“You would get a far better understanding if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world,” the NRA’s executive vice president J. Warren Cassidy told Time magazine in 1990.1 “Like any religion, the NRA has its gods, commandments and hierarchy,” Josh Sugarmann wrote in his 1992 book about the NRA. “The faith is passed down by the leadership to the laity, and, like all good fundamentalists, both are unswayed by the complexities of modern life.”2
Once lost to the NRA, Mitt Romney was found in 2012. He came home to Wayne. “What a job Wayne LaPierre just did,” Romney said at the NRA’s annual convention, praising its chief executive officer and executive vice president. “What an extraordinary man. I owe him a great debt of gratitude.”3
Romney did not explain why he owed LaPierre his gratitude. It was no doubt because of Wayne’s power to absolve Romney of his sins. In 1994, when Romney was running against Senator Edward Kennedy, he supported the assault weapons ban pending in the 1994 crime bill. A “campaign source” told the Boston Herald that “there was a lot of soul-searching” before the decision to support the legislation.4 A few days later, the candidate himself made a stronger assertion. “There’s been no wavering [on the assault ban],” Romney said. “I studied it and made a decision.”5 Two months later, Romney said that he also supported the new Brady law, imposing background checks on gun purchasers. “I think it will have a positive effect,” Romney said.6 He publicly rejected help from the NRA, citing his support for the assault weapons ban and the Brady law. “That’s not going to make me the hero of the NRA,” he said. “I don’t line up with a lot of special interest groups.”7
Kennedy beat Romney, but the latter was later elected governor of Massachusetts, serving from 2003 to 2007. As governor, Romney continued to advance a legacy of strong gun regulation that, in 2009, rewarded the people of Massachusetts with the lowest per capita gun death rate in the nation. In 2000, the state’s attorney general had begun enforcing what have been described as “the strictest and most comprehensive handgun safety laws in the nation, banning all gun makers and dealers doing business in the state from selling handguns that do not have tamper-proof serial numbers, trigger locks and safety devices enabling a user to know whether the gun is loaded.”8 In 2003, Governor Romney raised gun license fees from $25 to $100.9 In 2004, he signed the state’s revised assault weapon ban, amended to remain in effect after the demise of the sunsetting federal law.10 “I believe the people should have the right to bear arms, but I don’t believe that we have to have assault weapons as part of our personal arsenal,” Romney said on Fox News.11
The strong gun controls that Romney supported and expanded have worked to save lives in Massachusetts. An April 2012 analysis by the Violence Policy Center of 2009 national data (the most recent then available) demonstrated that states like Massachusetts with low gun ownership rates and strong gun laws also have the lowest rates of gun death.12 Household gun ownership in Massachusetts stood at 12.8 percent, and its gun death rate was 3.14 per 100,000—the lowest in the nation. By comparison, household gun ownership was at 45.6 percent in Louisiana, which had the highest gun death rate in the nation at 18.03 per 100,000.13
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 usually 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
The omnibus crime bill on which Democrats now hung their hopes was a wallowing $30 billion tub. “With the bulk of a Tolstoy novel, this 960-page monster includes something for everyone,” the National Journal reported.68 “The law includes a sprawling array of programs, many of them untested, that taken together have little overall coherence,” reported the New York Times. “It reflects the ideological divisions that had stymied Congressional efforts to enact a crime bill for years as well as the pet projects of legislators whose votes were needed to pass it at last.”69 On the eve of the final vote in the House of Representatives, the bill’s cargo included the assault weapons ban, a revived federal death penalty, and grants to help local governments hire a hundred thousand police officers. It was also packed with federal funds for crime prevention programs.
The original youth-programs amendment to the crime bill, introduced by Senator Chris Dodd, a Democrat, called for $1 billion of funding for one program.70 By the time the Senate passed its version of the bill, the package had grown to $3.8 billion and a dozen programs. The House version ballooned up to $6.6 billion and even more programs. The funding topped out at $7 billion and twenty-eight programs after the House and Senate reconciled their bills in conference.71 These programs came to be lumped under the phrase “midnight basketball,” an image charged with social and racial subtext.
