Riding To The Rescue Of Nra Board Candidate Charlton Heston, Old Leaders Concerned That Group Has Leaned Too Far To The Right

The National Rifle Association will become politically isolated and irrelevant if leaders of the nation’s oldest and largest gun rights group are ousted, actor Charlton Heston said Friday.

Heston said he was running for a seat on the NRA board to support “the good guys,” embattled executive vice president Wayne R. LaPierre Jr. and his backers.

“There are forces within the NRA that threaten to reduce it to kind of a sideshow on the radical fringe of the American scene,” Heston told reporters.

“I hear from gun owners, more and more, that they can’t relate to the NRA. I hear from my friends on the Hill in Washington, in both houses of Congress, that the NRA is going to be overrun by people incompetent in the political process. I hear from my hunting and shooting friends that the NRA is approaching irrelevance,” he said.

Heston never mentioned LaPierre’s rival, first vice president Neal Knox, nor said whether he would remain in the organization if LaPierre is ousted.

“My friends in the NRA have circled the wagons, and I guess I’m the cowboy riding over the ridge,” he joked. “It’s the right thing to do, it’s the right time to do it, and frankly I think I can do it.”

Heston is one of 158 candidates on this weekend’s convention ballot for a lone seat on the NRA’s 76-member board. The other 75 were elected earlier by mail.

The board chooses officers in a two-day meeting that begins Monday.

The power struggle involves allegations of financial mismanagement against the current leadership, as well as accusations that the organization has courted right-wing militias.

It is perhaps no wonder that there is dissension within the ranks. NRA membership has dropped 20 percent, to 2.8 million, in just two years. And assets have slumped from $80 million to $49 million, including $36 million in reserve to secure a mortgage on NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Va.

In 1995, former President Bush turned in his NRA membership after a fund-raising letter signed by LaPierre referred to federal agents as “jack-booted government thugs.”

But LaPierre has since sought to bring the NRA closer to the center with a broader base of support.

As executive vice president, LaPierre is the NRA’s chief operating officer.

Early Friday, former NRA president Joe Foss, 82, of Scottsdale, Ariz., and other senior leaders of the group accused Knox of “courting the militia and other extremists.”

Foss, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who served two terms as governor of South Dakota, said Knox met with militia leaders after the Oklahoma City bombing - a charge Knox denied.

Robert K. Brown, an NRA board member and founder of Soldier of Fortune magazine, said Knox lacked respect in Congress.

“The man is interested in power, power, power, and I object to that,” Brown said. “It is necessary to preclude him from taking over the association.”

Knox, 61, of Rockville, Md., said that in his four years in charge of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, “we had no losses,” in contrast with passage of the Brady bill and assault weapons ban in the 1990s.

LaPierre, 47, was chosen for his $190,000-a-year post in late 1991.

Aligned with LaPierre, in addition to Heston, are NRA president Marion Hammer, 58, of Tallahassee, Fla., and chief lobbyist Tanya K. Metaksa, 59, who worked for Knox before he was ousted in 1982 from the job she now holds.