by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
Romney clearly would be entitled to take credit for saving lives through his sensible gun control policy. Mulling his presidential prospects, however, Romney apparently decided that politics and ideology trump public health and saving lives. He concluded that—contrary to his earlier assertion—he actually did need to “line up” with the NRA. He got a “sheep dip”14 by going hunting with Rob Keck, “an outdoor television host, renowned hunter and conservationist.”15 Keck endorsed Romney and boosted his credentials as a sportsman to news media at the NRA convention.16 Romney said in his NRA speech exactly what he needed to say to get right with Wayne.
This administration’s attack on freedom extends even to rights explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution. The right to bear arms is so plainly stated, so unambiguous that liberals have a hard time challenging it directly. Instead they’ve been employing every imaginable ruse and ploy to restrict it and to defeat it. . . . And if we’re going to safeguard our 2nd Amendment it’s time to elect a president who will defend the rights President Obama ignores or minimizes and I will protect the 2nd Amendment rights of the American people.17
But the NRA’s religion is about more than guns. At its core, it’s about culture—socioeconomics; race; ethnicity; the modern politics of an old doctrine, Manifest Destiny; and Anglo-Saxon singularity. Romney deliberately touched this broader and deeper theology. “We will not just select the president who will guide us,” he said of the coming 2012 election. “We will also choose between two distinct paths and destinies for the nation.”18 This language of “paths and destinies” is dogma. The NRA’s savage religion of conflict and the gun industry’s technique of marketing military firepower share a common cultural source, summed up by James William Gibson in his 1994 book Warrior Dreams.19 Gibson traced this source to the shock of American defeat in Vietnam, and the tumult of other societal change in its wake:
During the 1960s, the civil rights and ethnic pride movements won many victories in their challenges to racial oppression. Also, during the 1970s and 1980s, the United States experienced massive waves of immigration from Mexico, Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, and Taiwan. Whites, no longer secure in their power abroad, also lost their unquestionable dominance at home; for the first time, many began to feel that they too were just another hyphenated ethnic group, the Anglo-Americans.20
Three years later, Charlton Heston, first vice president of the NRA, evoked exactly this resentment before the right-wing Free Congress Foundation at its twentieth anniversary gala. In his speech, given December 7, 1997—“Pearl Harbor Day”—Heston spoke at length about those who were collectively the “victim of the cultural war.”21
Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant, or—even worse—Evangelical Christian, Midwest, or Southern, or—even worse—rural, apparently straight, or—even worse—admittedly heterosexual, gun-owning or—even worse—NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or—even worse—male working stiff, because not only don’t you count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress.22
Gibson’s articulation and Heston’s evocation raise a question: what could be done to prevent America from taking this new path? For some of those frightened or angered by this change, the answer lies in a call to arms. That call has become the explosive gospel of the American right wing, with which the NRA has closely allied itself.23 “When you’re in the NRA, the problem is never extreme moderation,” said Richard Feldman, a former NRA political operative.24 Constantly hinting at armed resistance to government, the NRA and the gun industry exploit the warrior fantasy that Gibson described in his book:
American men—lacking confidence in the government and the economy, troubled by the changing relations between the sexes, uncertain of their identity or their future—began to dream, to fantasize about the powers and features of another kind of man who would retake and reorder the world. And the hero of all these dreams was the paramilitary warrior. . . . Terrorists and drug dealers are blasted into oblivion. Illegal aliens inside the United States and the hordes of non-whites in the Third World are returned by force to their proper place. Women are revealed as dangerous temptresses who have to be mastered, avoided, or terminated.25
Few better examples of this warrior dream exist than that of American neo-Nazi Jason Todd (“J.T.”) Ready. A former Marine discharged for bad conduct, Ready led the “U.S. Border Guard,” an anti-immigrant paramilitary group. “This is a white, European homeland,” Ready said at a National Socialist Movement rally in October 2009. “That’s how it should be preserved if we want to keep it clean, safe, and pure.”26 Ready’s ragtag group patrolled the desert south of Phoenix, Arizona. They carried assault rifles and wore military-style battle dress and body armor. “We’re not going to sit around and wait for the government anymore,” Ready said in a July 2010 interview with the Associated Press. “This is what our Founding Fathers did.”27
On May 3, 2012, J.T Ready shot four people to death—his forty-seven-year-old girlfriend, her fifteen-month-old granddaughter, her twenty-three-year-old daughter, and a twenty-four-year-old fellow “Border Guard.” He then shot himself to death. Investigators, who found military ordnance in the home, called it a case of domestic violence.28 Violence it was. But to dismiss it as only domestic misses the significance of the new warriors like Ready, who get their gospel from the NRA and their tools from the gun industry. The same trumpets Ready heard were sounded in Heston’s speech to the Free Congress Foundation.
