Photography by Gage Skidmore
In the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, I raged emotionally about guns, as a father who had dropped off his own children at an elementary school just two hours before the shooting spree claimed all of those innocent souls.
“The NRA Can Go to Hell,” I seethed in the headline of a blog post at stlmag.com. I said this should be the 9/11 moment for gun control.
“If the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre was a real man,” I wrote, “he’d make his way to Connecticut to explain to those grieving parents that the guns didn’t kill their children, the shooter did. Or maybe he could tell them that the tragedy would have been avoided if only the teachers had been armed, or perhaps the children themselves. Or maybe he could tell them about how precious the Second Amendment is.”
Damned if my sarcasm didn’t turn out to be strangely prescient.
No, LaPierre didn’t have the cojones to show up in Connecticut. But by the time he had slithered off the stage a week later—after arguably the most obnoxious press conference in history—the NRA’s monster-in-chief had actually laid the blame for the killings on anything but poor, maligned, underappreciated guns, which he so unmistakably saw as the real victims here.
To LaPierre, the culprits were the media, violent movies, and video games; gun-free zones; the failure to arm teachers; and the absence of an armed guard (to stop a suicidal killer armed with military-style weaponry and body armor). No wonder the New York Daily News called LaPierre “the craziest man on earth,” and its Rupert Murdoch–owned conservative rival, the New York Post, termed him a “gun nut” and an “NRA loon.”
I questioned my own headline.
“Should I apologize to hell?” I asked my friends on Facebook.
This query, along with the original post, created quite a stir. And while the overwhelming sentiment was in favor of gun control (these are 3,000 of my closest friends, after all), the most enlightening thing that happened was a dialogue with a fair number of NRA supporters upset about my opinions.
After the obligatory name-calling subsided, the exchanges actually turned civil, and while I don’t flatter myself to think I won over any converts, I was struck by this: There’s more common ground than you’d think between gun enthusiasts and gun-control advocates.
I was more accepting of their gun ownership than they expected. They were more open to reasonable regulations than I would have thought.
The people with whom I conversed were passionate about their guns and convinced they are essential for self-defense. For the most part, they repeated standard NRA verbiage—tellingly, I’d say—about how gun-control laws are hopeless and about how if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
But to my surprise, the same individuals—ones I had been prepared to dismiss as wackos—did, in fact, agree that it was perfectly reasonable to have some limitation on the availability of weapons designed for military use. And without exception, they seemed to feel as strongly as I do that criminal background checks should apply to all gun sales, including those at gun shows.
This anecdotal experience is consistent with the results of a study conducted last May by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who surveyed 945 gun owners and found that 82 percent overall (and 74 percent of NRA members surveyed) favored requiring criminal background checks for all gun purchases.
These are stunning numbers when you consider that NRA leaders have made fighting background checks at gun shows a top priority. The same can be said for the finding that 64 percent of NRA members (and 71 percent of gun owners overall) would support requiring gun owners to alert police if their guns are stolen.
The NRA wouldn’t stand for that.
The Luntz survey found that 63 percent of NRA members polled believed concealed-carry permits should be limited to applicants 21 years of age or older. But last year in Missouri, the NRA successfully fought to have the age requirement lowered to 18.
There is a disconnect between the men who run the NRA and the gun owners whom they purport to represent. The NRA’s membership is neither served nor represented by demagoguery and fear-mongering about how the Second Amendment will be repealed or how “jackbooted government thugs” (LaPierre’s phrase) will confiscate their weapons.
Nationally, the NRA’s political clout is overrated, as evidenced by the $14 million spent in vain trying to defeat President Barack Obama. Eighteen of the 26 House incumbents who lost reelection bids had NRA support. Six of the seven Senate candidates who received more than $100,000 from the NRA were defeated, including Missouri’s Todd Akin.
Still, the NRA dominates politics in Missouri. For example, voters rejected a concealed-carry proposition in 1999 by a healthy 3.3 percentage points, only to have an NRA-bought-and-paid-for legislature overturn the results four years later. Gun control hasn’t been heard from since.
