Deadly. Dependable." These NRA
directors are representative of a firearms sector that knows lethality sells.
"The industry has changed," says Tom Diaz, former Democratic counsel
to the House subcommittee on crime, a longtime gun-violence policy analyst and
author of a forthcoming book on the industry, The Last Gun. "In
terms of what sells and what is marketed most successfully, we're now talking
about guns that are derived directly from military design."
Of the top 15 gun manufacturers, 11 now manufacture assault
weapons, many of them variants of the AR-15 – derived from a military rifle
designed to kill enemy soldiers at close-to-medium range with little
marksmanship. The industry loves these "modern sporting rifles"
because they can be tricked out with expensive scopes, loaders, lights and
lasers. "Most of the money is in accessories," says Feldman. As one gun rep recently boasted to an
industry publication: "The AR platform is like Legos for grown men."
And a 2012 report from Bushmaster's parent company boasted that the industry's
embrace of these guns has led to "increased long-term growth in the
long-gun market while attracting a younger generation of shooters." The
campaign certainly seems to be working. Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster.
Twenty-five-year-old James Holmes, the Aurora shooter, was in many ways the
dream customer of the surging industry. He bought an AR-15 .233-caliberSmith
& Wesson assault rifle – a category the company's CEO bragged was
"extremely hot" – tricked it out with a 100-round ultrahigh-capacity
magazine and then purchased thousands of rounds from BulkAmmo.com, spending
nearly $15,000 on his greater arsenal. The
changes in the industry are underscored by dispatches from industry websites
and publications, like this one from Shooting Wire, in which the NRA is an
advertiser: "The net of all the numbers is that if you're a company with a
strong line of high-capacity pistols and AR-style rifles, you're doing
land-office business. If you're heavily dependent on hunting, you are
hurting."
The NRA insists in its publications that it is "not a
trade organization" and that it is "not affiliated with any firearm
or ammunition manufacturers or with any businesses that deal in guns and
ammunition." That is a lie. NRA's corporate patrons include 22 firearms
manufacturers, 12 of which are makers of assault weapons with household names
like Beretta and Ruger, according to a 2011 analysis by the Violence Policy Center.
The report, drawn from the NRA's own disclosures, also identified gifts from
dozens of firms that profit from high-capacity magazines, including Browning
and Remington. Donors from the industry and other dark reaches of the corporate
world – including Xe, the new name of the mercenary group Blackwater – had
funneled up to $52 million to the NRA in recent years. More disturbing, the NRA receives funds
directly from the sales of arms and ammunition. The "Round-Up"
program, launched by arms retailer Midway USA, encourages customers to increase
their purchases to the nearest dollar and sends the extra coin to the
association. Midway customers alone have contributed nearly $8 million
in this way to support NRA's lobbying division, the Institute for Legislative
Action.
In 2011, Ruger set out to be the first gun company to
"build and ship a million guns in one year." So it ginned up a
promotion that would give a dollar to the NRA for every weapon sold between the
2011 and 2012 NRA annual meetings. The company broke its own sales goal, sending
$1,254,000 to the NRA-ILA. Glock – whose pistols have been used in at least
six mass murders since 1991, including the Virginia Tech and Gabby Giffords
shootings – has been shipping an offer for discounted NRA memberships with its
handguns. In 2007, the NRA thanked Glock for helping it recruit 10,000 new
members. Top corporate patrons are
treated like royalty. Those whose giving to the NRA reaches $1 million or more
are inaugurated into an
elite NRA society called the "Golden Ring of Freedom" in a
ceremony where they're presented with a silk-lined golden blazer with a
hand-embroidered crest. Industry honchos seen in "the million-dollar
jacket" include the heads of Ruger, Beretta, Midway and Cabela's, an
outfitter that sells 12 models of semiautomatic rifles. Much like elite funders of a major political
party, these Golden Ringers enjoy top access to decision-makers at the NRA.
Their interests, not the interest of the $35-a-year member, rule the roost.
