                           AM I THE NRA?
                          by L. Neil Smith

    This coming August I'll have been a Life member of the National Rifle
Association 22 years.  If you're not a member yourself, it may surprise you to
learn that, by the standards of that organization, born just after the War
between the States, this isn't particularly long.  I know people who've been in
the NRA twice as long as I have, and one or two who've been members three times
that number of years.

    It is long enough, however, to make me wonder, as one does upon occasion in
any long-term relationship, whether, knowing everything I know today, after 22
years, I'd do it again. Lately, the answer seems to be -- and I'm sure the NRA
will be devastated to learn this -- that I'd have to think about it.

    Knowing everything I know today, I'd want assurances this time that the NRA
is willing and able to perform the task that brought me to it.  I'd been in
Junior NRA as a Scout, but the course of my life had taken me away from
shooting (it seems hard to believe now) until just before that surrealistic
year of 1968 when, as a newly-fledged handgun owner (we'd had an incident in
the neighborhood) I recall sitting in front of the TV watching the
assassination of Bobby Kennedy, knowing the proclivity of liberals to blame
everyone but the perpetrator, and thinking, "Boy, we're gonna get it now."

    And so we did.

    And so I joined the NRA, although it took me five more years to get the
cash together for Life membership.  Since then, we've lost one fight after
another until today, the enfringements we deal with -- on an unalienable
individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right that was supposed to be
absolutely guaranteed -- are beyond anything most members of the NRA 22 years
ago would have believed.

    I was one of a few who saw the ugly future ahead, even then. Four years
after I became a Life member, I wrote my first science fiction novel, full of
dire predictions.  I also wrote letters, not just to politicans, but to editors
of gun magazines, even to the NRA's top banana, the guy who looked so much like
Nikita Khrushchev, urging them to stop fighting the Battle of the Second
Amendment as a holding action, a tactic we have seen was bound for inevitable
defeat, and adopt an offensive strategy.

    Those editors (with a remarkable exception whose good judgement I'll repay
by NOT associating his name with mine) laughed me off as an alarmist.  I never
heard from the bald guy at the NRA. And why should I?  Who was I? Just some
nobody, worried over what was about to happen to his unalienable individual,
civil, Constitutional, and human rights. For that matter, who am I today? Just
a 22-year Life member wondering whether he'd do it all over again, remember?

    As I say, I'd want assurances this time, sort of a prenuptial agreement,
before I slipped the metaphorical ring on my trigger finger.  My 22 years of
experience have taught me a few things -- a dozen of them, roughly -- about
defending the Second Amendment. For the life of me, I don't understand why they
haven't taught the same things to the NRA.

    FIRST, I'd want the NRA not to write any more legislation. It's said the
NRA leadership wrote the Gun Control Act of 1968 (before my time, if you'll
recall).  I know they wrote the Maryland Handgun Ban because they were afraid
that something worse was in the works. Fear seems to be their principal
motivation, not anger or determination. Invariably it steers them toward a
submissive, repulsive "strategy" of doing the enemy's work before he can do it
himself.

    SECOND, I'd want the NRA not to trade away any more rights it "thinks" are
less important for those it "thinks" are more so. The leadership would find, if
they ever asked, that their membership often disagrees with them.  The
"cop-killer" bullet fiasco comes to mind, where we got trivial reforms in a
devil's bargain -- letting them make some bullets illegal -- that serves our
enemies so well today that one particularly repellant and evil Senator has
based the sunset of his career on it.

    THIRD, I'd want the NRA to stop supporting government activities
irrelevant, even harmful, to the Second Amendment. Increasingly, gun owners see
that the War on Drugs, to name an example, was meant from the outset as a
calculated assault on the Bill of Rights, especially on the Second Amendment.
It must end if there's to be anything left of the Constitution in the 21st
century. That isn't the NRA's job, but it should butt out of the debate.  Its
"Operation Crimestrike", celebrating patently illegal incursions against
individual rights is nothing more than a sustained, humiliating grovel -- like
having to watch another kind of civil rights advocacy crawl up on the verandah
and whine, "See Massah, what a good boy Ah is?"

    FOURTH, in the same context, I'd want the NRA to disconnect all future
discussion of the Second Amendment from the totally unrelated topic of crime.
My rights have nothing whatever to do with anything anybody else does, right or
wrong. If the crime rate were only 1/10 that of today, my rights would be
unaffected.  Likewise, if the rate were TEN TIMES what it is, it would have
nothing whatever to do with my individual right to own and carry weapons.

    FIFTH, I'd want the NRA to reject all future argument about the "sporting
use" of weapons -- why look like an imbecile, pushing the AK-47 as a deer
rifle, when it meets the Founding Fathers' ACTUAL criteria so elegantly? -- in
favor of frank and frequent public reference to the original Constitutional
purpose for an armed citizenry, which is to intimidate the government.