They [Caucasian “victims”] prefer the America they built—where you could pray without feeling naive, love without being kinky, sing without profanity, be white without feeling guilty, own a gun without shame, and raise your hand without apology. They are the critical masses who find themselves under siege and long for you to get some guts, stand on principle and lead them to victory in this cultural war.29
This sense of victimhood and the violent metaphor of a war between cultures echoed in Mitt Romney’s act of contrition before the NRA. “There was a time not so long ago when each of us could walk a little taller, stand a little straighter because we had a gift that no one else in the world shared. We were Americans,” Romney said, later adding, “Let’s take back our nation and defend our freedoms.”30
The NRA’s faithful need no one to fill in the blanks of from whom and how the country should be taken back. Speaking at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Wayne LaPierre told cheering attendees that “our Founding Fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.”31 Marion Hammer, the NRA’s Florida advocate, put it more bluntly. “There are a number of atrocities at the hands of our government, if people want to be honest and they don’t put on blinders,” she told the Washington Post in 2000.” If our government were to use mass destruction against our populace, the Army would start to desert. And that’s where your privately owned small arms would come into play. You don’t realize these guns preserve our freedom.”32 NRA board member Ted Nugent hinted at violence several times in remarks at the 2012 NRA convention. “Because it isn’t the enemy that ruined America,” he said. “It’s good people who bent over and let the enemy in. If the coyote’s in your living room, pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault. It’s your fault for not shooting him.”33
The Obama reelection apparatus jumped on Romney’s repentant speech. But it focused not so much on Romney’s bowing to the NRA as on Obama’s equal devotion to the Second Amendment. “The president’s record makes clear that he supports and respects the Second Amendment, and we’ll fight back against any attempts to mislead voters,” the campaign press secretary said.34
Any political mechanic in the mood to sneer at Mitt Romney’s pilgrimage ought first to review the history of other candidates. William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton’s record is a good example. Bill Clinton scrambled to win the NRA’s endorsement in 1982. He was trying to win back the Arkansas state house, which he lost in 1980 after serving one term as governor.35 When his opponent
published parts of Clinton’s answers to the NRA’s candidate questionnaire, Clinton claimed that his true position had been misstated in his answers to the questionnaire.36 He insisted that he was a strong opponent of gun control,37 and telephoned the NRA to give new answers, blaming the wrong answers on his staff.38 Clinton wrote a letter to the NRA in which he stated, “I am against any legislation or regulation on gun control that goes beyond the current law, and am in support of the NRA position on gun control.”39
Clinton tacked differently near the end of his tenure as governor of Arkansas, as he readied his run for the White House. He twice vetoed a “preemption” bill—an NRA national priority40—that would have barred cities and counties in Arkansas from passing local gun control laws.41 These 1989 and 1991 vetoes were 180 degrees opposite to Clinton’s earlier declaration to the NRA. Explaining his unacceptable answer to the original questionnaire, he told the NRA in 1982, “Based on lengthy conversations between my staff and yours, I was under the impression that NRA opposed preemption of local firearms laws by state acts. I am now advised that NRA favors state preemption and, therefore, my answer to [the preemption question] should read ‘yes.’ ”42
Clinton waffled as he pursued the presidency. In 1991, shortly after his second veto of the preemption bill, Governor Clinton said he supported an early version of the Brady Bill, which proposed both a waiting period and a background check before a person could buy a handgun. But he said he favored the system of on-the-spot instant checks that was demanded by the NRA in exchange for having any checks at all—a system that was by definition inconsistent with a waiting period. “I think the NRA is right about that,” Clinton said. “I think it’s a good thing to try to make the records as subject as possible to instantaneous check.”43
Candidate Clinton was also equivocal on semiautomatic assault weapons.44 When he vetoed the first state gun law preemption bill in 1989, he said assault weapons and guns in schools were potential local problems and said, “The state should not take away the capacity of local communities to act as they see fit, should such a danger occur.”45 In February 1991, however, he avoided aligning himself with an effort at the National Governors’ Association winter meeting to pass a resolution calling for a national ban on assault weapons. Clinton expressed doubt that a ban could be passed in Arkansas. “All states won’t do it, so its got to be the feds who do it,” the governor was quoted as saying. “If you’re asking me what I’ll do, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to wait. I’m just going to be open and see what happens.”46 In August 1991—during the week in which he formed his presidential campaign exploratory committee—Clinton “dodged questions about his stand on assault weapons,” according to the Washington Post.47 The governor said, “I’d have to see what the options are.”48 Scarcely three years later, however, President Clinton decided to take up the gun control movement’s cause and lobbied Congress aggressively in favor of a federal assault weapons ban that had become part of his administration’s comprehensive anticrime bill.49
The point here is neither to criticize Bill Clinton nor to expose his varied stands on gun control as political dirty laundry. It is rather to show by example that politicians are rarely natural gun control advocates, and they are not always reliable allies. Moreover, and perhaps most damaging, their default impulse is to blame the NRA for their failure to create a coherent, effective national program against gun violence. Unfortunately, too many advocates have bought into this excuse.