If you’d like to see this phenomenon in action, follow the “progress” of a bill that state Rep. Stacey Newman (D–St. Louis County) was at press time preparing to introduce for the start of the legislative session. The measure would require criminal background checks for all gun purchases—including at gun shows—the kind of checks favored by 82 percent of gun owners in the survey.
The NRA was reportedly set to fight the measure, and it’s quite likely that Newman’s bill won’t even make it into a committee, much less out of one. But if that’s the case, her efforts will at least have spotlighted some ugliness.
What possible purpose could be served by making it easier for guns to be obtained by people who couldn’t pass a background check—say, felons, people with mental illness, individuals with a history of domestic violence, whatever? And with about 40 percent of firearm sales taking place at gun shows, isn’t this about common sense?
Law-abiding gun owners need no protection from background checks, which is why the vast majority of them support the use of such checks to help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals. But that matters not to the NRA bosses, who fight for the “freedom” of gun shows for the same reason they have worked to make it easier for felons to get gun-ownership privileges reinstated: It’s about selling more guns.
The NRA doesn’t deny this goal: It equates gun sales with goodness. It proudly supports the proliferation of firearms in America, so much so that its website pushed back against giving too much “credit” for recent spikes in firearms sales to its hated nemesis, President Obama.
An article titled “Why Are Gun Sales Booming?” on the NRA Publications site (nrapublications.org) boasts “there are many factors driving the sales figures, and sales are up everywhere, even in ‘blue states.’ The top reason hasn’t been President Obama, but rather the movement for freedom spearheaded by the National Rifle Association and its robust membership.”
So “the movement for freedom” responds to the slaughter of innocents by calling for more sales of those perfectly legal assault weapons that took their lives. Too much gun violence in our schools? Why, let’s just have more guns in schools, so the good guys can shoot the bad guys, just like in the movies.
And what better place to advance this abject stupidity than Missouri, a state proudly ranking in the top third nationally in gun ownership and the bottom third in education funding? It’s fair to say that your average NRA-owned Missouri legislator would rather show you his gun case than his high-school transcript.
It’s hardly a surprise that some brilliant Missouri legislators have called for teachers and principals to be allowed to pack concealed weapons at school. If there’s a surprise, it’s that the legislators aren’t requiring teachers and principals to pack heat, or that they haven’t expanded the God-given concealed-carry privilege to every kid in every school.
One of the co-sponsors of the bill to arm educators is St. Louis’ own Rep. John McCaherty (R–High Ridge), featured in this space just five months ago. In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo., movie-theater massacre, McCaherty had the tastelessness to go forward with the political fundraising raffle of an NRA-donated AR-15 assault rifle—the very weapon used by the Aurora madman to kill or wound 70 people.
It’s doubtful that this imbecilic idea to arm Missouri educators will make it to the finish line, but its main function will be to distract from any serious attempt to bring sanity to Missouri’s gun laws. In that event, the winners would be the NRA and its gun-industry clients, but not your average gun owner.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, gun manufacturers are openly threatening to move their operations out of the state if Gov. Pat Quinn were to succeed in producing some sort of ban on assault weapons, which he rightly says “are not designed to do anything but to have human targets.” That’s a bluff worth calling, and if it ends up costing the state hundreds of jobs, that would be just fine (as long as they don’t move to Missouri).
Quinn is spot on: There is no legitimate sporting or self-defense purpose served by owning firearms that can commit the carnage suffered in places like Aurora; Tucson, Ariz.; and Newtown, Conn.
Those who want to own military weapons should join the military.
And to those who say the term “assault weapon” can’t be defined, let me offer this layman’s definition: If a gun can kill large numbers of people without reloading, if it can wreak mass carnage, civilians don’t get to own it.
Why is that a problem?
If more guns made a country safer, the U.S. would be, far and away, the safest place in the history of the world. It most definitely is not, as evidenced by homicide and gun-violence rates significantly higher than all other wealthy nations on the planet.
Reasonable gun-control measures cannot assure that horrible crimes won’t continue to happen. But they can reduce the odds, and they pose no threat to any of us, law-abiding gun owners included.
It’s the NRA that does.
SLM co-owner is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
