Pistol-Packin’ Baby May Give NRA a Formula for Its Future

Her straight brown hair flopping down over a cherubic face, Megan Burris seemed a typical 4-month-old infant as she nestled snugly in her mother’s arms recently at Anaheim Convention Center. Except for one thing: She’s a life member of the National Rifle Assn.

In fact, Megan was honored as the youngest among about 1,000 members who turned out for the NRA’s general membership meeting June 9, a raucous affair that hinged on fears that the group’s waning influence might mean that kids such as Megan won’t have guns when they grow up.

What a thought.

A thousand gun enthusiasts, most of them distanced from Megan by a few dozen years and their sex, cheered wildly as her mom held her proudly on stage. “Isn’t that something?” said a middle-aged man with a Southern drawl. Covering it all from the audience, I could have sworn I was missing something.

The sight was a bit unnerving, especially for me, whose shooting experience is limited to a silver-barreled cap gun that conjures up fond but non-lethal childhood memories.

“Ah, hah! That explains it!” I can almost hear the exclamations now from NRA members reading this.

In covering the NRA convention, I listened to defiant defenses of gun owners’ rights. I saw infighting and frustration over the NRA’s political fortunes. I watched angry NRA leaders assert time and again that Uzis, AK-47s and a range of assault-style arms are the weapons of choice for hunters and other law-abiding citizens, not drug dealers and criminals.

And I was confronted with a stream of angry diatribes and obscenities against the “liberal” press for its gun coverage. The only other NRA target that can stir up such anger is gun-control activist Sarah Brady, whose senses--gun owners say--have been dimmed by the tragedy of her husband’s shooting in the Reagan assassination attempt. The perception of media bias is so strong, I learned, that some NRA members want to try to take over CBS.

But no image was so striking to me as that of Megan, too young to pronounce “Second Amendment,” much less picket her local legislator for laxer gun restrictions, yet old enough to serve as a powerful symbol of the NRA’s future.

A resident of Anchorage, who came to town for the NRA convention, mom Sharon Burris said both her family and her husband’s are longtime hunters and NRA members; her in-laws had gotten Megan a $300 life membership within weeks of her birth. Burris wants her daughter “to learn to shoot and hunt and all that stuff. I think it’s important for her to know how to use a gun.”

Such arguments reverberated through the center.

“All guns are good guns!” said outgoing NRA President Joe Foss, who won a Medal of Honor in World War II shooting down enemy planes.

“Free men own guns--slaves don’t,” another NRA member told me.

“Gun laws mean nothing to crooks,” a third said.

Good bumper stickers, all. And NRA members are always ready to back up the slogans.

At the convention, for instance, I asked a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy why a legitimate gun owner would object to laws requiring handgun registrations or a waiting period on sales, intended to weed out possible troublemakers. The explanation, he shot back, is that the law-abiding citizen might have his gun stolen in a robbery and then be left defenseless when the felon inevitably returns a few days later.

The answers are so quick, the bumper stickers so catchy, that it becomes easy to forget all the gun-related tragedies that I and every other reporter have covered, tragedies that might have been prevented if an unwitting child such as Megan--or an enraged spouse, or a delinquent teen-ager--had not had easy access to a gun.

Joe Foss and the other NRA leaders want me to forget. That’s why, in exchange for letting me sit in on their board meeting at the convention, they made sure to hand me a membership application for my perusal. And that’s why Foss, in a parting comment as president, said members should make sure to grab any reporters they can and bring them to the shooting range to display “the doctrine of the great organization that the National Rifle Assn. is.”