Passage of the reconciled conference crime bill was predicted to be “an easy win for Clinton and a certain campaign trophy for Democrats.”72 But on August 11, 1994, the conference report suffered a surprise in the House. Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats voted down a procedural rule that would have brought the bill to the House floor for a final vote.73 Such “special rules,” issued by the House Rules Committee, specify the length of debate on substantive bills and detail other procedural matters.74 When such a rule is defeated, consideration of the underlying bill halts until a revised or new rule is approved.75
“Democrats were so stunned at their loss that they could hardly explain their gross miscalculation,” reported the New York Times.76 President Clinton was described as “very nearly sputtering with shock and anger.”77
What had gone wrong?
According to contemporary post mortems, the bloated prevention programs, which had grown from $ 1 billion to $7 billion, were the fulcrum that gave the bill’s opponents—who had a wide variety of motives, including opposition from the left to a federal death penalty provision—the leverage to bring it to a halt. Certainly, the NRA was doing all it could to rip the assault weapons ban out of the bill. But the ban had so much public support that President Clinton insisted that it stay in the crime bill during the next two weeks of frantic negotiation to resuscitate it.78
The Washington Post reported that the bill’s opponents “have turned the debate over the final version of the crime bill into a debate on the merits of the prevention programs, which they denounce as ‘social welfare’ and ‘pork.’ “79 The New York Times saw the same dynamic. “The bill was much ridiculed for spending money on dance programs, arts and crafts, midnight basketball leagues and programs to promote self-esteem,” it reported.80 A lengthy analysis in the New Yorker traced the roots of the rout to radio rants by the right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh, who “had been hammering away at the crime bill—not as much on its anti-gun provisions as on the social programs it contained.”81
Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts “plainly struck a chord and excited an antipathy toward the crime bill.”82 As a result, casting a vote against the bill lost the sting of its being seen as soft on crime by conservative voters. House minority whip Newt Gingrich asked conservative polling consultant Frank Luntz for a read on public opinion. Luntz’s poll confirmed the wisdom of attacking the prevention programs. Those polled, he wrote, “are far more concerned that convicted criminals remain behind bars than teenagers in inner cities learn to ball-room dance and slam dunk from the foul line by the pale moonlight.” Luntz advised Republican members, “If you want to oppose this legislation, you should.”83
Two weeks later, Democrats got their crime bill, slightly pared down. The bill included the assault weapons ban.84 The president signed the bill into law on September 13, 1994.85 Republicans, however, were conspicuous by their absence from the signing ceremony86 Newt Gingrich and his party’s strategists had gained a valuable insight into the public mood.
On September 27, he and more than three hundred Republican lawmakers and candidates stood on the steps of the Capitol and announced their commitment to a ten-point Contract with America.87 They said they would run a campaign focused on its promises, and would implement the contract’s laundry list if they regained the majority in Congress. Frank Luntz had “market tested the message like a breakfast cereal.”88 The Republican “contract” promised a tougher “anti-crime package,” the “Taking Back Our Streets Act.”89 But significantly, the legislation did not propose repeal of the assault weapons ban or the Brady law.90
The NRA was reported to have spent about $4 million in the 1994 midterm campaign, including a battery of television ads in which Charlton Heston attacked specific Democrats who had voted for the Brady and assault weapons bills.91 The NRA’s funds went “overwhelmingly to support Republican congressional candidates,”92 evidencing its embryonic “culture war” alliance with the right wing.93
Democrats woke up to disaster the morning of Wednesday, November 9, 1994. Riding “a tidal wave of voter discontent,” Republicans had taken control of the Congress, winning their first majority in the Senate since 1986, and their first in the House since 1954.94 For the first time since Abraham Lincoln was president, a sitting Speaker of the House, Thomas S. Foley, was rejected by voters in his own district.95 But virtually no one—including President Clinton—blamed the sweeping Democratic loss on the assault-weapons ban or even gun control in general. Clinton accepted some of the blame, saying his agenda of change had not moved fast enough. But “he drew the line on any turning back against gun control and the banning of assault weapons, two pieces of legislation he was able to get through Congress this year.”96
The New York Times opined that morning that it was “easy to see why the Democrats got whacked.”97 Adding to “the sour national attitude toward politics generally and the rebellion against incumbents in particular,” the Times wrote, “failure of governance must be laid at the feet of the retiring Senate majority leader, George Mitchell; the embattled Speaker, Thomas Foley, and a leadership team that placed loyalty to them above cooperation with the White House or public demands for Congressional and campaign finance reform.”98 The Boston Globe reported that “throughout the nation, voters complained about a bickering Congress, bloated government and what one described as ‘a cream puff president who had made many hopeful promises but had produced little.”99
