The Road to Damascus

I went off to summer camp when I was thirteen, and along with canoeing and lanyard weaving and archery, and swimming in the chilly, tidal backwaters of the Sheepscot, I took riflery.  We might honestly understand, that both in my personal history and in America’s, this was a more innocent age.  Camp Chewonki - which still exists, just south of Wiscasset, Maine – had been around for generations.  Two of my uncles, my mom’s older brothers, went there, and Roger Tory Peterson, the much-celebrated author of A Field Guide to the Birds, dedicated his book to Clarence Allen, who was even in my day the benevolent eminence, a little shaky on his pins, but very much present.  Looking back, Chewonki might be said to represent a lost world, where Saltonstalls and Cabots, among the New England elite, were destined to rule the American imperium; salt water and the Episcopalian catechism were brisk and bracing.

But for the purposes of the immediate discussion, we can narrow the field to shooting skills.  Chewonki had a rifle range.  We used single-shot bolt-actions in .22 rimfire, at fifty feet.  To qualify for awards like Marksman, or Sharpshooter, and graduating up to Expert, you followed a course of fire – a minimum score in each of the four positions, prone, sitting, kneeling, standing - established by the National Rifle Association. 

The NRA offered these programs all over the place, summer camps, the Boy Scouts, schools and social clubs, and nobody found it odd.  They were a sportsmen’s organization, with no political affiliation.  They also published the only national shooting magazine, American Rifleman, which was for hunters and recreational shooters - handguns featured very little, in those days, primarily in competition.  The craze for military-style weapons and combat-related content was some ways off.   

The year it all changed was 1977, at the NRA national convention in Cincinnati.  This isn’t a date or an event that registers much with the general public, but it looms large in NRA lore, and has had a lasting effect on American gun culture, and the ongoing debate over gun control.    

The short version is this.  Historically, from the 1870’s to the 1970’s, the NRA was recreational, environmentally aware, and committed to gun safety and education.  The coup in Cincinnati toppled longstanding leadership policy, and brought the 2^nd Amendment absolutists to power.  Their emphasis was on gun ownership, and a rigid interpretation of the right to bear arms.  They moved the goalposts.  More importantly, they caught the Old Guard off-guard.  Nobody organized any effective resistance.  They didn’t recognize how radical a change was in the wind.  And left a vacuum.

Into this empty space stepped an activist and self-selected lobbying group, devoted to a single issue.  What you might describe as more reasonable voices surrendered the stage.  They let the other guys set the terms of the debate.  Which is where we’re at now.

Now, like the Port Huron Statement, for SDS, or the Seneca Falls Declaration, in support of women’s rights, the NRA wanted to cast their position as about fundamentals.  These are rights denied - more to the point, not exercised, or not affirmed.  Allowed to atrophy.  If you argue original intent, the 2^nd Amendment is a bulwark against tyranny, the well-regulated militia.  In the context of England’s wars against the French, or for that matter, against the Stuart pretenders in Scotland, this makes perfect sense.  Troops could be billeted in your home, against your will.  They’d steal the eggs, and then kill the chickens.  Not to mention rape the women.  This is a common-sense precaution.

Interestingly, as the argument warms up, we hear even legal scholars on the Left saying, Oop, sorry kids, but the 2^nd actually means what it says, commas and all.  You can’t restrict legal ownership of guns.  And the Supremes weigh in.  An overly repressive DC law is voided.  (In that particular case, a security guard, licensed to carry on the job, wanted to know why he couldn’t protect his home.  The court, quite sensibly, ruled in his favor.)  The problem is not the 2^nd Amendment.

Wayne LaPierre, and the direction the NRA has taken in the last fifty years, is contrary to what a lot of us think.  I’m not talking about the drift of liberal opinion, I mean gun guys.  It’s ridiculous to conflate Ruby Ridge or the Branch Davidians or some other asshole who hates the Feds with people who hunt, or shoot, or need personal protection in a dangerous place. 

What we lost is that we ceded the argument.  We let the other guys get possession, we need to take the conversation back.  Like everything else. 

Enough with the crazies sucking the air out of the room.