NRA Loses Its Political Firepower

Whether admired or reviled, this much can be said of the National Rifle Assn.: The course of the gun control issue in the U.S. turns directly on its fortunes. Thanks in part to a receptive Bush administration, the organization would seem to be better positioned than at any time in its history to enact its agenda.

“The Clinton anti-gun legacy has been almost entirely erased,” David Kopel of the Independence Institute wrote in January.

Yet for all its resources, organizational acumen and rhetoric, the nation’s premier gun organization has been shooting blanks lately. It is a political player whose reputation exceeds its reach. The NRA has failed to expand its base or to persuade that base to vote GOP, which it must do to maintain its standing with the administration.

In 2000 and 2002, the organization launched massive campaigns to enlist union members and women. Both efforts failed.

The NRA took credit for Al Gore’s loss of Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia, any one of which would have delivered him the presidency. But among these, only West Virginia has any consistent recent history of voting Democratic.

More significant was the failure of the NRA to push larger swing states into the Bush column, including union-heavy states like Pennsylvania (which has the second-largest NRA membership next to Texas), Michigan and Illinois, or smaller swing states, including Iowa, Wisconsin or New Mexico.

Nor is there evidence that women, who have been courted by the gun industry, are suddenly becoming gun owners or abandoning their traditional support for stronger gun laws. In fact, the NRA base has shrunk. By the end of 2003, NRA membership had dropped 20% since 2001, from 4.3 million to 3.4 million members. It also reported a $100-million debt as of 2003.

The NRA’s most significant policy accomplishments have yielded little. In 2001, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft reversed more than 50 years of Justice Department policy by asserting that the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms applied to private individual gun ownership and was not limited to citizen militia service. Yet even Ashcroft has proved unwilling to extend this “right” to dozens of gun-related prosecutions. The result after three years has been no actual change in gun-owner rights.

And in January, supporters slipped into an omnibus appropriations bill a provision to destroy gun background-check records after 24 hours instead of 90 days. But this change, which will have no effect on law-abiding gun owners, may well prove embarrassing to the gun lobby, especially if there’s another case like one from November. In that instance, the Justice Department had to issue a frantic order to the FBI to increase scrutiny of gun buyers after discovering that 12 people on the government’s terrorist watch list had purchased firearms in 2003.

Most significant, the NRA’s two top priorities have missed their targets. The NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform in Congress and in the courts, but it failed in both instances. Then the NRA pushed for a bill to shield gun manufacturers from lawsuits. On the verge of what seemed an easy win, the NRA pulled the plug. Supporters of a bill to extend the assault weapons ban had attached it and a measure to close a gun-show loophole to the liability legislation. Rejecting a compromise, the NRA stunned the Senate by withdrawing its support for its bill.

For all these reasons, expect the politically savvy Bush administration to soft-pedal the NRA’s support. The reason will be the one that explains the gap between its reputation and reality: The NRA’s dreaded political clout ebbs as public exposure and attention rise.