Glenn E. Meyer
New member
In other posts, I have argued against the tool and sport arguments. I have also argued that the old strategies don't work and cries of getting the hunters and sports shooters involved are not that useful. Here's why:
From the NY Times
March 21, 2000
Armed but Not Alarmed
By RICHARD FORD
find it hard to believe that my current hunting buddies and I have found a
natural mouthpiece for our interests in the person of Wayne LaPierre and the
National Rifle Association. For one thing, we have virtually no use for assault
weapons when we're out there hunting pheasants and ducks and deer. These
animals aren't that dangerous.
For another thing, when we're sitting around the campfire we never speak in the
tumid rhetoric of armageddon and violent conflict which Mr. LaPierre and his
N.R.A. associates use much of the time. Like most Americans, we're happy when
the government stays out of our personal business. But my bird-shooting pals (all
voters, by the way, some Republicans, some Democrats, some Libertarians) don't
tend to think that Washington's at war with us or that our legally appointed federal
agents are "jack-booted thugs" or bucket-helmeted Nazis intent on imprisoning us
in our own country (as an infamous N.R.A. fund-raising letter put it).
We don't believe -- as a former N.R.A. vice president, Neal Knox, apparently does
believe -- that John F. Kennedy's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassinations were
part of a drug-induced gun-control conspiracy aimed at "disarming the free world."
And we certainly don't think that by striving to restrict felons from gun ownership,
restraining ordinary citizens' access to assault weaponry, and trying generally to
reduce the availability of handguns, President Clinton has "blood . . . on his
hands" and is guilty of tolerating violence in the land, as Mr. LaPierre said
recently.
Maybe we've all just been out in the woods too long and gotten fuzzy. But the
president's intent actually seems to be to lessen violence in America, whereas the
N.R.A.'s gibberish sounds like the big lie strategy -- the corrupted logic and bizarre
exaggeration associated with doomsday cults, the Montana Freemen, Aryan
Nation types and other single-issue, antigovernment crazies who rely on apathy,
sloganeering and fear to force their points into prominence.
What my friends and I do understand is that for hunters and target shooters,
governmental regulation has long been part of our lives. The need and warrant of
regulation come with increasing human population, with diminishing wilderness
and wildlife numbers, with private ownership of land, with American prosperity --
with modernity itself. It's government's responsibility, using its licensing and
restrictive authorities, to protect our ever-diverse and complicated populace, and
to maintain a balance among our precious and conflicting interests in order that we
can share the planet and its bounty as peaceably as possible.
So we don't shoot a hundred pheasants a day; we shoot three. We purchase
hunting licenses. We use steel rather than lead pellets for migratory game birds.
We are routinely required by law to pass a hunters' safety course before we go
into the field with guns. And this is simply because guns (as well as people) are
very dangerous, and we don't want to kill anyone. Such ordinary and sensible
regulations rely on, among other things, our belief that in a sane and democratic
nation regulation may become excessive, but need not, because reasonable people
are watchful and can be relied on to do sensible things.
All this is enough to make one think that the "natural" alliance between the
usually moderate and conservation-minded American hunter, and the
fear-mongering paranoiacs running the N.R.A., isn't an alliance at all. Hunters and
the "gun culture" may have some crossovers, but they have few inherent affinities
if all they can be said to share is gun ownership. Indeed, when sportsmen wake up
to this garish incongruity, either the N.R.A. leadership will start making sense or
the organization will cease to hold our attention.
Note well: the gun-control issue will be a hot one in the November election. New
York Gov. George Pataki -- a Republican -- and Vice President Al Gore have now
clarified their quite sensible positions. American hunters, whoever you are, you
might think extra long this time about your own as well as the country's well-being,
and then once you view your convictions clearly, act on them at the polls.
Richard Ford is a novelist
A followup letter
Voices of Hunters, and the N.R.A.
Related Articles
Armed but Not Alarmed (March 21, 2000)
Letters Index
To the Editor:
Richard Ford does a commendable job (Op-Ed, March 21) distancing sport hunters
from the increasingly fringe National Rifle Association. Hunters and sport
shooters should either take over the leadership of the N.R.A. or form a new group
and completely abandon it.