"They've got this base of true believers that they mail their magazines
out to," says policy analyst Diaz. "But the NRA is really about
serving this elite."
In more than three decades of service to the NRA, Wayne
LaPierre has done more than any other man alive to make America safe for crazed
gunmen to build warlike arsenals and unleash terror on innocents at movie
theaters and elementary schools. In the 1980s, he helped craft legislation to
roll back gun control passed in the wake of the Kennedy and King
assassinations. And since the late 1990s, twice he has destroyed political
deals that might have made it hugely difficult for accused killers like Holmes
and Lanza to get their hands on their weapons.
A predecessor once characterized the NRA as being "one of the
world's great religions," and 64-year-old LaPierre is a strange fit to be
its pope. LaPierre did not come from gun culture. He wasn't a hunter, a
marksman, a military man or a Second Amendment activist. "He's not a true
believer," says NRA biographer Osha Gray Davidson. "He's the first
NRA chief you can say that about." According
to NRA legend, LaPierre is actually a menace with a gun. NRA's PR team once
thought it would be sexy to film LaPierre at a firing range. "It was a
nightmare," an NRA staffer told Davidson. LaPierre was aiming downrange
for the camera when an engineer called for a sound check. To answer the man,
LaPierre swung around, but he failed to lower his rifle, aiming it directly at
the engineer – before someone took the gun away from LaPierre. The incident,
terrifying at the time, became a dark joke at NRA headquarters. Staffers behind
on their projects were threatened that they'd have to "go hunting with
Wayne." (The NRA's press office did not reply to Rolling Stone
inquiries.)
Between 1978, when LaPierre was hired as a lobbyist, and
1991, when he took over as CEO, the NRA had been on a historic roll. In those
early days, LaPierre served at the knee of a revolutionary NRA executive named
Harlon Carter, who transformed an old-time shooters club into a political
powerhouse – an "NRA so strong," Carter boasted, "that no
politician in America mindful of his political career would want to challenge
[our] goals." The NRA started grading politicians on guns – a process Bob
Dole kvetched was "a litmus test every five minutes" – rewarding
allies with campaign cash and subjecting foes to the backlash of millions of
rabid, single-issue gun-owning voters. In 1980, the NRA made its first-ever
presidential endorsement with Ronald Reagan, and by 1986 had the Gipper's
signature on legislation, overseen by LaPierre, that would usher in a new era
of unregulated gun shows.
By the late 1990s, however, the once mighty NRA was reeling
on LaPierre's watch: It had suffered stinging legislative defeats – the passage
of the Brady Bill in 1993 and the Assault Weapons Ban a year later. Despite
being credited by President Clinton for the GOP takeover in the House in 1994,
the association was riven by factionalism and money troubles that had many
writing the association's obituary. Instead,
LaPierre orchestrated a stunning turnaround, rebuilding the NRA's power, this
time as the voice of the industry. In so doing, he destroyed a historic
gun-control effort. Cities around the
country, emboldened by the success of the legal action that had humbled Big
Tobacco, had begun suing gun manufacturers, claiming that the industry was
liable for the social costs of gun violence. These suits argued that firearms
manufacturers had negligently marketed guns to criminals and profited from
illicit gun sales by turning a blind eye to their distribution networks. The
Clinton White House, in an initiative driven by Housing and Urban Development
Secretary Andrew Cuomo, announced its own class-action, suit over gun violence
in the nation's housing projects.
"The liability fight was an existential threat to the
firearms industry," says Feldman. "They thought that if those
lawsuits continued, let alone were successful, it would drain the
industry." In the industry's moment of peril, LaPierre saw an opportunity
to expand the NRA's power: The NRA would get out in front of gunmakers and,
through its membership, lead their fight. Charlton Heston, then NRA's
president, brought a stark message to the industry's biggest trade show in 1999:
"For a century, we have thrived independently," Heston said.
"But now your fight has become our fight." Under LaPierre, the NRA
went to work at the state level, securing bills that would ban localities from
suing gun manufacturers. It also began to draw up a national campaign to get
Congress to immunize gun manufacturers from liability for their deadly
products.