“The NRA is buying votes with blood money!” emcee Rosie O’Donnell shouted at the “Million Mom March” rally on Mother’s Day 2000. “We have had enough! Enough of the NRA and their tactics. Enough of the stranglehold the NRA has on Congress and in the Senate.”50
But there is a great and growing body of analytical evidence that “the myth of the fearsomely potent NRA . . . is just that—a myth.”51 For example, an exhaustive 2004 study—conducted with the cooperation of the NRA itself—found that the conventional wisdom (started by Bill Clinton) that the NRA cost Democrats control of the House of Representatives in 1994 is simply not true.52 “When the impact of organized interest groups on election outcomes is closely examined. . . the systematic evidence routinely fails to support claims like Clinton’s.”53 Other independent studies have found the same thing. A study published in 2012 declared, “Despite what the NRA has long claimed, it neither delivered Congress to the Republican party in 1994 nor delivered the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.”54
It also turns out upon objective examination that “while the NRA spends a good deal of money in total, that money is spread over so many races—well over 200 House races alone every election—that it has little more than symbolic effect. . . . [It] may be enough to keep the volunteers in donuts, but it won’t swing any races.”55
And the NRA’s vaunted endorsements and “grass roots” power? The NRA brags, talks tough, and threatens. But the electoral successes it claims are in fact those of the broader coalition to which it has attached itself. “The NRA’s influence . . . seems to interact with the party trend that is evident in any particular election year.”56 In other words, like the remora, or suckerfish, which attaches itself to a shark for scraps of food, the NRA simply gets the benefits of its association with a much larger right-wing coalition. Like the remora, it neither causes harm nor contributes significant value.57 The NRA’s bloviating might be of incidental benefit, but it doesn’t make or break elections. The NRA rides the trend. It declares victory in good elections and the coming apocalypse in bad ones. “The NRA has virtually no impact on congressional elections,” the latest study concludes. “The NRA endorsement, so coveted by so many politicians, is almost meaningless. Nor does the money the organization spends have any demonstrable impact on the outcome of races. In short, when it comes to elections, the NRA is a paper tiger.”58
If the NRA is a paper tiger, politicians in Washington are trembling pussycats. This political surrender—and the NRA’s exploitation of it to puff up its credibility—can be traced to three interwoven trends. The first is the influence of poll-driven, “triangulating” political operatives searching for a “third way” to evade taking hard stands on core principle. The second is the revisionist history of the political impact of gun control legislation, expounded by Bill Clinton and adopted as gospel by “moderate” politicians and the political mechanics they employ. The third is the rise of what media critic Tom Rosenstiel has described as “synthetic” journalism that is “shallowing out our understanding of American politics.”59
Scholars of political science describe one of the core dynamics of power in Washington as the “iron triangle”—special interests, the career bureaucracy, and Congress.60 There ought to be added now another geometric figure, the “golden triangle” of commercial public opinion pollsters, well-paid professional political consultants, and career politicians. Interacting with these artful technicians, ambitious political “candidates are using polls to select their voters and to fashion their policy choices,” with the overall effect of “distorting the process of democratic accountability and responsiveness.” In order to “avoid the risk of electoral punishment, they turn to polls to craft appealing campaign messages and to microtarget voters,” according to Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, professors of political science.61
Recent trends in the news business have made the media not only receptive to, but eager for, the golden triangle’s output of polls and artfully spun candidate and issue narratives. One of these influences has been the vastly expanded universe of the “information revolution.”
The explosion in outlets has not meant more reporters doing original shoe-leather reporting. Instead, more people are involved in taking material that is secondhand and repackaging it. This greater reliance on secondhand material inevitably has two consequences. First, it means that the reporting news organization is less likely to have independently verified the information. Second, the understanding of the reporting news organization is us
ually more superficial. They did not do the work themselves, discovering its nuances and limitations. Rather than conducting the work, usually the reporter or editor is paring down, summarizing, or rewriting a news agency account.62
Other factors include staff cuts and the demands of a twenty-four-hour news culture in which there is “more news time to fill than there is news to fill it,” so that “there is more appetite for the latest poll, the latest anything.” Finally, the reduced news staffs “tend to be less experienced” and thus have a “shallower grasp” of issues they report on.63 In this environment, “Values, political philosophy, life experience, authentic belief, and all the other motivations behind political action are devalued in the coverage because they are harder to report, harder to identify, harder to measure.”64
The politics of guns and gun control combine the worst of these influences. If “the best way to think about public opinion and its relationship to politics and policymaking is that the American public is typically short on facts, but often long on judgment,”65 gun control compounds the problem by orders of magnitude.
The inflated myth of the NRA’s invincibility began in the late summer of 1994, when the Clinton administration badly needed a win in Congress. The President’s health care proposal was stuck on a reef. Other plans, like welfare reform, were foundering. On top of all this, the White House was hit by a court-ordered change in the special counsel conducting a criminal investigation into the Whitewater affair, ensuring that it would drag on at least through the 1994 election.66 Democrats were “clinging to the passage of a crime bill as their only evidence of late that a Democratic majority in Congress can accomplish something of lasting significance,” observed the New York Times.67