More Than Just Weapons at Stake in Gun Debate

PHOENIX —  For many gun owners, guns have become tangential to the debate over gun control. In conversations at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Assn. here over the weekend, it was striking how rarely the subject actually turned to guns. And when guns did come up, they were usually discussed, not as a practical tool for hunting, or even protection against crime, but as a symbol--of personal freedom to some, as a last line of defense against a tyrannical government to others.

Over and over, the NRA members gathered here repeated a stark and simple conviction: Government takes away guns as the first step toward confiscating other freedoms. Many see the drive for restrictions on gun ownership not as an end in itself but as a means to give government more control over ordinary citizens--even to subvert democracy itself. “It was never about gun control,” one man told me. “The issue has always been people control.”

Without exception, those I spoke with linked the drive to control guns with the broader issue of government’s scope. The size of government, much more than the specifics of the Brady law or the ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, was on their minds; guns, in many instances, seemed merely the prism that focused their fear of police and regulatory public power.

Those feelings help explain why the NRA has in the past few months turned its focus so sharply to criticizing alleged abuses by federal law enforcement agents, particularly those of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws. The organization’s drive to rein in the ATF--along with its celebrated description in a fund-raising letter of ATF agents as “jackbooted government thugs”--already has eclipsed discussion of repealing the assault weapons ban and plunged the organization even deeper than usual into controversy. Former President George Bush cited the fund-raising letter when he recently denounced and resigned from the NRA.

But hardly anyone here batted an eye at Bush’s defection; many even thought NRA Executive Vice President Wayne R. LaPierre was misguided when he apologized last week for a passage in the letter that made it appear as though he was condemning all federal law enforcement officials. It didn’t take very long at the Phoenix Convention Center to realize that LaPierre’s abrasive attacks on “government thugs” did not approach the outer boundaries of alienation from government evident among the hard-core activists at the heart of his organization.

These anti-government sentiments came in three strengths: mainstream conservative, libertarian and eerily paranoid. In any instance, the disaffection from government, politicians and the media expressed here was as searing as the sizzling Arizona sun.

Conversations that began with criticism of President Clinton or resentment about the ban on semiautomatic weapons frequently descended, as if falling into a trench, into warnings about a police state or comparisons of contemporary America with Germany on the eve of the Nazi takeover. One longtime NRA board member suggested that I watch movies of Hitler and Mussolini to understand where Clinton is trying to take the country.

Everywhere, people saw signs of threatened liberty. Mic McPherson, an intense and articulate editor of gun-related publications in Colorado, rages over having to give his Social Security number to cash a check or provide fingerprints to obtain a driver’s license. “We’re going into a situation where there is a police-state mentality,” McPherson says. “I am afraid that if I don’t kowtow to the police-state mentality, I would be shot.”

Of course, not all the gun fans who gathered here felt so besieged. In the long hallways of the exhibition halls, where gun owners displayed their latest models, you could find fathers examining hunting rifles with their sons, the way their fathers, no doubt, once did with them.

But then there was David Dutton, a trim, middle-aged psychologist from the small California Sierra town of Coarsegold, who says that if the Republicans don’t deliver on their promise to retrench the government, revolution is possible. “I hope guys like [House Speaker] Newt Gingrich can turn it around, because if they don’t, we’re in for some real problems. Didn’t Jefferson say ‘alter or abolish’? I think we’re in the ‘alter’ stage now.”

In other words, apres Newt le deluge .

And there was Lawrence Smith, a machine shop owner from Hamburg, Mich., who says: “If you look at Germany before World War II, a lot of people say it can’t happen in America. Well, it can happen anywhere.”

Smith said he suspected that the White House instigated the Oklahoma City bombing “to get the media attention away from . . . Vince Foster and this Whitewater thing.”

All of this suggests the need for everyone involved in the gun debate to take a deep breath. If the federal government really were a fascist occupying power, the people here wouldn’t get away with calling it one. The freedom that they enjoy to publicly criticize the government deflates their ominous portrayal of it.

In recent years, the NRA has systematically stoked fear of the federal government as a mechanism for mobilizing (and inspiring contributions from) its members. But the bombing in Oklahoma City last month has rendered that language politically illegitimate. And so, at the weekend conference, whether out of conviction or simply concern about their political exposure, the organization’s leaders showed signs of sensibly recalibrating their approach.

The group distributed flyers debunking the conspiracy theorists’ wild tales of black helicopters landing U.N. troops to prepare for a one-world takeover of the American government. And in a brilliant turn of political oratory on Saturday, LaPierre moved to firmly distance the organization from the shadowy militia movement--while solidifying its identification with the broader anti-government cause now driving American politics.

Repeatedly, LaPierre and other executives who spoke Saturday championed the “rule of law”--a formulation that allows the group to simultaneously criticize both the militias and federal law enforcement officials it says are abusing gun owners. Just as effectively, LaPierre--echoing the arguments I heard from his members--situated the gun debate firmly within a broader critique of government, linking gun control to such issues as property rights and unfunded government mandates. The calculation seems to be that while assault weapons are unpopular, government may be even more so. None of this portends a kinder and gentler NRA--the group’s leaders boldly baited President Clinton on Saturday--or even a narrowing of the cultural chasm between opponents and proponents of gun control. To the contrary, gun control increasingly resembles abortion as a clash of absolutes--an issue with powerful cultural symbolism that makes rational compromise almost impossible.

But especially given the intensity of alienation evident here--and the frequent expressions in the hallways of understanding, if not outright support, for the militia movement--it was important that the NRA reaffirmed the potential of peaceful, democratic change.

In the past few years, LaPierre has put his name behind statements that are clearly indefensible (in his recent book, he analogized the siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex., to the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto). But he hit exactly the right note Saturday when he told a room full of gun owners bristling at Washington that “there is a difference between criticism and insurrection . . . between acting within the law and acting above the law.” It’s a bit disconcerting LaPierre felt he had to say that; but it is encouraging that he did.