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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive.
Editorial: 3/17/2000 Just because the National Rifle Association is filled with paranoid delusionals
who are members of the Tim McVeigh Fan Club doesn't mean they're always wrong. Their
point that current gun laws are often neither enforced nor prosecuted is valid.
Project Exile in Richmond, Virginia spent millions of taxpayer dollars to federalize
gun crimes, adding dozens of new Assistant U.S. Attorneys to the staff to prosecute
almost every gun crime. Gun violence has dropped.
Would they and their radical right allies really approve increasing the reach
and expense of federal law enforcement throughout the United States by turning every
Federal District Court into Gun Court? Would they really want to pay for it?
If so, let's go. Let's increase the staff of federal judges and prosecutors ten fold
and see if sending everyone with an illegal gun to a federal lock-up has an effect.
Reasonable people can agree on things like that. Or on stiffer prosecution of
local gun laws. Or requiring all gun buyers to pass a firearms training test, just
like getting a driver's license. I'm a gun owner. I've been around weapons since I
was five. I held a concealed weapons permit when I lived in Florida, where even
housepets pack heat. I would no sooner join the NRA than the Klan or the Young
Trotskyite League.
The NRA is entering its fourth decade of being run by fringe elements who have
misread both American and NRA history. The NRA was founded by two Civil War Union
veterans in 1872. Up until World War II, the NRA was mainly a rifle club for
military sharpshooters. Congress set up the National Board for the Promotion of
Rifle Practice in 1903. The NRA ran the board, and received surplus carbines for
use in its rifle clubs.
Around 1945, the NRA became less military and more sportsman-oriented. It
organized rifle safety courses for hunters, helped sponsor U.S. Olympic shooting
teams, and held classes in gun safety for youngsters. The NRA at that time, noted
The Economist magazine, was "...a little like the Boy Scouts."
The Gun Control Act of 1968, passed after the Kennedy and King assassinations,
outlawed selling guns by mail. Enter a convicted murderer whose case was overturned on
appeal named Hanlon Carter. Carter and other Texans began an insurgent movement in
the NRA in reaction to its support of the 1968 Act. The last straw for radicals like
Carter was 1977, when the NRA proposed teaching outdoor and environmental
awareness as part of its rifle range classes.
Incensed that tree-huggers were being invited into the gun culture, Carter
engineered a revolt that resulted in untra-conservatives like him taking over the
NRA. The rest, or course, is history. The NRA is probably the most potent lobbying
force in Congress.
In 1995, shortly after the Murrah Federal Building was bombed, Wayne
LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice-president, referred to federal law enforcement
officials as "...jack-booted thugs." A letter was sent to the NRA afterwards that
said, in part "To attack Secret Service agents or ATF people or any government
law enforcement people...is a vicious slander on good people...it offends my concept
of service to country. It indirectly slanders a wide array of government law
enforcement officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the
line for all of us...I resign as a Life Member of the NRA, said resignation to
be effective upon receipt of this letter."
It was signed "George Bush". The former President had had a belly full. Now
LaPierre's at it again, saying President Clinton is ..."willing to accept a certain
level of killing to further his political agenda and his vice-president, too."
Conservatives in Congress from Dick Armey to J.C. Watts distanced themselves from
LaPierre's bizarre remarks, and the NRA claimed over a hundred thousand new
membership applications rolled in.
The NRA has set up a typical totalitarian straw man, trying to convince
law-abiding gun owners like yours truly that there's actually a serious threat of
guns being outlawed and seized. Anyone who beleives something like that is even
a remote possibility has been wading in the shallow end of the gene pool for too
long.
If guns were the sole cause of Columbine and street crime, then Israel and
Switzerland--two of the most heavily armed nations on earth--should be ankle-deep
in blood. It hasn't happened. Indifferent parents, a selfish every-man-for-
himself society, drugs, a pathological underclass--it all adds up.
The problem is that flamethrowers like LaPierre are trying to squash even
a reasoned discussion of what we should be talking about. The NRA even pressured
Congressmen to try and stop a non-binding sense of the House resolution, urging
House and Senate conferees to at least sit down and talk about pending gun
legislation. That led even a few GOP lawmakers to rip into the NRA.
The first four words of the Second Amendment are "A well-regulated militia."
One can only imagine Alexander Hamilton looking at that, looking at the NRA,
and spinning in his tomb.
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