The NRA is convening in Milwaukee today, with some 50,000 people expected to attend.
Milwaukee's alternative weekly, the Sheperd Express, has on its cover this week a story on the NRA's hard-right politics and the fact that many NRA members are tired of the group's coziness with the neocons and would just as soon the NRA return to its roots.
The author of the story, a handsome and brilliant guy named leftilicious, is neither an NRA member nor a gun control activist, just a reporter who leans left.
The gist of the story is that the NRA not only has lost its way in terms of serving the interests of hunters, sportspersons and responsible gun owners, but is actively working against their best interests.
More on the flip.
The NRA started in 1871 to promote marksmanship for militia soldiers. Since then it has become an important advocate for hunters and competitive shooters, but it has increasingly left them behind in an effort to advocate and all-or-nothing approach to protecting gun ownership.
The NRA is a political force that spent an estimated $20 million in the 2000 election season. It supports candidates who wish to protect the second amendment, which is appropriate enough. But those candidates also tend to support things like building roads in federally protected wilderness areas.
For example, the NRA has supported conservative legislators intent on opening up wilderness areas, probably the most pristine hunting lands we have, to mining and drilling and the building of roads.
In an attempt to justify the contradictory positions, NRA leaders have repeatedly asserted that building roads into natural, pristine habitat is actually good for hunters. "Our dues-paying members are hard-working people who are unable to take large amounts of time off to enjoy the time-honored tradition of hunting," says NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. He explains that modern-day hunters simply don't have time to hike; they need to drive right up to the tree stand. Arulanandam also repeats NRA dogma that increased access will be good for elderly, young and disabled hunters unable to trek through the wilderness.
This would seem to go against the wishes of NRA members who hunt within those areas and fear the continued loss of habitat, and many of those hunters aren't buying it. "They're concerned about guns, but I don't know where they're going to use those guns," says John See, a lifelong gun owner and hunter in northern Wisconsin.
The NRA's political wing represents a tiny portion of its overall membership and an even tinier portion of American gun owners. Its political agenda is set and steered by its 75-member board of directors, which is elected by only 3% of NRA members. Of the 50,000 expected in Milwaukee this weekend, only 100 (one hundred!) are expected to attend its public policy meetings.
That board of directors reads like a Who's Who of NeoCons: Grover Norquist, Oliver North, Larry Craig, Roy Innis, etc, etc.
One of the things your rank-and-file NRA member is sick of is the constant pleas they get for money.
"If you join the NRA, you're going to get a letter once or twice a month asking for money," says Bob Ricker, the assistant general counsel to the NRA in the early 1980s, and a major gun-industry lobbyist for most of the 1990s. "It's a letter that'll scare the hell out of you."
That same Bob Ricker now heads the American Hunters and Shooters Association, a newish alternative to the NRA that supports gun rights, safety, hunting, and common sense legislation. He disputes the NRA's constant rhetoric that if you don't give money to the NRA, Teddy Kennedy will kick down your door and take your guns away.
The NRA's hard-right political action dates to the late 1970s. It's no coincidence that it took its turn to the right at about the same time as the birth of the neocon movement, and it's no coincidence that it uses the same "chicken little" tactics as the religious right and other neocon constituency groups.
In addition to alienating a lot of members (currenly only one third of its members have been members for five years or more) the NRA's politics have led to rifts with other important groups. In the mid 1990s the NRA lost its position as the sole sponsor and governing body of the US Olympic shooting team, and in 2004 it got pushed out of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.
The NRA is now solely beholden to the Bush Administration and its NeoCon friends.