NRA Leaders Reject Clinton’s Denunciation

As thousands of gun owners gathered for the National Rifle Assn.’s annual meeting here Friday, the group’s leaders brushed off President Clinton’s suggestion that it return the donations received from a controversial fund-raising letter that referred to “jackbooted government thugs.”

At a meeting with law enforcement officials at the White House, Clinton for the second time this week denounced the mailing, which was sent to all 3.5 million NRA members in March. The President said that the organization should donate the proceeds to the families of police officers killed in the line of duty.

“They ought to give up the ill-gotten gains from their bogus fund-raising letter,” the President declared.

But NRA leaders dismissed the President’s remarks as grandstanding and said that they had no intention of following his suggestion. “It’s all political,” said Tanya K. Metaksa, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Affairs.

The dust-up with Clinton underscored the turmoil surrounding the nation’s leading organization of gun owners as it gathered for its 124th annual meeting. Over the last month the NRA has been embroiled in escalating controversy over its sharp criticism of federal law enforcement agents, particularly those of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws.

Earlier this month, former President George Bush resigned from the NRA, citing the language in the same March fund-raising letter that Clinton criticized.

On Wednesday, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne R. LaPierre said that the letter--which drew about 1 million responses and sources say is expected to raise as much as $6 million--meant to refer only to specific allegations of abuse that the NRA has compiled. LaPierre said he is sorry it was interpreted to criticize “all federal law enforcement officers.”

All of this has taken place against the emotional backdrop of last month’s bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City. Timothy J. McVeigh, the principal suspect in that crime, reportedly was obsessed with the federal raid against the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex.--which has also been a principal target of NRA criticism, often in extremely heated rhetoric.

*

Citing such language, a small group of NRA dissidents led by a former board member from Texas called a press conference Friday to denounce the organization’s direction and charge that the current leadership has depleted its reserves through an overly expensive direct-mail drive to build membership.

“What we are concerned about is the direction the zealots are taking the organization,” said Dave Edmondson, the former NRA board member.

Edmondson was joined at his press conference by three other critics, including Wayne Anthony Ross, a board member from Alaska. Ross described himself as an ardent opponent of gun control but said that the hard-line tactics embodied by the language in LaPierre’s letter are proving counterproductive.

“We didn’t lose the big battles prior to 1991” when LaPierre moved into the organization’s top staff position, Ross said. He noted that passage of the so-called Brady bill, which requires a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases, occurred in 1993 and that last year Congress approved and Clinton signed a measure banning 19 types of semiautomatic weapons.

*

Ross estimated that one-third of the group’s 76-member board is critical of the organization’s direction. But a slate of candidates for the board backed by Edmondson and other critics was soundly defeated in the election, NRA officials said. The results are to be announced today.

“The membership likes the direction we’re taking,” said former NRA President Robert K. Corbin, who still sits on the organization’s board.

Edmondson argued that the election results stemmed from the reality that only a small minority of NRA members vote in the board elections.

Still, among the NRA members milling through a huge exhibition hall crowded with dealers displaying guns and ammunition, there seemed relatively little anxiety about the controversies swirling around the organization.

“Overall I think the membership is behind the leadership,” said C.P. Chaconas, a retired oral surgeon from Silver Spring, Md. “This exposure, though certainly not satisfying, will strengthen the NRA.”

Jeffrey E. Feicht, a bank courier from Alhambra, Calif., said he is glad LaPierre had issued the statement indicating that he did not mean to tar all federal law enforcement officials as “jackbooted thugs.” But he added: “With all the incidents that have been cited [of abuse], congressional inquiries are definitely called for.”

Nor did Bush’s resignation appear to make much impression on those arriving under a sizzling Arizona sun. Though the NRA supported Bush in 1988, his standing with the group dropped precipitously after he instituted a ban on the importation of assault weapons in 1989. The organization remained neutral in the 1992 presidential race.

Still, several sources close to the organization said that LaPierre’s statement this week suggested the leadership was feeling, in the words of one NRA political adviser, “more besieged than they let on.”

At the White House on Friday, Clinton attempted to roil the waters further. “No one has a right to attack those who uphold the law,” he said. “I hope the NRA knows by now that anyone who pretends that police officers are the enemy is only giving aid and comfort to criminals who are really the enemy.”

The International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, the largest organization of police executives in the world, announced that it is responding to the NRA’s verbal attacks on federal agents by barring the organization from staging exhibits at the group’s annual conference in October.

“We are outraged at the NRA’s repeated, slanderous rhetoric against federal agents,” President John Whetsel, police chief in Choctaw, Okla., said in a statement from the group’s headquarters in Alexandria, Va.

“Such attacks cannot help but suggest that the NRA leadership is anti-law enforcement.”