Attitudes have changed about guns in America, and so has the role of the National Rifle Association. Formed as a club for hunters, the group has shifted its focus to the political arena. Despite victories in the 1994 election, the NRA is in trouble. Membership is off, fiscal problems loom and the group struggles to counter associations with militia militants.
After one of the most brutal battles of the Civil War, the U.S. Army sent teams of soldiers to the Gettysburg battlefield to collect weapons of fallen Union soldiers. Thousands of rifles had been improperly loaded or so poorly maintained they could not be fired.
This left a deep impression on Col. William C. Church and Gen. George Wingate, Army officers from New York who decided in 1871 to form a club to improve marksmanship and gun skills.
They called it the National Rifle Association.
For most of its 124 years, it has performed that task magnificently, walking in lockstep with government, basking in the adulation of presidents and generals and governors and congressmen who embraced the belief that knowing how to shoot straight was important.
The NRA changed American military history, trained generations of fathers and sons to hunt and shoot safely and won very high marks for citizenship and patriotism.
But that was a different world.
Attitudes have changed about where guns fit in American culture, and so has the role of the NRA. The association now is among the strongest critics of government, labeling federal agents as jack-booted thugs and offering confrontation where once it sought compromise.
The organization claims non-partisanship, but has cast its fate with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republicans, as evidenced by a letter Gingrich wrote to the NRA’s chief lobbyist shortly after he took office pledging that no gun control measures would move in the House while he was in charge.
The NRA inserted itself so completely into the just-concluded House hearings on the Waco debacle, the 1993 incident in which some 80 members of the Branch Davidian cult died after an FBI assault, that critics say it tainted the entire procedure.
The organization has leaped into the deep end of the political pool.
Its budgets for fundraising, membership drives, lobbying and political contributions-nearly $35 million in political spending last year-get much more attention, and its critics say more priority, than its shooting and safety programs.
Always plagued by internal political squabbles, the NRA has become the target of an aggressive group of dissident insiders who challenge everything the organization does, from the way it spends money to the compensation of its officials to its politicial activism.
The NRA’s $104 million bank account has dwindled the past five years as it shifted millions of dollars into political campaigns, spent a fortune trying to enlist new members and built an expensive new headquarters.
The group also finds itself aligned with the very kinds of people-far-right radicals in the gun movement and militiamen noted for their paranoia about government-whom it has formally banned from membership.
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Adding to its troubles, the association is on bad paper with Dun & Bradstreet Corp., a major financial risk assessment company, because of its budget problems. It also has been forced to open its doors to an intensive audit by the Internal Revenue Service, which may affect its not-for-profit tax status.
The reputation of the NRA and the public’s attitude toward guns have always marched hand in hand. It is no surprise that as crime and violence have tarnished the mythology of the gun, the NRA, too, has been tarnished.
Guns are viewed as a threat to the culture the NRA has professed to defend for so many years. Even though the vast number of guns never will be used in crimes-half the households in the U.S. have a firearm, according to the best federal estimates-gun ownership has taken on a stigma, especially in urban areas.
The issue has become so wildly politicized it sometimes seems supporters and opponents are headed for Gettysburg again. In the process, the NRA has mutated into one of the most politically active lobbying organizations in the U.S.
Last year, it gave $5.4 million to anti-gun congressional candidates-more than any other special interest group-and spent $28.3 million on lobbying.
“The main reason we have become so political is the effort being put forth by the establishment and the government . . . increasingly and progressively trying to take more guns from the people,” said Neil Knox, gun writer, lobbyist and as the NRA’s second vice president, a significant power behind the scenes.
“Up to now we have had an escalating effort against gun owners and gun ownership. We in our radicalism are responding to radicalism. We are shooters and gun owners and hunters, and we got into politics of necessity.”
With its 3.2 million members, the NRA commands impressive political clout on election day because it can make the 3- to 5-point difference that decides races in many congressional districts.
The association even wages political war upon sitting presidents, a practice that would have stunned its long line of leaders stretching back to Ulysses S. Grant, who assumed the NRA presidency in retirement.
But behind that mask of “in-your-face” political action, the NRA is in trouble. Despite its high profile, membership is declining.
