Well, E&F, you're right. 100%. Good news is, Ruger, Colt and others seem to agree, and have helped FIRE a moderate weasely rodent within the NRA and steer them in a more combative direction.
Political lesson #1: DO try not to attack your allies. With this, I'd say continuing the boycotts is bordering on lunacy:
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The Wall Street Journal -- March 2, 1999
By Paul M. Barrett and Vanessa O'connell
Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
Hard-liners in the gun industry have just issued a battle cry.
Facing a new wave of litigation, more militant elements within the industry have
orchestrated the ouster of trade-association executive Richard Feldman, whom they viewed as too inclined toward compromise and too quick to grandstand in the media.
Mr. Feldman's demise represents the triumph of the industry's more rigid factions and advocacy groups at a moment when it appeared that there might be serious consideration given to finding alternatives to a prolonged court fight with cities seeking to recover the public costs of gun violence. And it points to a period of all-out defense against the growing wave of municipal lawsuits,
combined with a legislative drive to pass state laws to block such litigation
altogether.
On Saturday, representatives of the trade group headed by Mr. Feldman, the American Shooting Sports Council, announced at a private industry gathering in Phoenix that he would turn in his resignation as soon as this week.
The abrupt ouster dooms quiet efforts by Mr. Feldman to open lines of communication to representatives of cities such as New Orleans, which have sued, and those such as Philadelphia, which are considering doing so. Several major gun and ammunition manufacturers had made Mr. Feldman's ouster a priority, but his fate was sealed when the politically powerful National Rifle Association decided last week to get him fired, according to some people familiar with the situation.
"The NRA has been gunning for him, and last week's headlines gave them the ammunition to get it done," said a senior industry official, referring to articles in The Wall Street Journal about preliminary contacts between Mr. Feldman's organization and an attorney for New Orleans. Officials with major gun manufacturers, including Colt's Manufacturing Co. and Sturm, Ruger & Co., which believe they can beat the city suits one-by-one in court, also backed Mr. Feldman's ouster.
Mr. Feldman has urged gun makers to mend their traditionally fractious ways, hire more high-powered lawyers who might be better-equipped to forge a national
settlement, and develop a more sophisticated public-relations pitch. But many of his clients, who have successfully fended off less-threatening lawsuits on their own for years, aren't yet convinced that they need a new strategy. Some of the leading defense litigators who have successfully represented the industry likewise have urged that Mr. Feldman be stifled.
In December, in fact, rumors began swirling that Mr. Feldman was in danger of being fired for his outspokenness, and he acknowledged at the time that "the long knives are out."
Yesterday, some industry executives said that no official steps had been taken. "To get rid of him would take some action from the board, and I have received no notices of any impending meetings," said Michael Saporito, senior vice president of RSR Group, a big gun distributor in Winter Park, Fla., and a member of the American Shooting Sports Council's board of directors. "This industry is rife with scuttlebutt."
But Mr. Feldman himself isn't denying the scuttlebutt. "I'm still executive director" of the trade group, but "that is subject to change within the next 24 hours to 48 hours," he said from his Atlanta headquarters.
James Baker, the NRA's chief lobbyist and a leading anti-Feldman activist, didn't return phone calls seeking comment.
Ironically, Mr. Feldman got the hook at an industry gathering devoted to fostering the sort of solidarity he had long advocated. The NRA, which represents gun owners, has dominated the gun debate for decades, but its
reputation for unswerving zealotry caused worry among manufacturers and suppliers in the late 1980s. In 1989, the industry formed a separate trade group, the American Shooting Sports Council, to represent its commercial and political interests. Two years later, Mr. Feldman, a former NRA staffer and veteran Republican political operative, was hired as the group's executive director.
His stance has angered the NRA before. For example, Mr. Feldman's opposition to the 1993 Brady gun-control law, which introduced a five-day waiting period and, more recently, "instant checks" of gun buyers' backgrounds, was less absolute than the NRA's.
In October 1997, he brokered a deal with the Clinton administration under which most major handgun makers agreed to include child-safety locks with their products. The NRA blasted participants in the deal for being "conned into the notion of making your business `acceptable' to a wider non-gun-owning audience." Mr. Feldman's compromise, nevertheless, ended efforts to legislate more
aggressive safety measures at that time.
