Nra Party Could Be Showdown Factions Expected To Battle During Seattle Convention
For groups such as the National Rifle Association, annual conventions are supposed to be a show of unity and power - not the kind of event kicked off with your top staffer warning against an internal “coup d’etat” ripping the organization apart.
But this will be no ordinary gathering for the 20,000 or so gun enthusiasts due in Seattle this week for the NRA’s 126th-annual meeting.
Firearm exhibits, pep talks from pro-gun politicians, even a possible visit from actor Charlton Heston, the Second Amendment’s most glamorous defender, likely will be overshadowed by a nasty fight over control of one of the nation’s most potent political-interest groups.
And it’s being played out with the kind of hardball tactics and tough rhetoric the NRA usually reserves for battles against President Clinton, foes in Congress and gun-control advocates such as Sarah Brady.
A bloc of disgruntled NRA board members is set to renew efforts to remove Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who runs the organization’s day-to-day operations. Ads running in gun magazines attack LaPierre and the current NRA leadership for running a “fiscal madhouse,” charging that mismanagement has jeopardized the organization’s financial future and its clout.
“This is a battle for who’s going to control the direction and tone of the NRA,” says David Gross, a board member from Minnesota who wants to remove LaPierre. “Wayne’s calling this a ‘coup d’etat’ shows you how bankrupt his position is. He’s not king; he’s not president. He’s a hireling.”
Many of LaPierre’s supporters, who believe they have the votes to block any dump-LaPierre movement, blame what they term “thuggish attacks” on the ambitions of one man: Neil Knox, vice president of the NRA board.
Knox’s reputation for confrontational, give-no-quarter politics is reflected by the name of his independent gun-rights newsletter, The Hard Corps Report. A victory by the Knox forces, warn LaPierre loyalists, will only provide comfort to anti-gun forces and drive away mainstream gun-rights backers.
Says LaPierre: “All I know is, this isn’t really based on finances. This has been terribly destructive to the organization and the cause. We should be aiming our efforts at the people who want to disarm American citizens, not each other. This has to stop.”
NRA membership, which soared to 3.5 million after President Clinton’s 1992 election and passage of the federal assault-weapons ban, has dropped to under 3 million. Last fall, confronted with ongoing financial problems, the NRA had major layoffs at its headquarters in Fairfax, Va., a Washington suburb.
Gross contends that LaPierre kept the organization running in the black during the past three years only by repeated fund-raising appeals that have turned off many members and by sales of lifetime memberships at a big discount - essentially squandering long-term assets to cover short-term deficits.
Still, LaPierre insists “the NRA was collapsing in 1991. The NRA is in great shape now.”
LaPierre spent a good chunk of the NRA’s $80 million cash surplus moving the organization from its crumbling headquarters, expanding its television and radio operations and modernizing its computer system.
Allies also credit LaPierre with helping retool the NRA’s political strategy after Congress passed the Brady Bill.
In 1994, the NRA targeted many of its former congressional allies who strayed from the fold on the assault-weapons ban. The most powerful victim was former House Speaker Tom Foley, whose defeat was aided by NRA television ads and mailings. The internal feuding comes at a time when the NRA is relatively secure on the political front, thanks to Republican control of Congress and a conservative swing in many state legislatures.
The NRA has failed to win repeal of the assault-weapons ban or the Brady Bill. But it has gotten laws passed in at least a dozen states allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Trying to snuff out a movement aimed at declaring firearms a public-health hazard, the NRA last year persuaded Congress to eliminate funding for “gun violence” studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mike Beard, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Handgun Violence, watches the NRA’s internal strife with pleasure. It is making the NRA “move further right and sound even more shrill,” he says.
But he adds that it is wishful thinking by gun-control proponents, who have little chance of winning major victories in Congress right now, to believe the NRA has lost much political clout.
“I’ve heard their death pronouncements too many times before,” says Beard. “When they’ve got tens of millions of dollars and a couple of million members, it’s stupid to count them out.”
The five-day Seattle convention begins Friday at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. It will feature a sprawling collection of firearm exhibits, seminars on everything from historic black-powder shooting to methods of carrying concealed weapons and a banquet featuring Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, one of the NRA’s staunchest allies.
Backers of Washington state Initiative 676, which would require trigger locks and gun-safety training and licensing of all handgun owners, plan on using the convention to publicize their cause. Washington Ceasefire, which is collecting signatures for the measure, will hold a fund-raiser Friday in Seattle.
The real fireworks, though, are likely to come after the exhibits shut down, during the two-day meeting of the 76-member NRA board on May 5-6.
At a February board meeting, Gross said LaPierre’s foes fell just a handful of votes short of changing bylaws that would make it easier to remove him from office or weaken his position. But Sue King, a LaPierre supporter from Texas, says the preliminary counting of mail ballots for the board positions being contested at this year’s convention indicates the anti-LaPierre faction is losing strength.
The result won’t change the NRA’s basic philosophy on gun-rights legislation.
While Knox is often branded as “the hardliner,” the NRA under LaPierre recently launched a lobbying campaign for the veto of a bill in Virginia allowing counties to prohibit bringing weapons into recreation centers. And LaPierre caught flak and eventually apologized for a 1995 fund-raising letter that referred to federal agents as “jack-booted government thugs.”
LaPierre has made himself available for interviews before the convention, and his advisers make sure reporters get copies of an exhaustive article in the conservative American Spectator magazine that gives a blow-by-blow account of the NRA’s bloody backroom battles. LaPierre says it was important to get the story out because the gun lobby’s troubles were being “gleefully” splashed across the pages of the national media.
Irv Benzion of Issaquah, Wash., one of two NRA board members from the state, is upset over taking the feud public.
“I’m not in anyone’s camp. I’m in the NRA’s camp,” said Benzion. “This can’t keep going on like this.”