Over the past several years, the NRA spent about $60 million more than it took in, depleting its ready assets from $102 million to $40 million. Nearly every penny of that is pledged to First Union Bank of Virginia against a mortgage on the NRA’s new headquarters in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Va.
NRA board dissidents recently circulated a financial assessment from Dun & Bradstreet that gives the NRA the agency’s lowest financial rating, lumping it with companies that have extreme financial difficulties.
“The financial situation has gotten to be rather desperate,” said J. Warren Cassidy, former head of the NRA and a critic of the current leadership.
Knox, who says the NRA board always has been home to the cantankerous and is no stranger to disagreement, defends the expenditures as necessary.
“What it boils down to is that (executive director Wayne LaPierre) and I inherited a mess back in 1991. . . . We were faced with an infrastructure that had been allowed to go to pot while all that money was building up in the bank,” Knox said.
But the trouble doesn’t stop with finances.
The NRA finds itself uncomfortably encamped with a strange collection of fellow travelers ranging from conspiracy theorists to survivalists to so-called militia militants, many of whom see law enforcement as the enemy and as a threat to weapons ownership.
This became such a problem over the past year that, at its annual meeting in Phoenix in May, the NRA was forced to revive a document from the 1960s-the last time the militia movement was on the rise-that forbids membership to those who advocate overthrow of the government and expresses in the strongest terms that there is no room for anti-government militants in the NRA.
Still, the group suffers from guilt by association with the far-right groups because of a strong common interest: the absolute commitment to the right to keep firearms.
Behind the scenes, the NRA’s own operation is saturated with internal politics so thick and hot that they seem better suited to Byzantium than Fairfax.
Knox, whose knowledge of gun law and NRA history is encyclopedic, can tick off revolution after revolution within the organization, including the one he helped lead, which left him and a loyal staff firmly in control of the NRA four years ago.
Now it seems a month doesn’t pass without new controversy.
When the Oklahoma City federal building was destroyed by a bomb in April, the media made immediate connections between militia groups with their passion for firearms and the NRA, even though the NRA strongly condemned the explosion and militants connected to suspects in the case.
At its annual meeting in May, the group had to wrestle with the resignation of former President George Bush, who was angry about an NRA fundraising letter that called federal agents thugs.
The latest problem involves the NRA’s role in congressional hearings that ended Tuesday into the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco, Texas. Four federal agents and more than 80 Davidians, some of them children, were killed during a long confrontation that ended in a conflagration that destroyed the Davidian compound.
Guns, federal bungling and an apocalyptic death wish on the part of David Koresh, the Davidians’ leader, were at the center of that disaster. But the NRA has used it as a fundraising tool and a chance to attack its nemesis within the federal government: the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
On the eve of the hearings, it was revealed that the NRA was financing its own scientific probe to see whether someone had tampered with weapons collected from the Waco ashes, and that an NRA consultant was searching out witnesses to testify before the House committee.
The disclosures led committee Democrats and President Clinton to charge tha the NRA was scripting the hearing, using its influence with the Republicans it funded so heavily in last year’s congressional elections-about 80 percent of NRA contributions went to Republican candidates-to whack away at federal agents who were trying to enforce U.S. gun laws.
“We’re only interested in the truth,” said Tanya Metaksa, the NRA’s legislative director and chief lobbyist.
In the midst of those hearings, The Washington Post reported that one of the NRA’s biggest letter-writing supporters, a widely published character named Theodore H. Fiddleman, in reality was Paul H. Blackman, research coordinator for the NRA’s lobbying arm. That disclosure added a patina of embarrassment to the NRA’s problems.
How and why did this group of essentially conservative gun owners make the shift from among the most supportive of government allies to one of the sternest of government critics?
That story begins in the late 1950s, when the federal government was becoming more and more aggressive about regulating firearms.
The Treasury Department published proposed regulations in the Federal Register on May 3, 1957, a move the NRA viewed as a bold attempt at national firearms registration. Treasury would administer the new regulations, through its Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS, forerunner of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
That effort was defeated. But the episode helped to sour a relationship with government that had worked well for many years, and put the organization on what appears, it retrospect, to be a much different course.