Then the N.R.A.'s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, can form the National
Handgun and Assault Weapons Association and see how far that gets him.
MICHAEL STAHL
From the NY Times
March 21, 2000
Armed but Not Alarmed
By RICHARD FORD
find it hard to believe that my current hunting buddies and I have found a
natural mouthpiece for our interests in the person of Wayne LaPierre and the
National Rifle Association. For one thing, we have virtually no use for assault
weapons when we're out there hunting pheasants and ducks and deer. These
animals aren't that dangerous.
For another thing, when we're sitting around the campfire we never speak in the
tumid rhetoric of armageddon and violent conflict which Mr. LaPierre and his
N.R.A. associates use much of the time. Like most Americans, we're happy when
the government stays out of our personal business. But my bird-shooting pals (all
voters, by the way, some Republicans, some Democrats, some Libertarians) don't
tend to think that Washington's at war with us or that our legally appointed federal
agents are "jack-booted thugs" or bucket-helmeted Nazis intent on imprisoning us
in our own country (as an infamous N.R.A. fund-raising letter put it).
We don't believe -- as a former N.R.A. vice president, Neal Knox, apparently does
believe -- that John F. Kennedy's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassinations were
part of a drug-induced gun-control conspiracy aimed at "disarming the free world."
And we certainly don't think that by striving to restrict felons from gun ownership,
restraining ordinary citizens' access to assault weaponry, and trying generally to
reduce the availability of handguns, President Clinton has "blood . . . on his
hands" and is guilty of tolerating violence in the land, as Mr. LaPierre said
recently.
Maybe we've all just been out in the woods too long and gotten fuzzy. But the
president's intent actually seems to be to lessen violence in America, whereas the
N.R.A.'s gibberish sounds like the big lie strategy -- the corrupted logic and bizarre
exaggeration associated with doomsday cults, the Montana Freemen, Aryan
Nation types and other single-issue, antigovernment crazies who rely on apathy,
sloganeering and fear to force their points into prominence.
What my friends and I do understand is that for hunters and target shooters,
governmental regulation has long been part of our lives. The need and warrant of
regulation come with increasing human population, with diminishing wilderness
and wildlife numbers, with private ownership of land, with American prosperity --
with modernity itself. It's government's responsibility, using its licensing and
restrictive authorities, to protect our ever-diverse and complicated populace, and
to maintain a balance among our precious and conflicting interests in order that we
can share the planet and its bounty as peaceably as possible.
So we don't shoot a hundred pheasants a day; we shoot three. We purchase
hunting licenses. We use steel rather than lead pellets for migratory game birds.
We are routinely required by law to pass a hunters' safety course before we go
into the field with guns. And this is simply because guns (as well as people) are
very dangerous, and we don't want to kill anyone. Such ordinary and sensible
regulations rely on, among other things, our belief that in a sane and democratic
nation regulation may become excessive, but need not, because reasonable people
are watchful and can be relied on to do sensible things.
All this is enough to make one think that the "natural" alliance between the
usually moderate and conservation-minded American hunter, and the
fear-mongering paranoiacs running the N.R.A., isn't an alliance at all. Hunters and
the "gun culture" may have some crossovers, but they have few inherent affinities
if all they can be said to share is gun ownership. Indeed, when sportsmen wake up
to this garish incongruity, either the N.R.A. leadership will start making sense or
the organization will cease to hold our attention.
Note well: the gun-control issue will be a hot one in the November election. New
York Gov. George Pataki -- a Republican -- and Vice President Al Gore have now
clarified their quite sensible positions. American hunters, whoever you are, you
might think extra long this time about your own as well as the country's well-being,
and then once you view your convictions clearly, act on them at the polls.
Richard Ford is a novelist
A followup letter
Voices of Hunters, and the N.R.A.
Related Articles
Armed but Not Alarmed (March 21, 2000)
Letters Index
To the Editor:
Richard Ford does a commendable job (Op-Ed, March 21) distancing sport hunters
from the increasingly fringe National Rifle Association. Hunters and sport
shooters should either take over the leadership of the N.R.A. or form a new group
and completely abandon it.
Then the N.R.A.'s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, can form the National
Handgun and Assault Weapons Association and see how far that gets him.
MICHAEL STAHL