Smith & Wesson, at the time America's biggest handgun
manufacturer, was hesitant to bank on the NRA's legislative moonshot, deciding
that the best way to limit the damage would be to negotiate a settlement with
Cuomo. "We have to save the business," said CEO Ed Schultz." So
we're talking, instead of hiding our head in the sand like the National Rifle
Association." In exchange for
immunity from product liability lawsuits, Smith & Wesson agreed to make
safer guns and to clean up distribution networks. The measures included changes
to the guns themselves, such as internal locks, triggers that couldn't be
operated by kids and making new guns incompatible with old, high-capacity
magazines whose manufacture was now illegal thanks to the Assault Weapons Ban.
Smith & Wesson also promised to ship only to dealers who ran background
checks at every sale, including at gun shows, and who refused to sell grandfathered
assault rifles. With Smith & Wesson on board, Cuomo was confident that
other manufacturers would fall in line. But
LaPierre would tolerate no defections. Determined to kill off any comprehensive
gun-control agreement, he decided to hurt Smith & Wesson like the NRA had
punished so many wayward politicians, by riling up the membership and
organizing a consumer boycott that left the company reeling. Cuomo's
negotiations with the industry soon collapsed.
So too did the effort to pass new gun restrictions in the
aftermath of Columbine, underscoring the NRA's resurgent power. Three guns used
in the Columbine massacre had been picked up at a gun show, where, thanks to a
loophole in the Brady Bill, the purchases weren't subject to background checks.
The Senate quickly passed an amendment to close the gun-show loophole, with Al
Gore casting the decisive vote. But the NRA made its stand in the House. A
month later, when the amendment came up for a vote, it got stomped, 193 to 235.
Democrats, mindful of the punishment of 1994, contributed 49 nay votes. The dual defeats left Cuomo disillusioned. He
gave a speech in June 2000 that was stunningly bleak. "If we engage the
enemy in this town, we will lose," he said. "They will beat us in
this town. They are too strong in this town. Their fortress is within the Beltway."
LaPierre had helped gunmakers dodge two bullets as the
Clinton years drew to a close. But to lock in these gains, the NRA needed an
ally in the White House. The NRA backed
Bush to the hilt in the 2000 race. According to one tally, one in three dollars
spent by outside groups to support the Bush ticket was spent by the NRA, and in
the end Bush beat Gore among gun owners by 25 points. "The gun issue cost
Al Gore the White House," says Feldman. "Forget the couple of hundred
chads in Palm Beach. Absent the gun issue, he would have won Tennessee,
Arkansas and West Virginia." The
Bush administration rewarded the NRA as few could have imagined. Bush appointed
NRA favorite John Ashcroft as attorney general, who, in May 2001, announced
that for the first time in the nation's history the Justice Department had
adopted the view, long championed by the NRA, that the Second Amendment confers
an individual, not a collective, right to bear arms.
In the aftermath of 9/11, when other constitutional
protections were being trampled, nothing would shake this conviction, not even
the fact that a jihadist training manual found in Afghanistan instructed Al
Qaeda operatives living in the United States on how to, legally and without
arousing suspicion, "obtain an assault weapon, preferably an AK-47 or a
variation." The Bush administration continued to press the NRA's expansive
vision of the Second Amendment until it was even adopted by the Supreme Court
in 2008. It wasn't only restrictions on
the sale of military-grade weaponry that the NRA fought. It also fought to keep
Americans in the dark about the relative dangers of such guns. The Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms compiles detailed records about what firearms are
used in what types of crime, and even published a list of the top 10 crime
guns. To block the release of that data, Todd Tiahrt, a GOP congressman from
Kansas and an NRA ally, tacked a rider onto a 2003 appropriations bill that
forbids ATF from spending any money to share the data it collects with the
public – or even with Congress. "If you wanted to know how many
Bushmasters have been used in what kinds of crime for the last five years, that
information is in ATF's files," says Diaz. "But it can't be released
because of the Tiahrt Amendment."
