Will the NRA Ever Give Enough Ground?

It’s a question that will--and should--be asked over and over in the wake of the bloodiest school shooting spree in modern America: Can the National Rifle Assn. continue to justify its stand on gun possession and still think of itself as an organization of rational human beings?

Guns don’t kill people, as the NRA likes to point out, people kill people. In this case, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., enraged, irrational, depressed young men killed 14 of their fellow classmates and one teacher and wounded many more. But you’ll notice they didn’t club them to death with baseball bats. They used guns.

For years, the NRA has lobbied vigorously against virtually every piece of anti-gun legislation introduced around the country, from local to national levels. Americans should be able to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, the group posits, and legally be allowed to bear arms. Unconcealed, concealed, whatever. Well, it’s not the bearing part that’s so worrisome--it’s the using part.

I’m not a gun fan, but I understand why, in certain instances, a person might want keep one nearby, at home, for self-protection. Until there are a lot fewer guns on the street, it will be hard to convince worried residents in high-crime neighborhoods that a gun, even one they may not really know how to use, isn’t better real-life protection than a burglar alarm or a yappity dog.

But the NRA, despite its patronizing blather to the contrary, isn’t terribly interested in making sure the law-abiding, mostly minority citizens of Compton, East St. Louis, West Oakland or inner Houston maintain the ability to protect themselves with firearms. And while the organization is more diverse today than it has been in years, a demographic check of the NRA’s roster probably would reveal its members are, overwhelmingly, white, male and fairly politically conservative. They believe in the 2nd Amendment because bearing arms protects them from everyone else. And so every incursion, no matter how small or rational, is met with a blitzkrieg of resistance.

Intelligent compromise just isn’t possible in such circumstances, because there’s always an explanation for how each gun death tragedy is an exception to the rule. You’re probably starting to hear the rationalizations for Columbine High already. NRA President Charlton Heston, for instance, says tragedies like Columbine’s could be averted if armed guards are placed in every school across America. But an armed guard was at Columbine, and he was hopelessly outnumbered by the number and caliber of firearms the adolescent assassins carried and used to horrifying effect.

Gun advocates are right: A gun did not almost kill Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady; a person did. But guess what he was using? Same for Colin Ferguson on the Long Island Railroad when he calmly slaughtered and wounded a car full of homeward-bound commuters. And guns were merely the medium enraged children chose in sad places like Jonesboro, Ark., West Paducah, Ky., Springfield, Ore., Fayetteville, Tenn., Edinboro, Pa., Pearl, Miss., and now Littleton to dispatch their classmates en masse. In those scenarios, it was definitely people killing and wounding people. With guns.

Eventually, the cost will be too high for even the greediest politicians to support. They will begin to turn away NRA funding for their campaigns and do the right thing, and the long-postponed curtailment of guns will begin. But how many more schools will have to suffer the agonies we witnessed Tuesday in Littleton before this happens?

It is an ineluctable part of the human condition that we sometimes kill each other. If we didn’t do it with guns, we’d find another way. I’m not naive enough to assume that all homicide would cease if gun laws were more stringent. But I can do the math: A knife, a rock, a speeding vehicle cannot produce the kind of widespread devastation one angry 16-year-old can with a loaded semiautomatic weapon.

It’s time for the NRA to wake up and realize that eliminating citizen use of such weapons is something that can--and should--happen.