Over the half-dozen decades since The Old Man dragged me and my kid brothers to the National Rifle Association (NRA) range in East Wenatchee, “NRA” has always been a good conversation. Depending on where I might be in this country, or another, the association was responsible for millions of adults and kids learning to safely and responsibly handle firearms, or for Americans developing life-long marksmanship skills, or responsible for every bad thing any fool had done with a firearm in the previous whatever-number-of years. Few good pictures have ever been painted with a broad brush, yet there seems to be a number of them these days.
When I was a youngster, every kid I knew was in one or another NRA certified shooting program. Through match seasons over the years, we fired thousands of rounds of .22 caliber ammo under safe and controlled conditions. The Old Man always said it was his job to make sure we were safe around the firearms with which we were having so much fun. The NRA made that possible, and I have been ever grateful for the training.
Several years ago, I was talking with one of my fellow profs about the upcoming Kittitas County Friends of the NRA banquet, and its support of the NRA Foundation for firearms safety training, local shooting facilities and other programs for all ages across the country. Somewhere in there, I mentioned my strong support of the Second Amendment and my long-held belief that every kid and adult in the country ought to have training in the safe handling and use of firearms.
My friend got pretty worked up, listing tragedies involving firearms in the hands of unstable people. In his opinion, the firearms were the problem. He was dismayed at my support for firearms rights. “You’re an ordained minister, for God’s sake,” he said, “so how can you support these ‘firearm rights?’”
Hmmm. In 1991, the Colorado State Legislature was debating a bill to limit the ability of some churches to practice their religions as they saw fit, and deny them recognition unless they met some new standard. On a warm sunny day, a couple hundred of us were on the street outside the Capitol, representing denominations and practices from Wiccan to Catholic.
I had just returned from a trip to St. Louis and a series of interviews with NRA officials, during which I had just been hired to fill a newly-created field rep position in Denver. I would finalize the paperwork in Washington, DC. One of my fellow picketers overheard part of a conversation about the job, and moved out of his place in our picket/protest line to rag on me about it.
His initial comments were pretty raw. The NRA, as he saw it, was the greatest evil on the planet, and to work with them on behalf of firearms rights – even if my job was more about education and safety training – clearly put me in bed with the devil himself.
Others gathered. When he paused, I asked him why we were all in the street. “It is our right,” he said, “and these guys are messing with our First Amendment rights to freedom of religious practice!” I finally asked, “So, what is the Second Amendment?”
“It’s that gun stuff,” one of the women said, “but it’s only for the army, but a lot of people disagree.” That debate raged until someone opened a pocket book of the Bill of Rights (the first ten of our 27 Constitutional Amendments). “Okay,” Antagonist said. “So it’s a right, but we don’t have to support it. It’s not why we are here. Let’s get back to business. And,” he looked at me, “you really ought to be thinking about your priorities…”
As he turned, I said, “So, it’s okay to stand for religious rights and freedom of speech, but wrong to stand for the right to bear arms? I can’t help but wonder why the First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech are immediately followed by the Second Amendment declaring our rights to bear arms… Maybe it’s to ensure the first? Don’t we have to stand up for all our rights, if we expect to keep any of them?” He sighed, “Yeah, okay… I just never thought about the NRA as some kind of ally – that’s weird.”
As it turned out, Wayne LaPierre reorganized the NRA before I went to DC. We never opened that Denver office.
May 12 is our local Friends of the NRA banquet. In partnership with many others, it will support ranges, equipment and safety training. Get tickets and info from Brian Huss (509-607-1677) or [email protected]. No more than half the money raised will go to meals and production costs, and all net proceeds will go to qualified local, state and national programs. Our state programs annually raise nearly half a million bucks – half of it coming back to shooting safety and training in our Washington. The rest goes to national programs such as Eddie Eagle (teaching firearm safety rules to youngsters), Y.E.S. (Youth Education Summit), and other educational and safety shooting programs. Since 1990, the foundation has awarded nearly $369 million in grant funding in support of the shooting sports. See for yourself at www.nrafoundation.org.
Plenty of people are still conflicted about firearms and the NRA, but I wonder what would happen to firearm accidents and firearms violence if safety and marksmanship programs were required of every kid in the United States?
There is a seat for you at the banquet and in the discussion. Come play on May 12.
I wish Mr. Huckabay’s article had said more about how the reflex discussion of our Second Amendment doesn’t seem to approach the current need to discuss how we’re to own guns in this day and age. We have a right to bear arms; that’s hard to argue. But how? Should we all keep military grade weapons? Probably most would argue that’s not palatable for a bunch of reasons. So who should?
The Second Amendment seems to produce a gut response of protectionism for those I’ll call gun rights super-enthusiasts. Justification I’ve repeatedly heard is that any limitation of gun rights poses an inroad to more regulation and should be avoided at all costs.
A second concern I often hear is that our country was founded on the right of civilians to defend against a military government uprising against we civilians. OK, but I struggle to see what that would actually look like today with drones, chemicals and who knows what else. And consider how we might actually coordinate something like a resistance defensive if our cell towers were taken down during said uprising. No Facebook! We’d be doomed. How many of us kept our ham radios? Not to mention that US history hasn’t treated standoffs very well.
If there’s a military standoff coming soon, we’ll be responsible for having voted it in so there’s that. Our better defense is to be well informed when we get out to vote.
Back to gun present and future. Couldn’t we have the real discussion of how to let us gun owners have our guns but limit mass-killing guns that fall into the hands of hostile documented persons, hostile mentally ill persons, and immature persons. There’s got to be a reasonable way to do that.
We have a right to bear arms. We have a need to do something about wanton killing due to someone having a difficult go of it with mass killings of innocents the result. Can’t we all take a deep breath and talk without defensiveness – including the NRA? They’re in an awesome position to inject a bit of wisdom in a floundering bit of our society. Please! Let’s hear the discussion and get somewhere by consensus. We can do this.