With Bush in the White House and the public now blindered to
the perils of semiautomatic weapons, the Assault Weapons Ban was on a glide
path to expire in 2004. And the NRA, hellbent to free the gunmakers and dealers
from any responsibility resulting from the use of these dangerous weapons,
continued to press ahead in its fiercest fight: a federal bill immunizing the
industry from liability. In 2004, the
NRA had gathered its forces in the Senate and pushed them to bring a liability
bill to the floor. A gun-control group, Americans for Gun Safety, made the
decision that it was willing to stop fighting the bill, whose passage seemed
all but certain, if it could somehow force the NRA to accept renewal of the
Assault Weapons Ban and the closure of the gun-show loophole in the bargain. The compromise bill had a clear path to
victory. The gun-control activists believed they'd backed the NRA into a
corner. Their thinking, says Jim Kessler, who directed policy for AFGS, was
that the NRA would say, "OK, we gotta take this because who knows what
will happen in 2005. John Kerry could be president." Then something extraordinary happened: The
NRA blew up the deal, letting senators know that any votes for the bill would
be recorded as votes against the NRA. "You could see them on the Senate
floor looking at their BlackBerrys and changing their votes," says
Kessler. The bill died by a vote of 8 to 90.
This was becoming a pattern. Just as he'd done by upending
the White House settlement talks with the industry in the late 1990s, LaPierre
had once again cut the bottom out of a hard-fought political compromise to
impose meaningful gun restrictions. "There is not a middle ground with the
NRA," says Diaz. Indeed, LaPierre had laid this strategy in a 2002 speech
to his membership: "We must declare that there are no shades of
gray," he said. "You're with us or against us." Bush rolled to re-election, and the NRA continued
to roll up victories. The Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, reopening the
market for the high-capacity magazines favored by mass murderers. And in 2005,
the NRA finally secured clean passage of a law immunizing manufacturers,
importers, distributors and dealers from any civil liability. After President
Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that October,
LaPierre called it "the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in
20 years." Who did it benefit? LaPierre made no pretenses: "History
will show that this law helped save the American firearms industry."
The NRA, severely weakened just years earlier, seemed once
again an invincible force in Washington. And Democrats, tired of losing
elections on the issue, made gun control the new third rail of Washington
politics. In the 2006 election cycle, two longtime foes of the NRA, Rahm
Emanuel and Charles Schumer, were responsible for recruiting and funding attractive
Democratic candidates. And they decided to drop guns as an issue altogether.
"People didn't care about what your position was on guns," says a top
Democrat. The party would support you either way. They recruited pro-gun candidates who won the
kind of races Democrats usually get trounced in. Among the ranks of the 2006
class of gun-friendly Blue Dogs was one Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. The gun
lobby welcomed its new amigos with open arms. "I always bent over
backwards to help Democrats," says Feldman, the former lobbyist. "A
Democrat who was supportive of my issue was worth 10 Republicans." Though Barack Obama had campaigned on modest
gun-control proposals, he ducked any fights over the issue. "His view was
never that we shouldn't move on these things," political strategist David
Axelrod says. "His view was that such moves would be largely symbolic
because of the power of the gun lobby to stop them."
Bloomberg doesn't buy that excuse. "The first two years
of the Obama administration, the Democrats had the White House, the Senate and
Congress," says Bloomberg. "And they did nothing." In early
2009, after Attorney General Eric Holder casually mentioned that renewing the
Assault Weapons Ban was a priority, Rahm Emanuel, then the president's chief of
staff, sent a characteristically profane message to Holder on the gun issue:
"Shut the fuck up." In fact,
Obama moved to expand gun rights as though Bush were still in office. He signed
laws to allow guns in checked baggage on Amtrak trains and to allow conceal-carry
permit holders to pack heat in national parks. In 2009, the Brady Campaign gave
Obama a report card with seven F's. While
Jared Loughner's assassination attempt on Giffords was met with a national
presidential address and tearful pieties, the aftermath stopped short of
meaningful legislative or executive action. "In response to a horrific
series of shootings that has sown terror in our communities, victimized tens of
thousands of Americans and left one of its own bleeding and near death in a
Tucson parking lot, Congress has done something quite extraordinary,"
Giffords wrote in January. "Nothing at all."