As for Speaker Foley, opinion in his home state of Washington noted the NRA’s turn against him but cited a laundry list of miscues and reasons for voter anger that eclipsed the gun issue. “The NRA was not the only friend turned foe,” wrote one local newspaper columnist. “Foley’s humiliating defeat came from a combination of factors,” including, among others, “the hubris of an insulated, overconfident incumbent presiding over a hated, ‘Imperial Congress,’” and “a cavalier campaign effort in a year of a heavily organized anti-government and Christian Coalition turnout.”100 Foley’s pollster, Celinda Lake, summed up the election. “I think the voters are really mad,” said Lake. “And because we’re in charge, they’re really mad at us. They said they wanted a change [in 1992], and they don’t think they got it.”101
If the Republicans thought that the 1994 election was won by the NRA, they showed little evidence of it. They planned instead “to reopen this year’s angry debate over federal funding for crime-prevention measures in hopes of getting rid of midnight basketball and other programs aimed at crime prevention.”102 Not only was repeal of the ban not in the legislation proposed in the Contract with America, but even after their convincing win, the GOP leadership squashed proposals to repeal the law. The NRA soon was reported to be angry because “the Republican strategy is to steer clear of the assault-weapons ban in the first part of the session and pass measures showcasing the GOP’s resolve to change the way Congress does business.”103 By July 1995—following the bombing by Timothy McVeigh of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—the subject of repealing the ban was completely off the Senate calendar.104 In October the conservative Weekly Standard reported that “some conservatives are getting tired of the National Rifle Association.”105
But in January 1995, President Clinton sat down with reporters and editors of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. During a long interview, Clinton planted the seed of a narrative that has grown into conventional political wisdom purporting to explain the humiliating 1994 defeat. The deletion of a single sentence in subsequent media reporting completely distorted what Clinton said, not to mention savaging the truth.
According to the Plain Dealer transcript, this is what Clinton said, the crucial sentence italicized for emphasis by this writer:
The fights that I fought, bloody though they were, cost a lot. The fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seat in Congress. The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House. I can’t believe nobody has written that story, but it is—partly because our guys didn’t know how to fight them—the NRA. If they had all done what Bob Kerrey did, almost all of them would have survived.106
But this is how the Plain Dealer reported the conversation in its news report the next day (the transcript ran inside the paper):
President Clinton yesterday said the historic Republican takeover of the House was made possible because the National Rifle Association targeted Democrats who supported his crime bill.
“The fights I fought. . . cost a lot—the fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress,” the president said in an interview with Plain Dealer reporters and editors. “The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.”107
Cutting out the last sentence of the President’s quote clearly transformed the NRA from an entity that could have been beaten “if they had all done what Bob Kerrey did” into an invincible juggernaut, the single reason “the Republicans control the House.” Tanya Metaksa, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, was delighted to accept the credit. “For once the president and I agree,” she was quoted by the Plain Dealer in its story with Clinton’s truncated quote.108
Reporters and editors across the nation commenced “paring down, summarizing, or rewriting.”109 The president’s salient reference to Kerrey’s tough stance immediately disappeared down the media memory hole. Eventually the myth won the imprimatur of the New York Times in an article following the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Reciting almost verbatim the Plain Dealer version, the paper reported as fact, “after he forced a ban on assault weapons through Congress, the Democrats lost control of the House and Mr. Clinton ascribed the loss to the gun lobby’s campaign against those Democrats who had supported the ban.”110
But the Plain Dealer itself had questioned Clinton’s blame-the-NRA version of the loss almost as soon as it was uttered. The paper cited political analysts who scoffed at the idea. “Just because the president says it doesn’t make it so” the paper reported. “And plenty of political observers around the country say Clinton’s explanation is at best a gross overstatement. At worst, it is a convenient self-delusion.” One of those who disagreed with Clinton was Stuart Rothenberg, an independent political analyst.111 “Anyone with a ‘D’ behind their name had a big problem in November, whether the issue was guns, abortion or NAFTA,” he said. “All the elements of the Republican coalition worked together to crank out the Republican vote, while the Democratic interest groups, whether pro-choice, pro-gun control or women’s groups, did a poor job cranking out the Democratic vote.”112 Roger Stone—a self-described “GOP hitman”113—agreed. “The last election was not about gun control, but a repudiation of Bill and Hillary and their policies,” Stone told the newspaper. “To scapegoat the NRA is self-delusional. But I guess you can’t expect him to say, ‘Well, they are repudiating me and my wife.’ ”114
So, what was it that Bob Kerrey did in 1994 that others did not? The Nebraska senator was one of those specially targeted by Charlton Heston’s NRA television broadside. But rather than running away from the NRA, Kerrey ran straight at it:
Kerrey grabbed his shotgun and headed out to a target range to film an aggressive response ad. After plucking a clay pigeon from the sky with a shotgun blast, Kerrey turns to the camera and says that he supports the right to bear arms and that hunters are entitled to a good weapon. But then Kerrey hands off his shotgun, picks up an AK-47 and recalls his service as a Navy Seal commando during the Vietnam War, when he lost his right leg below the knee.
