01-Jun-2007
Why I Am Not Going To Write About The National Rifle Association
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The National Rifle Association had just come out with a policy statement opposing a bill that would give the attorney general the power to deny firearms to suspected terrorists. It seemed as though the NRA was rivaling on the right what the ACLU on the left has long been accused of: championing bonehead causes in the alleged name of freedom.
Since that group has long annoyed me, and since I live in a town where it seems like every third pickup truck has an NRA sticker on it, I thought this would be a good chance to look into this group, give them a fair shot (pun) at my brain, and see where it all shook out.
Of course, trying to write something about the National Rifle Association feels a lot like trying to write something about God. You know it’s a complicated subject. You know there will be recriminations if you screw it up. You also know there are twenty-five million worshippers (3.5 million officially) at this particular tabernacle of freedom – and most likely most of them have guns.
Oh – a disclaimer (I am nothing if not journalistically clean): I own a gun. It’s a Winchester, single-shot, bolt-action .22 rifle. When I was a kid getting your gun was something of a rite of passage. My dad had a pump-action Remington .22 and he bought me the Winchester for some long-forgotten birthday. He never hunted and I don’t think he would have had the foggiest idea as to what the Second Amendment was, so I think he was just responding to certain cultural imperatives when he gave me the gun – kind of like teaching me to shave (which he never did), or telling me about sex (which he never did). I suppose back then the gift was just a part of my maturing into a proper American male, perhaps a way of saying that my squirt guns and cap pistols would no longer do.
Looking into the NRA, though, second thoughts about giving them a piece of Cold Iron began to arise. As most of my readers know, I can be a pretty quirky writer, not only in my fiction, but in other writings as well. Still, just getting into the NRA literature and website I began to feel seriously out-quirked. I began to think I’d have to embrace sanity and reason in order to make overt my covert sense that these are folks to whom you would not want to reveal your road rage.
Maybe it was the one page where I found I could buy a copy of Charlton Heston’s The Courage To Be Free or a copy of Advanced Sausage Making or a nifty anti-microbial, moisture-wicking, quick-drying shirt that would allow me to conceal a small revolver ($39.95 - $42.95). That was a juxtapositioning that cried out for advanced reasoning and, quite frankly, I didn’t feel up to it.
Maybe it was the praise the NRA had for Kennesaw, Georgia, a little town of 5000 in 1982 that passed an ordinance requiring all heads of households to own a firearm and ammunition. That ordinance is still on the books and the town is now about 30,000 in population.
Maybe it was discovering the NRA’s official blacklist. They say you can tell a lot about a person or an organization by looking at its friends. Conversely, I learned a great deal about the NRA by looking at its enemies, its official “blacklist” published on its website. Consider only a few:
National Organizations: AARP, American Medical Association, American Bar Association, American Firearms Association (!), American Jewish Congress, League of Women Voters, Lutheran Church in America, National Association of Police Organizations, NAACP, National Education Association, United Methodist Church, United Church of Christ, and the YWCA.
Individuals and Celebrities: Maya Angelou, Alec Baldwin, Drew Barrymore, Steve Buscemi, George Clooney, Sean Connery, Matt Damon, Ellen Degeneres, Gloria Estefan, Helen Hunt, Geraldo Rivera, Lisa Kudrow, Keyshawn Johnson, Rob Lowe, John McEnroe, Bette Midler, Jack Nicholson, Leonard Nimoy, Mary Lou Retton, Anne Rice, Meg Ryan, Jerry Seinfeld, Brittany Spears, Jimmy Carter, C. Everett Koop, Frank Rich, and Gary Trudeau.
Corporations and Corporate Heads: Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Hallmark Cards, Kansas City Chiefs, Kansas City Royals, Levi Strauss Co., Sara Lee Corp., Sprint, St. Louis Cardinals, Time Warner, CBS, Gannett News Service, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, McCall’s Magazine, NBC, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, The Tribune Company, and The Washington Post.
I’m not often aghast, but upon seeing this list I was fully aghast, not only because I like George Clooney, Sean Connery, Time Magazine, the United Church of Christ, Jerry Seinfeld and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, or because I have some Hallmark software on my computer, have worn Levi’s for decades, and at one time would have gladly run away with Mary Lou Retton (I married a look-alike instead); no, I was at maximum aghast because, by my estimate, the names I’ve inserted here represent maybe ten percent of the actual blacklist. When you hate that much, there can’t be a whole lot wholesome that you’re for.
I will say quite shamelessly that I am quite good at hoisting nonsense (people, governments, organizations) up on its own petard; of shining the bright light of ridiculousness down on outrageousness; of seeing not only the beauty of several hundred Canada geese on a playground up in Mankato one winter’s day, but also the quarter-ton of shit they left behind when they flew off.
This NRA, though, they did me in. My metaphors deserted me and my hyperbole came out in an anemic squeak. All that hatred swirling around in a multi-million dollar annual budget, a hatred that comes out of the Second Amendment of one of the most beautiful documents ever written – I wanted to smash those folks, destroy them, obliterate them, kill them.
I wanted, that is, to be one of them.
So I’m not writing about the National Rifle Association this month.
G. K. Wuori © 2007
Photo by the author