    SIXTH -- and this may be the most important point I'll make, so pay
attention -- I'd want the NRA to adopt as its principal and
publicly-acknowledged objective the repeal or nullification of every weapons
law, at every level of government in America.  The Second Amendment is explicit
about this and requires no esoteric legal interpretation. Check the dictionary
meaning of "enfringe" if you doubt my word.

    SEVENTH, in support of that objective, I'd want the NRA to print ads, half
a page in every issue, in all its periodicals, reminding members of the duty
and power of an American jury to nullify any law it believes unjust or
unconstitutional. Alcohol prohibition died this way.  Gun prohibition could, as
well.  All it takes is eight and a third percent of the population, one
twelfth, to carry it off.

    EIGHTH, I'd want the NRA to establish programs to educate the police in
their absolute obligation (given the Nuremburg trials after World War II) to
enforce only those statutes -- and obey only those commands -- that are lawful,
i.e., constitutional. For many decades, the NRA has spent a lot of resources in
what can only be described as sucking up disgustingly to the military and the
cops; it's past time we got something out of it. (I'm an ex-reservist, my
brother's a deputy, and we both grew up in the Air Force, so don't give me a
hard time -- this is the truth, and we all know it.)

    NINTH, I'd want the NRA to give up the self-defeating notion that you can
keep guns OUT of the hands of the "wrong" folks, while simultaneously and
miraculously keeping them IN the hands of the "right" folks.  Each of us is
somebody else's badguy. In the last century, laws were passed to keep guns from
Italians and the Irish. Earlier this century it was blacks and now it's those
who believe in the Bill of Rights.  Get it straight:  the latter could never
have happened if the former hadn't been possible.  No more background checks,
NRA, no more prior restraint. History, ancient and recent, clearly shows that
if the badguys have guns, the only way to handle it is to make sure as many
goodguys have guns as possible.

    TENTH, while we're on the subject of prior restraint, I'd want the NRA to
abandon its strategically idiotic enthusiasm for government-controlled
concealed carry -- illegal under the Second Amendment -- in favor of
uncontrolled and legal "Vermont Carry". If it won't, I guarantee that in years
to come, someone will say: the NRA wants your name on this piece of paper
BEFORE you'll be allowed to exercise your unalienable individual,
Constitutional, civil, and human rights. The NRA wants your age, address,
phone, sex, race, social security number, photograph, and fingerprints as a
cost of doing what the Framers meant you to do without all that. In short, it
wants to impose the very system of gun and owner registration we've been
fighting more than 60 years!

    Huey Long, virtual dictator of Louisiana in the 1930s when Mussolini was
making the trains run on time, was asked by the press, "Will we ever have
fascism in America?"  "Yes," Long replied with a grin, "but we'll call it
ANTIfascism."  I can guarantee that someone will say all of this, because if
nobody else does, I will. And to the advocates of licensed carry, I say now:
don't you realize how pathetic you look, lying there with your OWN foot on your
neck?

    ELEVENTH, I'd want the NRA to make endorsements based on the candidate's
respect for the Second Amendment, regardless of his affiliation or its estimate
of his chances.  It's suicidal -- if only because it denies us leverage we'd
otherwise possess over the Republicans -- to say a third party candidate can't
win, and on that self-fulfilling basis, withhold endorsement that could give
him, and us, a victory. If "NRA" stands for "National Republican Association"
let it be said plainly and stop what amounts to a consumer fraud. If not, then
if a candidate's unwilling to be photographed for public consumption firing a
machine gun, a semiautomatic rifle with a long, curved magazine, or a pistol
with a fat, two-column grip, he can't be trusted whatever his affiliation, and
shouldn't be endorsed.

    TWELFTH, I'd want the NRA to reduce its Board of Directors to no more than
20, so they can lead instead of turning things over to a tiny, often misguided
elite.  One director I know told me the NRA is in trouble precisely because its
huge, unwieldy board flounders helplessly, leaving policy in the hands of a
"troika" with its own agenda.  It's time for that to end.

    In general, I'd give the NRA the same advice I give everybody else.  Never
let anybody keep you from enjoying your rights to the fullest, not for a day,
not for a minute. Never let anybody stand in your way. Never accept even the
most reasonable-sounding excuse for why you can't have everything you deserve.
Never accept compromise.

    Worse than thieves, murderers, or cannibals, those who offer compromise
slow you and sap your vitality while pretending to be your friends. They are
not your friends. Compromisers are the enemies of all humanity, the enemies of
life itself. Compromisers are the enemies of everything important, sacred, and
true.

    So, would I join the NRA all over again, after 22 years, knowing everything
I know today?  I guess I'm still thinking about it.

    Give me a reason, NRA.

---------------------------------

L. Neil Smith is the award-winning author of 19 books including
THE PROBABILITY BROACH, THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE, HENRY MARTYN, THE LANDO
CALRISSIAN ADVENTURES and PALLAS.  He is also the founder of the
Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus.