“Twenty-five years ago, in the war in Vietnam, people hunted me,” Kerrey says. “They needed a good weapon, like this AK-47. But you don’t need one of these to hunt birds.”115
More recent in-depth analysis has confirmed the contemporary understanding that the election was about something much broader than guns.
The best way to understand 1994 is in terms of partisanship, not in terms of the specifics of the gun issue, or any other one issue. To the extent a vote in favor of the crime bill made a difference to a Democratic incumbent’s election prospects, it was as one of a group of indicators—on issues like health care, gays in the military, and taxes—of whether the candidate was with or against his party in a year when that party did poorly in Republican areas. All these factors combined to create a wave election in which issues could not be separated from party. And if there was any single issue that did the most damage to Democrats that year, it was more likely the failed attempt at health care reform, according to post-election polling by Stanley Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster at the time.116
Bill Clinton certainly did not believe that the NRA was omnipotent or that the assault weapons ban was a “third rail” during his successful 1996 reelection campaign. In July 1995, his campaign rolled out television ads touting his passage of the crime bill, including specifically the assault weapons ban and a measure to fund expanding local police forces. “The President is determined not to let the N.R.A. and their supporters on the Hill roll back the assault weapons ban, or his commitment to 100,000 cops,” a White House official told the New York Times. Deputy White House press secretary Ginny Terzano said the assault-weapons ban was one of the president’s “major achievements” and “he wanted his important message taken directly to the American people, that we must not roll back the progress.”117
The advertisements were the work of prominent members of Clinton’s golden triangle—consultants Bob Squier and Dick Morris.118 Among other things, Morris became noted during Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign for his “poll-driven, pragmatista notion of ‘triangulation,’ a nautically inspired gambit, meaning that to get from point A to point B, Clinton may have to tack first to point C. Ideological consistency can be cast overboard.”119
Others thought that the triangulation strategy did not go far enough. One of them was Al From, the president of the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), who urged Clinton to break with liberals and their “old orthodoxies and old arrangements.”120 The DLC wanted—through such policies as embracing the death penalty and welfare reform—to “‘inoculate’ Democrats against charges that they ignored middle-class values.” At about the time of Clinton’s reelection campaign, From and others began developing a strategy they called the third way, supposedly divining new policy positions. “Triangulation is fine, but not enough,” From told the New Republic in 1996. “It goes halfway. . . . I believe we can develop an ideology for the dominant party.”121
From’s “third way” would eventually uncoil in the form of the Third Way think tank in Washington. Along the way, the idea would throw gun control under the bus in the wake of Al Gore’s 2000 defeat. Democratic political mechanics fixated on the excuse that gun control was the party’s problem. “A lot of people—[former DNC Chairman Terry] McAuliffe, Daschle, [former House Minority Leader Dick] Gephardt—were going around saying that guns had been the key. . . . There was a lot of talk about how Democrats should avoid the issue entirely,” Matt Bennett, vice president for public affairs at Third Way, explained in 2007.122
But blaming defeat on guns was as uninformed and self-serving in 2000 as it was in 1994. “For the NRA to argue that this single issue swung these states into the Bush column is revisionist history at its worst,” pollster Celinda Lake wrote in 2003.123 A more recent analysis explained the popular error in detail:
When one looks for actual evidence that the gun issue cost Gore more votes than it gained him, one comes up empty. Few scholars have performed a quantitative analysis of the role of guns in the vote of 2000, though one study examining a range of policy issues determined that the gun issue gave Gore a small advantage on election day. The argument from those who believe that the gun issue was decisive and worked against Gore usually amounts to little more than the fact that Gore lost some states where there are many pro-gun voters. This argument presumes that there were no areas in which Gore’s position on guns helped him win a state he might otherwise have lost. But Gore won swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa largely on his strength among urban and suburban voters, who are more likely to support restrictions on guns.