Like every other element of today's modern conservative
machinery, the NRA works in the background to expand corporate power – while
pretending in public to advance the interests of the little guy. The NRA
continues to put forward its members as the face of the organization. But dues
from members bring in less than half of the association's yearly expenses,
which include spending heavily on a sophisticated telemarketing campaign to
sustain its membership. To stay afloat,
the NRA relies on tens of millions in grants and gifts – increasingly linked to
the gun industry. Such funds totaled $71 million in 2010 and have been
growing twice as fast as membership dues have. And the NRA, looking to bring in
even bigger bucks, is now fishing for donors with Koch-size wallets. On its
website, the NRA lists a donor tier for those who give $25 million or above,
which it calls the "Charlton Heston Society."
The Citizens United decision has fundamentally
transformed the way the NRA operates politically. The NRA can now tap into
unlimited donations from individuals and corporations to engage in direct
political advocacy – running TV advertising calling for the defeat of individual
candidates. The NRA gets to play like a Super PAC. But unlike groups that
sprang up to support Mitt Romney (Restore Our Future) or Barack Obama
(Priorities USA), the NRA does not have to disclose the names or contributions
of its donors. That's because the rifle
association is incorporated under the same provision of the tax code that
shelters Karl Rove's "dark money" operation, Crossroads GPS.
"The NRA is a 501(c)(4) organization," it advertises to potential
donors, "which enables it to be involved in political processes including
lobbying and political campaign activities." Such groups must be primarily
engaged in "social welfare" activities. While that's a source of
legal concern for groups like Rove's, the NRA has so many tentacles – from
shooting clubs to youth education programs to magazines – that it's perfectly
positioned to benefit from the dark-money boom.
The NRA's traditional, regulated PAC is as strong as ever. It spent
$16.6 million in national political races in 2012. But it was joined by a newly
empowered NRAILA, which kicked in an additional $7.4 million from undisclosed
sources, making the NRA the eighth-largest dark-money group in the
country. In a startling collusion among right-wing powerhouses, NRA-ILA's
efforts were actually funded by a $600,000 grant from Rove's GPS group.
The NRA is not simply working for the industry on the
national stage. In 1987, only 10 states had "right-to-carry" laws
permitting citizens to pack heat. By 2010, the NRA celebrated its efforts in
converting the 40th state. A former NRA lobbyist once crowed to The Wall
Street Journal: "The gun industry should send me a basket of fruit –
our efforts have created a new market."
Yet for many gun owners, carrying a gun in public has been a source of
anxiety. It's one thing to keep a weapon in the nightstand to guard against
intruders. It's quite another to take a gun out in public. That's where the
notorious "stand your ground" law comes in. The brainchild of former
NRA president Marion Hammer, stand-your-ground makes it legal for a person who
is attacked in public to use lethal force as a first resort. The first such
measure was passed in 2005 in Florida – championed by an ambitious state
legislator named Marco Rubio and signed by then-Gov. Jeb Bush.
At the time, LaPierre said Florida was just the beginning –
the "first step of a multistate strategy." To keep its efforts below
the radar, the National Rifle Association partnered with the American
Legislative Exchange Council to steer similar laws through other state
legislatures. Since 2005, the NRA, through ALEC, has taken stand-your-ground
nationwide, helping to pass laws in 24 other states. At least 10 of those laws
are all but identical to the language of the Florida legislation. Conceal-carry and stand-your-ground laws do
nothing to suppress crime, but they do boost gun sales. "This now expands
the scope of where people are going to be carrying guns," says Diaz. "And
you're more or less insulated from liability if you feel like you have to kill
somebody." In Florida, Trayvon Martin's home state, "justifiable
homicides" tripled between 2005 and 2011. A
new study out of Texas A&M found that by "lowering the expected
costs associated with using lethal force," these stand-your-ground laws
"induce more of it" – driving an eight percent increase in murders
and manslaughters.
