Confession of a Former Gun Editor: The NRA is the Problem

I was born and raised in Montana, in a law enforcement and military family. Few things feel as comfortable or homelike to me as a gun. Certainly a pen. As Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney wrote, “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” Precisely.

Now, I know I’m unusual in that sentiment, especially in the liberal circles which I often travel. Snug and gun are two words many of my friends would never tuck together unless engaging in half-drunk wordplay.

This kinship to guns has served me well, however, especially in my early days as a young writer in New York City. After several notable reporters and editors advised me newspapers were a sinking ship, and that I was probably too smart to be a reporter (whatever that means), I applied for several magazine editor jobs. My choices boiled down to gun magazines or sailing magazines, an easy choice for a Montana guy with the rent due.

My editor at the magazines was the legendary Harry Kane. Former Green Beret and Tunnel Rat in Vietnam, Harry was likewise fluent in Herodotus, Von Clausewitz and Proust, not to mention all other things literary. His father had been an Army general who’d early in his career sunk a Nazi submarine off the coast of North Carolina. Harry was born and grew up on Fort Bragg, but his father was born in Brooklyn. He always claimed his daddy would’ve been governor of North Carolina if he hadn’t been a Yankee. His quotient and quantum of original thoughts were virtuoso. And our well-groomed stock of freelancers were former special forces, former Secret Service, and retired law enforcement officers with more stories and insights than a lifetime of fledgling artists’ parties.

My days were spent with folks who likewise grew up with guns and the sporting life. They were patriots in the truest sense of the term, and they believed unequivocally in self-defense. And we all agreed on one thing, idiots should not be armed. These folks were mostly down-to-earth, and they reminded me of home, which was a long way away.

My evenings were often spent with friends who hadn’t grown up with guns. They were from cities and from small towns all over the country and Europe, and the lot of them understood guns to be a sign that something horrible was about to happen. Guns equal crime and/or war, and they were against both. And how. I couldn’t agree more. What’s more, as a Montanan living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan, I found my own instincts changing. Whereas I’d grown up completely comfortable at the sight of guns, I went through my days hoping to never see guns unless they were on cops’ hips. I came to an acute understanding of both sides, and both sides remain dear to me still.

Then there’s the NRA. I somewhat timidly asked Harry Kane what he thought of the NRA, and since it would be an insult to a Green Beret to say he spoke like a sailor, I’ll just say his response can’t be repeated here. To my surprise and relief, he was not an NRA supporter, and most certainly not a fan of Wayne Lapierre. Like every soldier who’s been sent across the globe to take care of a bureaucrat’s dirty work, Kane had a bullshit-detector second to none. And every time the NRA came up, its alarm sounded.

Believe it or not, it was a time before school shootings were a regular cultural event. This was pre-Columbine, and just before this current generation of young people came to wear the sad yet descriptive moniker “the school shootings generation.” It was also the start of the stark Us versus Them polarization in American politics that has left all of us grumbling and dumb in frustration. The U.S. Senate was still a place where deals were made, and more importantly, legislation was passed under the auspices of Democrat senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Dianne Feinstein, as well as Republican senators Olympia Snowe and Bob Dole.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this was anything but a golden age. As I enter my middle 40s, I look back on the time and think, “Really? Is that supposed to be when things were better?” I refuse to believe that. But when it comes to the gun industry, it was the end of a simpler time for gun owners and a time of hyper-politicization by the NRA.

For those unfamiliar with guns and the gun industry, I want to draw a stark contrast between gun manufacturers and the NRA. When most conscientious non-gun owners think about annual events like the Shot Show, the industry’s largest tradeshow, they think of Charlton Heston holding a rifle above his head, shouting, “FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!!!...” That’s not the gun industry, that’s the NRA. But it’s not the NRA’s rank and file members so much as the kooky, snake-oil tactics of Wayne Lapierre and mouthpieces like Dana Loesch. For nearly 30 years, NRA CEO Lapierre has led the dubious charge for the NRA like some unmedicated, unhinged Quixote storming at hallucinated gun-thieving ogres.

I sketch Lapierre and Loesch as caricatures here because they are two. And there’s a lot more resentment of their tactics within the gun industry than most people think. Under Lapierre’s leadership, the NRA attempted to bankrupt legendary gun maker Smith & Wesson when it bravely and conscientiously moved toward safety reforms. Avi Selk of the Washington Post has written a chilling account of this internecine carnage, and it is available online.

Another New York writer friend, Harold Crooks—an accomplished journalist and filmmaker—was part of the team that studied and interrogated pernicious organizational behavior in the award-winning documentary The Corporation. Crooks has spent his career delving into malicious organizational and corporate practices, from our bellicose intervention in Central American politics to the usurious practices of the waste management industry. Harold’s an old friend and mentor, and I often think of his cogent assessments whenever grappling with righteous anger. Like Kane, Crooks has a state-of-the-art bullshit detector.