If there is one state the proponents of the theory that guns delivered the White House to George Bush inevitably point to, it is Gore’s home state of Tennessee. After all, if Gore lost his home state, it must have had something to do with his position on guns. . . . Yet there are other more compelling explanations for the outcome in Tennessee, the simplest of which is a partisan one. Tennessee was in the midst of a larger trend in the South, where the state was growing more and more Republican over time. . . . Gore’s problem in Tennessee wasn’t the gun issue, it was something much simpler: he needed more Democrats in a state that was trending Republican.124
Nevertheless, the easy “conventional wisdom” about guns being the reason for Gore’s loss in 2000 grew, inspiring the political commentator Jules Witcover to observe that “the question now is whether this perception will make lambs out of previous anti-gun Democratic lions in Congress.”125 Waiting to shepherd any Democratic gun control lambs was Matt Bennett (quoted above on the panic after the 2000 election). He and a handful of other recycled Clinton-Gore and New York Democratic political operatives announced a new organization, Americans for Gun Safety (AGS), in October 2000. AGS was underwritten with an enormous infusion of cash from the late billionaire Andrew McKelvey, then CEO of the employment search firm TMP Worldwide. Bennett worked in the Clinton White House, first for Vice President Al Gore, then as Clinton’s liaison to state governors.126 The AGS president, Jonathan Cowan, had been chief of staff to Andrew Cuomo during the latter’s tenure as Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development.127 In 2001 the group was joined by Jim Kessler, a legislative aide to Senator Charles Schumer. Kessler became AGS’s director of policy and research.128
McKelvey was reported to see “his group falling somewhere in between avid antigun supporters and the National Rifle Association.”129 AGS offered a bounty of $60,000 a year to local gun violence prevention groups who signed up to become instant AGS chapters. Twenty-eight were reported to have taken the bait.130 The president of one such local group enthused, “Together, we think we’re going to dramatically change the debate on gun safety in this country”131
AGS certainly did want to change the debate. There would be precious little fact-driven policy, but a surfeit of the kind of political “inoculations” favored by the “centrist” DLC. The golden triangle had come to gun control, carrying a briefcase full of polls. The locals soon found out that they had been sold a pig in a poke. “Within a couple of days, as the state groups began to receive talking points and sample press releases from AGS, they found out what Cowan meant by ‘rights’: Americans were guaranteed the right to own guns, a position long promulgated by the NRA and opposed by nearly every gun-violence organization in the country.”132
Citing polling data, AGS’s political technicians bulled ahead and began popping up in the news media, proclaiming that there was a “third way” to deal with gun violence “if gun-control proponents and gun-safety advocates would stop fighting long enough to look for common ground.”133 Given the NRA’s adamant stance, it may be impossible to overstate the naïveté, or perhaps the cynicism, of this illusory suggestion. “We must declare there are no shades of gray in American freedom,” Wayne LaPierre thundered at the NRA’s 2002 annual convention. “It’s black or white, all or nothing. You’re with us or against us.”134
The recipe for the third way’s shade of gray—as attributed to AGS’s Cowan and Kessler—was telling. The two urged gun control groups to:
(1) Adopt a new message: respect for gun rights coupled with an insistence on gun responsibility; (2) Back up their rhetoric by “toughening enforcement of current gun laws and passing new laws that crack down on gun crime”; (3) Distance themselves from “traditional strategies that demonize gun owners, call for gun control instead of gun safety, urge a ban on guns, and imply that legal gun ownership is the root cause of gun crime.”135
Inventing their own revisionist history of the politics of guns, and ignoring or misunderstanding the effect of a greedy industry with a powerful lobby that batters fact-based public policy and shuts down information, the political operatives of AGS defined away the problem of gun violence. The problem was not a matter of torn flesh, spurting blood, shattered bodies, and unconscionable marketing of military weapons by a ruthless industry. To speak of those facts was “demonizing.” The problem, in the view of AGS, was nothing but a schoolyard argument between unruly advocates. And that was easy enough to fix. Substance out. Triangulation in. Pabulum like “toughening enforcement” is a page right out of the gun industry and NRA playbook. It ignores the torrent of gun violence by “law-abiding” citizens. So is the blinkered pretense that “legal gun ownership”—in the form of proliferation and militarization—is not a “root cause” of anything more sinister than good times at the SHOT Show. Ditto the mantra of “gun safety” as opposed to “gun control.”
