The NRA better gear up for inside agitation in St. Louis
By Beck Ireland
Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
Call it tilting at windmills, but Tom Knox hasn’t been to a baseball game since the players’ strike more than a decade ago. The man can hold a grudge, and now he’s setting his sights on another boycott that to some may seem like a straight shot to the foot. Knox, a federally licensed firearms dealer and card-carrying life member of the National Rifle Association, is protesting the organization’s 136th annual convention, scheduled to take place at America’s Center April 13–15. You won’t find him outside, waving a “Go Home, Moses” picket sign, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy that the NRA’s coming to town. “It has to do with the choice of St. Louis as a location,” he says. Why would a guy who sells guns as a hobby be upset that the Second Amendment’s biggest rally will be in his own back yard? Because he has a thing against hypocrisy: The city called a cease-fire on gun shows at the convention center in 1994, he says, “so the fact that they’re holding it there seems a bit strange to me.”
There was a time when gun shows ran concurrently under the roof of the St. Louis Convention Center with other public events—even a kids’ show—but 13 years ago the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission decided that bringing weapons in and out of the center might be a public-safety hazard. That’s when Pete Cutelli, president of the Saint Louis Weapon Collectors and an NRA member, sued the city for the right to host his own shows there, but lost in federal court. “It was a public building, and I paid taxes, so I thought I should be able to rent it,” Cutelli says. “But how can you fight City Hall?” Both Knox and Cutelli would prefer that the NRA hold its convention at the St. Charles Convention Center, where Cutelli has held his last three gun shows.
Impossible, says the NRA. Space, for one thing, is a factor. Between 40,000 and 65,000 members are expected to attend the convention, and the St. Charles Convention Center’s 27,000 square feet of exhibition space can’t touch the 500,000 square feet at America’s Center. “We only have a small number of cities that can accommodate an annual meeting our size,” says Andrew Arulanandam, the NRA’s director of public affairs. (Maybe, but it’s been nearly 20 years since the NRA last held a convention in St. Louis.) Also, ironically, the convention center doesn’t consider what some say is the largest gun show in the world a traditional “gun show.”
“There’s a major difference,” says the director of America’s Center, Bruce Sommer, a man who sounds like he’s been in front of the firing squad before. “At the gun shows, people bring guns in and out of the building. At the NRA show, there are no guns that leave the building.” He also notes that the firearms at the NRA show will be securely on display without firing pins and that any weapons ordered at the show will be delivered directly to the consumer’s home. Concealed weapons won’t be allowed, either, despite the state’s recent passage of the concealed-carry law.
Cutelli suspects that there’s more than just square footage and semantics involved, though. He thinks that the estimated $20 million NRA convention attendees spend in each host city could also be a major factor. “The city of St. Louis is making an exception for the NRA because it wants the money,” he says. “It always comes down to the dollars. The NRA is big money; I was small potatoes.”
In an organization as controversial as the NRA, dissent among the ranks could be considered natural, if not inevitable. “The people who gravitate to the shooting sports are outspoken, strong-willed individuals, but I say thank goodness, because it’s those types of people that have made this country what it is,” says NRA secretary Edward J. Land Jr. “If you have three firearms enthusiasts, you’re probably going to have two arguments going at a time.”