Metaksa says the NRA has become politically militant because it has had no other choice.
“We were reacting to the reality more than creating the reality. What happened is you had a politicization of the issue and all of a sudden because of a rise in crime . . . and the influence of television, which brought that into your neighborhood, it became fashionable to demonize guns,” she said.
“The people you saw using guns on the news and in entertainment were bad guys. Now, there was a non-understanding that half the households in this country own a firearm. The people who didn’t own one became terribly distant from the people who did. But it was nothing the NRA did, or that gun owners did, to cause this to happen.”
There were other developments, too.
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In 1968, in the wake of domestic turmoil and assassinations, Congress passed the Gun Control Act, which angered NRA members who felt the organization folded its tent on an issue of great importance to gun owners.
There also were subsequent gun control efforts in four states that have huge numbers of gun owners and hunters-Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut and Michigan. NRA members and gun owners mounted a major response to those attempts.
“The people who were involved in that 25 years ago decided that they had done something good and started to put pressure on the NRA to start doing something in that vein in Washington,” Metaksa said.
What one long-term observer called “the seminal event” in modern NRA history happened in 1977, still remembered as “The Revolt at Cincinnati,” when a whole layer of old-fashioned leadership was jettisoned.
“That was the first time the members ever had any say-so or control in NRA,” Knox said. “The thrust of everything there was to give members power.”
From that point on, the NRA became much more active in politics, with the legislative branch of the organization taking the lead. Knox, booted from NRA office in 1984 along with Metaksa in one of the organization’s seemingly endless internal squabbles-this one over lobbying-battled his way back.
He is now viewed as the power behind the 76-member NRA board of directors. Knox is seen as the third corner, along with Metaksa and executive director LaPierre, of the trinity that actually decides day to day what direction the NRA will take.
Knox has his critics, including current and past board members who argue that he is too much of a scrapper and, along with Metaksa, embraces political confrontation instead of compromise.
“We always had in the NRA a balance between the fiscally responsible, business-oriented people and those who were totally into the political arena. You need a balance,” said W. James Carlson, former NRA president and now a benefactor member.
Because it has been aggressive doesn’t mean the NRA has always succeeded. The organization has watched and battled for years as an estimated 22,000 gun laws were enacted in the 40,000 municipalities that make up government in America, everything from outright bans to various kinds of permit laws.
It has used these losses and victories very effectively in drawing funds from its members. But the NRA’s membership base is shaky. An internal report shows it is losing about 2 percent of its membership a month-a total of 323,000 members since January.
Over the past few years, it has had some big failures-the enactment of the assault weapons ban being one of them, along with mandatory waiting-period legislation-and some big successes, including laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons in Florida, Texas and other states.
“This is a grass-roots advocacy group that has a membership. Until the ’60s and ’70s, it had well under a million members. . . . The NRA changed in the late 1970s from the small tightly knit group of people who were interested in target shooting and the military aspect of it to include a lot more people,” Metaksa said.
“There was money in the bank and what happened is that some deficit budgets were run to do that kind of building of the association.”
The NRA’s current financial problems have the same kinds of roots, she said. When LaPierre became the association’s executive director in 1991, he spent a lot of money stopping membership declines, Metaksa said.
The group’s membership list grew by a million in that campaign, to a peak of 3.5 million.
Dissidents within the NRA-and there aren’t many of them-say the drive attracted radicals and militia members, among others. They also say the current leadership is too political, focusing so much on politics that the long-term future of the association is in jeopardy, politically and economically.
“We could have given away memberships on the street and left ourselves in better shape financially,” former NRA president Carlson said.
Board member Wayne Ross, an Alaska attorney who numbers himself among the small “loyal opposition” to the current leadership, is upset that so much money has been spent.
“The NRA had about $102 million worth of ready assets in 1992. Now it’s down to about $40 million, almost every penny of which is pledged to the new building. In the meantime, they have cut back on services to members. I have concerns about the financial responsiblity of this administration,” Ross said.
“All I know is this: Four years ago there was a bunch of money there, and the ready assets ain’t there now.”