The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre conjured another dystopic vision of America when he spoke last weekend in Houston during his group’s annual convention: “Lying in wait is a terrorist, a deranged school shooter, a kidnapper, a rapist, a murderer — waiting and planning and plotting — in every community across this country. Lying in wait right now.”
LaPierre’s speech in Houston echoed a feardinger of an essay he wrote in February for The Daily Caller, when he saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy a “hellish world” of hungry, thirsty disarmed survivors threatened by looters and social disorder. (A well-documented disaster myth appears to inform LaPierre’s post-disaster notion of rampant and widespread lawlessness.) Americans face a future of inevitable anarchy and chaos, LaPierre (pictured above) warned, and “to withstand the siege that is coming” we must arm ourselves against “terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster.” Or as he phrased it in another litany earlier in the essay: “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face — not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival.”
On the same day LaPierre was speaking to the NRA convention, the Texas House was celebrating “gun day” by passing a dozen bills that weaken already noodle-soft gun laws in the state and expand already expansive opportunities to own and carry a gun. Among the legislation passed May 4: A constitutionally dubious bill that would nullify new federal gun restrictions, should they ever come to pass, within Texas.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post published a story headlined “NRA lobbyist, arms dealer played key role in growth of civilian market for military-style guns.” According to The Post, in the mid-1980s Rene Carlos Vos, a Virginia arms dealer, sought the help of LaPierre, the NRA’s chief lobbyist at the time, to press Congress to pass legislation that would allow him to import 200,000 M-1 military surplus rifles from South Korea. Together the two men, with help from Republican Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and other members of Congress, “helped make a new, more powerful class of firearms more readily available to civilian gun owners” and as a result changed “the profile of American gun ownership.” The story involves questionable business associations, bribery allegations, investigations by the FBI, and the convening of a federal grand jury whose work came to an abrupt end when Vos died in a plane crash.
The Washington Post article brought to mind “Battleground America: One nation, under the gun,” Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore’s excellent 2012 New Yorker article that explores, in part, the transformation of the NRA in the 1970s from a sporting and hunting organization that supported gun limits to a powerful lobbying force that began pushing “a new interpretation of the Second Amendment” by decoupling “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” from the amendment’s “well regulated militia” preface.
The Washington Post story also helps explain why the guns at the center of today’s gun control debate have nothing in common with the guns I think of when I think of guns. Those guns include the .410-gauge single-shot shotgun I bought with some prize money I won at a livestock show when I was 10 or 11, the 12-gauge pump-action shotgun I used to hunt dove and quail, the .22 rifle I used to shoot jackrabbits on bored summer evenings (it’s a memory that horrifies me now), the .30-30 pump-action rifle that was the most exotic gun in our collective family arsenal.
None of the dozen or more guns in that arsenal bore any resemblance to the military-style weapons that have become an obsession to the point of fetish for LaPierre, Gov. Rick Perry and other gun owners and advocates. Each rifle, shotgun and pistol I think of when I think of guns seems quaint in contrast.
Quaint but just as potentially deadly. LaPierre reacted to the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Conn., by saying, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” [1] He repeated the line in The Daily Caller essay and in Houston. All it takes to stop that bad guy is one bullet in a good, old-fashioned revolver, however, not 30 bullets in a semiautomatic military-style rifle. Consider the case of Melinda Herman, a Georgia mother who defended herself and her two children against an intruder by shooting him with a .38 revolver.
Or consider Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, a movie hero to gun enthusiasts nationwide. He famously carried a .44 magnum handgun to keep the bad guys in check. It held six rounds.
[1] Slate magazine has been tracking the gun-related deaths that have occurred in the United States since the Dec. 14 Newtown shooting. The count as of May 6: 3,852.