The Corporation's hypothesis is relatively simple. The 14th Amendment granted corporations status as individuals under the law. Since said designation has led to licentious behavior, why not apply that other codicil of representative democracy, each right presupposes an obligation. Under this lens, the film scrutinized corporate behavior and granted that behavior a psychological category. Based on this rubric, the corporation was categorized a psychopath because it consistently exhibited the symptoms: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), incapacity to experience guilt, and failure to conform to social norms and respect the law.

Let’s apply this logic to the NRA’s long-time assertion: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And if there is one consistent line of rhetoric in the NRA’s arsenal, it is that background checks are essential to preventing the wrong individuals from acquiring guns. As Dana Loesch said on behalf of the NRA in a recent CNN town hall in Florida: "This madman passed a background check. How was he able to pass a background check? He was able to pass a background check because we have a system that's flawed."

In short, the NRA is the problem. This once patriotic, paternalistic gathering of greatest generation fathers, uncles and their sons has become a parody of itself. In the 19 years since Columbine, the strident lobbying and advocacy of the NRA looks more like Big Tobacco than the fatherly gathering it once was. If you want more evidence and a microcosm of this moral decay, research the career of John R. Lott Jr., the once respected academic at the University of Chicago, now a defrocked and demoralized gun evangelist trying to convince folks that snake oil also works as gun oil.

As Lapierre has famously said, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The problem is, there’s a troubling dearth of good guys out there. In the NRA and elsewhere.

Speaking of good guys, my marquis Harry Kane story comes from May 1999 following the Columbine shooting. The NRA, despite protests, had decided to hold its annual convention in Denver, only a short drive from where the shooting had taken place in Littleton, CO. Anti-NRA sentiments were high, and those sentiments were memorably stoked by its then-president, Charlton Heston, who offered glib remarks like, “We’re not peddling heroin.” These remarks were made prior to the aforementioned Planet-of-the-Apes-like spectacle destined to live in cable news clip files for eternity.

I’d been an editor since I was a teenager and getting in trouble for what had been published was a relished part of my repertoire by 1999. What was different was my own unwitting role in promoting one of the rifles used in the Columbine shooting—the Hi-Point Model 995 carbine rifle—of which I’d recently penned a new product review for front-of-the-book in a couple of our magazines. Anyone who’s ever worked in magazines knows that new products sections are the kind of stuff you write in your sleep, rewriting company press releases, trying to add a bit of flair.

But, it just so happened that the article I’d sleep-written had been on stands in time for the shooters to have read the same en route to purchasing the rifles used to murder their classmates. My crisis of conscience was earnest, but it was also quickly interrupted by another editor who reminded me that correlation is not causation, and 28,000 model 995s had been made and sold in 1998 alone. To think my little article had caused anything was the over-workings of a narcissistic twentysomething’s brain.

I never admitted my misguided though earnest pangs to Harry. The man had survived Vietnam and a subsequent career in special ops with his head and heart mostly intact, to say my concerns were quaint by comparison would be generous. But Harry did notice that I’d taped the NRA’s personal invitation to the Denver convention above my desk in constant eyeshot to ensure a reckoning with the same.

“What about the convention? You gonna go?” he asked. “Nope," I replied. “I was raised with guns, but I’ve never been a fan of the NRA. My father used to say, ‘millions of armed Americans don’t really need lobbyists for back-up.’ He was a homicide detective.” Harry nodded and told me he was letting the NRA know via phone that he wouldn’t be in attendance as well as his low opinion of their choice to continue with the convention.

The rest of our conversation was frank and not to be repeated. I don’t have his permission to repeat it, and therefore I will not. But I did walk away from that conversation with a different perspective on the NRA, and on Wayne Lapierre, and in the 19 years since, that opinion has done nothing but galvanize. It’s summed up by something else my father used to say, “If you wouldn’t take candy from them, you sure as hell shouldn’t trust ‘em with a gun.” It’s a gut check.

It’s a variation on the drunken uncle theory. We all have that uncle. The one who invariably has a few too many and starts airing grievances along with racist and otherwise troubling comments. We send the kids into the other room, keep him away from dangerous objects, and his dutiful wife eventually escorts him out the door in a series of low-tone scolds and curses.

When all these characteristics get distilled, what kind of a portrait emerges? It doesn’t quite add up to a psychopath or madman, but it is a sketch of a very worrisome and potentially dangerous individual. One who certainly displays callous disregard for the feelings of other people, a reckless disregard for the safety of others, incapacity to experience guilt, and failure to conform to social norms.

Would this person pass a background check? If so, is this a sign of a flawed system, as Dana Loesch asserted? Would you take candy from this person? Precisely.

-MRM