Virginia Pilot, December 28, 1980

Target Practice as Usual

By Colman McCarthy

WASHINGTON.

At the eight-story office building of the National Rifle Association on the day after John Lennon was gunned down, target-practice-as-usual was the order of the day. At point-blank range, which is where this wealthy, wellstaffed, and blustery lobby is most comfortable, NRA officials were taking aim at all the demands, pleas, and arguments for gun-control laws that inevitably follow celebrity shootings.

The NRA has weathered so many of these storms in the past few years— Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, Allard Lowenstein, Senator John Stennis, Mayor George Moscone, to name only politicians—that it can sail on with its eyes closed. A famous figure is shot, editorial writers crank out another “this madness must stop” editorial, and anti-handgun groups get a minute or so on television to urge citizens to write their senators and congressmen. And then, like a battlefield after the dead and wounded are carted off, there is calm.

The NRA wins another shootout. Nothing changes. Handgun laws remain ludicrously weak. Congress is still cowed by the might of the NRA. The statistics of death keep worsening: more than 10,000 handgun murders a year, which is half of all murders; the death rate is 200 times higher than in Japan, where laws make it almost impossible to get handguns.

At the NRA, I spent about an hour with a high-level official talking about such realities. But it was only a few minutes before I had the feeling of being in a fantasy world. Facts were replaced by slogans, from the old standard, “People kill people, not guns,” to new ones like, “The NRA is a great citizens lobby.” Distortions replace common sense: “If it’s against the law to murder someone, a gun-control law won’t stop murder any more than the laws prohibiting murder.”

Perhaps the most unreal moment came when the official offered an analogy. “You can’t stop a reporter from committing libel,” he said, “by taking away his typewriter. This would be prior restraint on the exercise of a right. To stop the abuse of that right will only destroy the right itself.” In NRA logic, this means you can’t prevent murders by taking away handguns.

While awaiting word from the Japanese to debunk that nonsense, the murder of logic is a crime that can be stopped. Typewriters are not designed to commit libel. Handguns are made and sold for one purpose: to kill a human being. People who don’t know how to use a typewriter don’t commit libel should they happen to stray into a reporter’s office and find an idle Smith- Corona. The U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that “foi every burglar stopped by a gun, four to six homeowners or family members are killed accidentally by a gun.”

The NRA, like a bully gunslinger, doesn’t worry that it has few facts and little sense on its side. It thrives for other reasons, such as the commitment factor. Most of its two million members are true believers who see themselves under threat by government meddlers out to take away their firearms. If the feds are allowed to control or ban handguns, pretty soon some pointy-head in Washington will be going after rifles and shotguns. In no time, a way of life will vanish. As the slogan says, it was God, guns, and guts that made America free and that’s what will keep us free.

Simplism like this attracts minds like Ronald Reagan, a longtime NRA member who, after the Lennon killing, predictably said that he is opposed to gun-control laws. Even without friends like Reagan, as well as the large numbers in Congress who prevent even mild handgun control bills from passing, the NRA has another strength which is perhaps its greatest: the climate of violence. There was little public disgust when the nation allowed itself to be consumed— spiritually uplifted, really—with the question of “Who shot J.R.?” What must the families of handgun victims have felt when this television shooting was treated as though it were the cultural event of the century?

The climate of violence Is such that nothing but sunny weather is forecast for the NRA. It is about to have a fellow member in the White House, it has strong support in Congress for a new federal law that will weaken the already- weak 1968 law, it can capitalize on the anti-regulation mood, and it can present itself as the defender of the right to own not only guns but typewriters too.

All that the NRA isn’t doing these days is sending roses to the funerals of handgun victims. No one, though, should put it past them.