None of this reality mattered to third-way acolytes, who failed to get passed any of the federal legislation that they bulldozed into the forefront over the objections of more experienced and knowledgeable gun control groups. What mattered was giving all too many politicians a fig leaf, a plausible way to explain their political indifference to the fate of hundreds of thousands of victims. Within a few years, the vaunted AGS “grass roots” coalition had fallen apart, amid angry recriminations between the founders and their instant chapters. “The activists felt that they had been blindsided and that AGS in general, and Cowan in particular, were being ‘a little dictatorial,’ as one participant put it,” in one contemporary account.136
In spite of their dismal failures, the AGS political surgeons declared victory and transplanted their “gun safety” organization as an appendage of a new organization, Third Way. They moved on to other issues. Nominally a think tank but primarily a political workshop, Third Way bills itself as a place that “answers America’s challenges with modern ideas aimed at the center.”137 It was blessed at its creation by the third-way pioneer Al From.138 Matt Bennett told Roll Call newspaper in 2005 that he, Cowan, and Kessler had discovered the model for Third Way at AGS while working on gun safety, “a real middle on an issue that had been polarized. We felt like we had a model that worked.”139
If the third-way model has “worked,” it has not diminished the torrent of gun violence in America, caused any uncommonly courageous moderate politicians to shake off the NRA’s paralyzing stranglehold, nor resulted in passage of a single important federal law. By obsessing on guns and microtargeting voters in search of a mythical middle ground, the hucksters of the third way have ignored the true significance of the NRA and the coalition to which it is attached—cultural war. As the author and commentator Paul Waldman observed in a fact-based 2012 analysis, gun control has had virtually no effect on the electoral cycles of this war: “The 1994 election was a Republican wave, and as 2006 and 2010 demonstrated, wave elections can happen in a variety of contexts. In 2010, for instance, Republicans won even more seats than they did in 1994—without any significant debate about guns. In fact, the only new laws about guns that took effect during Obama’s first two years expanded gun rights, allowing people to bring guns to national parks and on Amtrak.”140
The myth that the NRA is all-powerful and gun control is a “third rail” works in a perverse way—it benefits equally the NRA and the minions of the golden triangle who affect to combat it. The NRA’s executives continue to raise huge amounts of cash, pay themselves exceedingly well, and stroll the halls of Congress as if they were ten feet tall. The triangle’s pollsters and consultants continue to enjoy lucrative contracts that pay them well. The politicians get to express their sympathies without being expected to take effective action. The losers in this comfortable arrangement are the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of gun violence who have died or been mutilated with painful injury since the technicians of the golden triangle decided to abandon them.
