Critic traces rise in of NRA's power in Congress

Robert Draper

Saturday will mark the one-year anniversary of the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 people dead, 20 of them children. While the event horrified the nation, it hasn't prompted many changes in gun laws. A measure for added background checks on Internet and gun show sales was unsuccessful in the U.S. Senate. Colorado passed stricter laws, but two state senators who voted for the bill were defeated in recall elections, and a legislator who supported background checks resigned in the face of a recall threat.

Why is it so hard to pass even a simple gun-control measure, such as added background checks? Robert Draper, a contributing writer for The New York Times, who authored a chronicle of the George W. Bush administration, writes  that the answer lies in the enormous, partly unrecognized power of the National Rifle Association. He writes that that power was born out of calls for stricter gun laws after the 1968 assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

"The 1968 Gun Control Act imposed a licensing system for purchases, mandated serial numbers on weapons, banned certain gun imports and barred felons and illicit drug users from obtaining firearms. Gun-loving legislators like Rep. John Dingell of Michigan worried that even harsher restrictions were imminent, and clamored for the NRA to wake up and enter the political arena," Draper writes. "The lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, was formed in 1975. Two years later, at a now-famous annual convention in Cincinnati, [Democrat] Dingell and other NRA allies ousted the group’s reigning executives, who saw the organization largely as a haven for gentleman hunters, and replaced them with fire-breathing Second Amendment absolutists. The new lobbying director, Harlon Carter, then led an energetic campaign to boost membership," and now the group claims 5 million members.

"The NRA scored its first major victory when Dingell and other friends on the Hill succeeded in passing the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, which restored many of the gun rights that were outlawed by the 1968 law," Draper writes. When President Bill Clinton and Congress passed a ban on assault weapons [in 1994] the NRA "targeted the bill’s proponents during the midterm elections. Many of them lost and Republicans became the majority." When Clinton pushed for universal background checks after the 1999 Columbine shootings, the NRA killed the bill. "By the time the Virginia Tech murders occurred in 2007, it was a fact of life in Washington: Any major legislation that the NRA opposed stood little to no chance of passage." 

Even after the faces of 20 six- and seven-year-old children gunned down in Newtown became regular fixtures in newspapers, the nightly news and the Internet, the NRA remained on the offensive. "Aware that the struggle would be fierce and expensive, the group offered discounts on annual and lifetime memberships," Draper writes. "In the six months after Newtown, as gun-control advocates pushed for legislation, the NRA was able to recruit more than a million new members, Andrew Arulanandam, an NRA spokesman, said."

And the NRA is willing to align itself with anyone it has to if it means getting what it wants, Draper writes. David Keene, former NRA president, told Draper: “Our effectiveness is totally dependent on the fact that we reward our friends, and we stand with them. Our goal isn’t to elect Republicans. It’s to support people who support the Second Amendment.” (Read more)