Nra Finds Fear Is A Most Potent Weapon

The leadership of the National Rifle Association did not invent the technique, certainly not. That is the point - it’s been around in Europe almost a century.

First: Take over an organization that has special appeal to people who work for a living. Then find out something that is troubling them, makes them feel lesser, besieged or betrayed. Direct that unhappiness against a well-defined target in society. Maneuver a leadership clique into command. Then move ruthlessly for vastly expanded national political influence. Use the members, money and voting power of the reshaped organization as critical levers.

In Europe, far right and far left used techniques of subverting government to create their power.

Good students, the leaders of the NRA have created an organization with a new goal. It is much beyond simply fighting gun control.

The purpose and engine of the new NRA is deeply political: to persuade more Americans, inside and outside the organization, that they are being strangled by a plot to deprive them of their very liberty. The mastermind is the U.S. government; law officers are its servants.

That conspiracy theory is an old one on the far right fringes of American life. The triumph of the NRA has been to capture the anger of the conspiracy theory, feed and popularize it, make it their cause and cow politicians into submission.

NRA leaders use another old demagogic trick. They claim to represent more people than they do - in their case, all gun owners.

A Time-CNN poll shows this to be false. As of this month, 68 percent of gun owners disagreed with the NRA’s calling federal agents jackbooted thugs; 73 percent gave the FBI a favorable rating, to the NRA’s 60; 49 percent favored stricter gun control; 69 percent wanted to keep the assault weapons ban despite the NRA campaign against it. Gun owners seem less afraid of the NRA than politicians do.

President Clinton was the inevitable, prime target of the NRA, and not only because he was for some forms of gun control. When the NRA made federal law enforcement agents objects of hate, before and after Oklahoma, any incumbent president became their bull’s-eye.

President Bush saw that, I believe, and courageously quit the NRA.

But where are the major Republican candidates?

No politicians have a greater responsibility to take on the NRA and its anti-government incitement than mainstream conservative leaders. If the leading Republican candidates cannot explain the difference between conserving America and destroying trust in America, which is what the new NRA is doing, then intellectually they are unfit to lead.

But lack of intellectual ability was not what inspired Sen. Phil Gramm to make the keynote speech at the NRA convention. That was simply a case of enthusiastic bootlicking. The man put his heart in it.

Sen. Robert Dole has switched on assault rifles and now is against the ban. Surely that does not mean he is a prisoner of the NRA for the whole campaign, so paralyzed by fear of its power that he cannot criticize an organization that undermines the authority and legitimacy of the law enforcement machinery he hopes one day to command? Surely?

Yes, like many other voters, I keep hoping that Dole, Gov. Pete Wilson of California and other Republican candidates have political backbone they have not yet displayed and will show it against the NRA. The thing is when?

Earlier this month I wrote that conservative politicians who did not have the courage to paint a line between what they consider real conservatism and the hate-peddling of right-wing armed bigots were betraying all those citizens who believe in the essential decency of mainstream American conservatism.

In came letters saying I was naive to believe that either conservative courage or decency existed.

Standing up to the fatter and meaner NRA would take even more honesty and courage than denouncing nuts of the woods, so I will expect more such letters.

But consider this: Clinton seems to grow in strength by facing the NRA. With an enemy like that, a man who wants to be president might make a lot of friends.