Thus, even as the political establishment has sidetracked any effective gun control legislation, the gun industry, the NRA, and other elements of the gun lobby continue to barrel through Congress like a midnight express. A vignette from the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s website casts light on the gun industry’s influence machine. The NSSF sponsors an annual “Fly-In,” during which manufacturers and others in the industry descend on Washington to lobby members of Congress. The industry group posted a video on its website encouraging its members to come to its 2012 event and explaining lobbying procedures. “And don’t be offended if the person you meet with is a young staffer,” Max Sandlin, a retired Texas congressman and NSSF consultant, says in the video. He explains that because the Congress members themselves are quite busy, their staffs often take the actual lobbying meetings. “After the meeting, they are the ones who will carry our water.”141
These anonymous staff water carriers and their principals continue to do a good, if not widely reported, job for the gun industry. In its report on the 2012 Fly-In, NSSF boasted that “the week began on a high note with the House passage of the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act (H.R. 4089), a bill that contains the industry’s top priority—the Hunting, Fishing and Recreational Shooting Protection Act (H.R. 1558). Overall, the Fly-In was a great success, and NSSF looks forward to building upon its momentum through the rest of the year.”142 Not everyone in America agreed that passage of the bill was a “high note.” Professor Char Miller, an expert in environmental administration,143 denounced the legislation as “cynically titled,” and reported that “it has kicked up a storm of protest with the broad environmental movement, who see it as an ill-disguised assault on the wildlands and the Wilderness Act that. . . early generations fought so hard to protect and secure.”144 Among other things, the bill would boost shooting “sports” into a commanding position in decisions about public land use and prevent regulation of lead shot on public lands, “even though scientists have demonstrated time and again the deleterious impact it has on public health.”145
For its part, the NRA claims to represent gun owners and frames its ambitious congressional lobbying efforts in terms of defending “gun rights.” In fact, the NRA’s legislative program is largely driven by the gun industry’s business interests. Less regulation, more profits. The Violence Policy Center examined and exposed the financial relationships between the NRA and the gun industry in its 2011 study Blood Money: How the Gun Industry Bankrolls the NRA.146 The report detailed tens of millions of dollars in gun industry support for the NRA and summarized the intimate ties thus:
The depth and breadth of gun industry financial support for the National Rifle Association makes clear that the self-proclaimed “America’s oldest civil rights organization” is, in fact, the gun industry’s most high-profile trade association. While the NRA works to portray itself as protecting the “freedoms” of its membership, it is, in fact protecting the gun industry’s freedom to manufacture virtually any gun or accessory it sees fit to produce. As NRA Board Member Pete Brownell, owner of Brownells, “the world’s largest supplier of firearms accessories and gunsmithing tools,” wrote on his website in his successful campaign to join the NRA’s board, “Having [NRA] directors who intimately understand and work in leadership positions within the firearms industry ensures the NRA’s focus is honed on the overall mission of the organization. These individuals bring a keen sense of the industry and of the bigger fight to the table.”
This is a 180-degree turn from the NRA described in Americans and Their Guns, an official history of the organization published in 1967 which stated that the NRA “is not affiliated with any manufacturer of arms or ammunition or with any jobber or dealer who sells firearms and ammunition.” And today, while in one section of its website the NRA actively courts the financial support of its gun industry “corporate partners,” in another—where its industry financial links would heighten valid suspicions, such as in relation to the objectivity and effectiveness of its Eddie Eagle “gun safety” program—the NRA falsely claims that it “is not affiliated with any firearm or ammunition manufacturers or with any businesses that deal in guns and ammunition.”147
The saga of Larry Potterfield and the company he founded, Mid-wayUSA, is an apt parable. The company claims on its website to stock “just about everything for shooting, reloading, gunsmithing and hunting.” Potterfield created the “NRA Round-Up” program, which allows buyers to “round up” their purchase to the nearest dollar, with the difference going to the NRA. He has good reason to be grateful to the NRA. Potterfield credits part of his company’s success to NRA-backed federal legislation, the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, commonly known as McClure-Volkmer (but called Volkmer-McClure by Potterfield). “By 1987, we were doing about $5 million in business, selling mostly to dealers. The product lines were bulk components and cartridge boxes. The Volkmer-McClure law was enacted in October 1987, which removed the restriction of shipping brass and bullets to FFL holders only. Midway immediately began selling directly to consumers, in addition to selling to dealers.” In January 2011 the company announced that for “a second consecutive year” it was serving as “the Official Sponsor of the NRA Annual Meeting and Exhibits” being held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in spring 2011.148
There is no “third way” for the gun industry juggernaut.
The gun lobby’s ambitions for the future include enactment of a national law to allow the carrying of concealed handguns anywhere in America (overriding state and local controls); repeal or effective disembowelment of existing federal law severely limiting the ownership of fully automatic machine guns, silencers, and other weapons of war by private persons; and severe dilution of restraints on the export of military-style weapons abroad. The only way for the gun industry is the way of self-enrichment. Like a medieval battering ram, the gun industry continues to hammer at laws and government programs that restrict the sale and possession of guns of any kind in any way.
Brick by brick the walls are coming down. The self-proclaimed best political minds in America have failed to stop or even slow down the gun violence, death, and injury that inevitably stem from the industry’s unrestrained marketing binges. If government leaders cower before the altar of the NRA’s “great religion,” what might work against these evils? That question is addressed in the next chapter.