Flash in the Pan

Pro-Gun, Anti-NRA

Why hunters should stand against the nation’s largest firearm association

 

The National Rifle Association claims to be the largest pro-hunting organization in the world. But as a hunter, the NRA couldn't represent me less. And as a human being, I object to being associated with those bullies. The NRA is not for hunters any more than AAA is for bicyclists. In 2011, nearly 14 million Americans hunted, while NRA members number about four million, fewer than half of whom actually hunt. First and foremost the NRA serves gun fetishists and the firearms industry.

Unlike a lot of gun owners, hunters actually use their guns as the killing tools that they are. I don't shoot for the joy of killing or for the thrill of a loud explosion an inch from my head. The gun is not a toy that we have a constitutional right to play with, but a tool to which we're guaranteed access.

While most hunters don't have the firearms experience or training of law enforcement or military personnel, a hunter's experience imparts a significant level of competence with a gun. Hunters feel the jitters while trying to shoot, and shoot in all kinds of uncomfortable and less than ideal circumstances. We've seen what bullets can do to a body. We can contemplate, in an informed way, questions like how or if an armed civilian might stop a mass murder. And if for some reason a non-government militia had to be organized, it would doubtless be composed largely of hunters, along with military veterans and, of course, the gun freaks.

The NRA wants desperately to welcome more hunters into its ranks, but fewer than one in five hunters are members, and most who haven't joined by now probably won't. Like me, many hunters consider the NRA a bunch of paranoid loonies, with an increasing volume of innocent blood on their hands.

When I say "Fuck the NRA," as I do quite often lately, it's for a host of reasons both personal and political, but has nothing to do with my feelings for guns or the 2nd amendment.

The very fact that it's kind of scary to say "Fuck the NRA" is one of the biggest reasons to say it. It's a bullying organization, quick to use language like "traitor." NRA members have a lot of guns, and the organization appears to keep track of who does and says what. Ask any politician or gun-control activist. The Big Brother style intimidation tactics extend to individual hunters like myself.

When I take my gun to the store to get it worked on, the information slip I fill out includes a line for my NRA number. Will the gunsmith treat my gun with less love if I leave that line blank? Does the NRA keep track of who services which gun when, even as it decries federal attempts to keep track of guns? I face the same blank field requesting my NRA number when I buy a membership at my local shooting range. Some ranges won't sell membership to non-NRA shooters.

Among Americans with experience using guns as weapons, rather than as toys, compare 14 million hunters with 3 million active and reserve military, and nearly a million police officers. Of course, there is some crossover among these groups. And again, hunters have the least amount of formal firearms training. But in terms of votes, any way you slice it, there is no larger population of Americans with experience shooting at things than hunters. The NRA doesn't speak for us; we need to speak for ourselves.

If fewer than one in five hunters is an NRA member, how is it that the NRA has so much power, and the seeming ability to control politicians like marionettes? Money, of course. More than can be raised from membership dues and bake sales alone. According to the Violence Policy Center, between 2005 and 2010, the NRA took in about $40 million from the nation's gun manufacturers.

Fear mongering is one of the best ways to create demand for guns, and nearly every piece of NRA propaganda does that. We need guns to protect us from the government, the UN, home intruders, strangers on the street. We all need to be armed! And it works: on the Monday following the Sandy Hook shootings, a Utah sixth-grader took a pistol to elementary school, for "protection."

Obama's reelection has been an absolute bonanza for the industry. But he can't get reelected again, despite what the conspiracy theorists might tell you. That reality, combined with the unprecedented national trauma and soul-searching that Sandy Hook has inspired, could spell tough times ahead for the gun industry. Stock in publicly traded gun manufacturers like Ruger, which makes my hunting rifle, have been punished since Sandy Hook.

On the Tuesday after the shooting, Cerberus Capitol Management announced it was selling its 95 percent stake in The Freedom Group, a privately held conglomerate whose companies include some of the world's largest weapons manufacturers, including Remington, Barnes bullets and Bushmaster, which makes the AR-15 assault rifle used by Adam Lanza.

Could a hunter or some other armed citizen have prevented the Sandy Hook shootings? Such a thing has not happened in at least 30 years, according to a recent study by Mother Jones, which looked at 62 mass shootings over the past three decades, "In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun ... in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed."

Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence supports the observation that gun owners and their families are more likely to be shot by their own guns than to successfully repel attackers with them. In pretending otherwise, the NRA is selling the myth of security while it sells public safety down the river.

The NRA needs hunters a lot more than hunters need the NRA. And the nation needs the opinions of hunters more than it needs the opinion of the NRA. Hunters are intermediaries between government armed forces and private citizens. We are armed citizens, who know what guns can do, and if sensible gun-control policy is ever to be pursued, hunters need to be part of the conversation.

And we can start by saying "Fuck the NRA."