These numbers are profoundly disturbing to most Americans.
But to LaPierre and his allies in the gun industry they add up to something
else: opportunity. "We live in the most dangerous of times," LaPierre
warned the gathered activists at the NRA's 2012 convention in St. Louis.
America has been infiltrated by terrorists and Mexican drug criminals, he said,
who "are lurking and plotting to murder us." LaPierre railed against
"the Obama crowd" for "conspiring with the world's dirty-handed,
thug governments" and telling "lies" about the "coming
realities" – catastrophic events that he insisted could "freeze our
transportation systems, black out our cities, shut down our distribution of
fuel and food" and bring an "unprecedented breakdown of social
order." LaPierre told his flock, "Americans are facing the reality
that they're on their own."
But like any good preacher, LaPierre did not simply paint a
lurid portrait of hell – he also laid out a path to salvation: "We are the
millions of Americans who have found faith in the Second Amendment," he
said. "People are anticipating dangerous times and are responding in the
only sensible, logical way possible – they're buying guns!" With a twinkle in his eye, LaPierre added
that "America's women are leading the way! . . . The more women who buy
and own and shoot guns, the safer and better off we'll all be!" Twenty tiny coffins have again put the NRA on
the defensive. In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, which Adam Lanza
perpetrated with his mom's arsenal, public support of new gun-control laws is
overwhelming. Today, 92 percent of the country support background checks for
gun buyers, and 63 percent support limiting the capacity of gun magazines.
"If there's a conflict for some members of Congress between their politics
and their conscience, they should ponder that 92 percent number," says
Axelrod.
There's also new leadership in the gun-control movement.
Bloomberg tells Rolling Stone that his mayors' group will be bringing
local pressure on national elected officials and orchestrating coordinated
visits by the nation's mayors to congressional and Senate offices, with
delegations of voting constituents in tow.
"These people want to get re-elected," says Bloomberg of
Congress. "If they think the public wants gun control, they'll do it. If
they think the NRA is more powerful than the public, they'll follow the NRA.
We've got to convince them that the NRA is not that powerful." To beat the NRA in Washington, however, the
gun-control crowd is going to need more than constituent visits. It's going to
need money. In the 2012 election cycle, the NRA spent more than $24 million in
both regulated and dark money. Compare that to just $3,000 in campaign spending
by the Brady Campaign. And such yawning disparities don't begin to account for
the NRA's advantage in organizing activists at the level of every congressional
district in the country. "If you think about politics as a tug of
war," says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation,
"when all the strength is on one side, it's not surprising where the rope
ends up."
Republicans who control the House have already declared that
gun control is off the table. Even newly elected Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp
of gun-loving North Dakota has called the president's push for new gun laws
"wrongheaded." Andrew Cuomo's
bleak declaration – "If we engage the enemy in Washington, we will
lose" – may hold as true today as it did in 2000. But Cuomo himself is
demonstrating that there's another path to victory that doesn't rely on a cowed
Congress. In January, Cuomo, now governor of New York, passed the nation's
strongest gun-control law, limiting magazine clips to seven rounds,
strengthening the state's ban on assault rifles and requiring mental-health
professionals to notify police about patients who threaten violence – before
they go postal. Cuomo is fulfilling the
prediction he made as a 42-year-old HUD director: "We're going to beat
them state by state, community by community, because we have the ultimate
weapon with us, the American people."
The NRA wins because Americans lose focus. Because our outrage fades
after each new heartbreak. Because by November 2014, most of us won't be
thinking about the victims of Newtown. Most of us won't be thinking about guns
at all – while millions of activists, riled by Wayne LaPierre and the NRA, will
be thinking of nothing else. If this time is going to be different, Americans
have to act different, give different, vote different. In his speech laying out
his gun-safety agenda in January, President Obama was absolutely right:
"This will not happen unless the American people demand it."
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