The fact that Mr. Feldman, 47 years old, was increasingly portrayed in the media as a more moderate spokesman for the industry also angered senior officials of the NRA and of some gun manufacturers, including Sturm Ruger and Colt's. But Mr. Feldman, who jokes about his friendly relationship with the press and
occasionally refers disparagingly to industry "dinosaurs," appeared to thrive on the controversy.
Once pro-gun-control himself, Mr. Feldman has said that he began shifting his views while serving as a police officer in Cambridge, Mass., where he saw law-abiding store keepers who wanted gun licenses for self-protection. Today, he owns more than 100 firearms himself but says he rarely goes hunting or target
shooting.
His foes quickly grew impatient with Mr. Feldman's response to the municipal
litigation. He has been talking quietly for more than a year with Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell, who first raised the prospect of a city lawsuit in 1997. The two have discussed Mr. Rendell's ideas for greater regulation of the industry, including advertising restrictions, mandated safety technology and limits on the number of guns a consumer may buy per month or year.
The talks haven't produced a compromise, but Philadelphia and a number of other cities that Mr. Rendell has said could coordinate their efforts still haven't sued the industry. Five municipalities have sued so far.
Mr. Feldman explored a number of ways that the industry might short-circuit litigation. In late January, he ran into John Coale, a lawyer for New Orleans, at a briefing on the gun litigation at the conservative Washington Legal Foundation. According to an interview with Mr. Feldman last week, that meeting
prompted Mr. Coale to call and arrange a meeting with Robert Ricker, the American Shooting Sports Council's chief lobbyist in Washington.
At a half-hour meeting in mid-February between Messrs. Coale and Ricker, "the sum and substance was: Would we consider and be interested in having substantive discussion at some point in the future? The answer was yes," Mr. Feldman said last week.
Although Mr. Feldman had received approval for this foray from some of his board members, others in the industry and at the NRA exploded over what they saw as a signal of weakness. Of particular concern to the NRA, whose influence among gun buyers still commands tremendous industry respect, was the potential that any settlement deal would include new government controls on gun making or marketing.
"There will be no compromise" including such legislative restrictions, Mr. Baker, the top NRA lobbyist, said last week.
Exacerbating anxiety, last month a Brooklyn, N.Y., federal court jury -- for the first time ever -- found in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the families of seven shooting victims that 15 out of 25 gun manufacturers had distributed guns negligently. "That should have helped make [Mr. Feldman's] point that we need to have a more unified front, that more of the city suits were coming, that it would be tough to fight them one-by-one," said an industry official sympathetic to Mr. Feldman.
Instead, the Brooklyn verdict heightened tension and demands that Mr. Feldman depart.
Industry representatives headed for Phoenix late last week for a meeting aimed at creating a new umbrella organization that would emphasize links to hunting and target shooting and administer a new joint industry fund for legislative and legal costs. Each company is expected to contribute 1% of its sales to the fund, which will be overseen by the Hunting & Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation.
But the NRA and certain gun-company representatives arrived in the Arizona
desert with another agenda: Mr. Feldman's removal. In the days leading up to the
meeting, he had received some support from manufacturers that focus heavily on the law-enforcement market and therefore are more inclined to maintain good relations with municipal leaders, including the mayors of cities that have filed suit. These companies include Glock Inc. and Smith & Wesson Corp.
In a flurry of conference calls last week, however, it gradually became clear that companies urging a tougher line -- encouraged by the NRA's Mr. Baker -- wouldn't back off. Without consulting Mr. Feldman, members of his board decided to make a pre-emptive move.
Selecting as their spokesman Ray Oeltjen, an affable marketing vice president with Leupold & Stevens Inc. of Beaverton, Ore., which manufactures gun sights and other accoutrements, the American Shooting Sports Council board members announced to others at the Phoenix meeting Saturday that to avoid "counterproductive" feuding, Mr. Feldman would be asked to step down. Mr. Oeltjen told the gathering that Mr. Feldman, who wasn't at the meeting, had worked hard for the industry and that his removal caused great regret.
Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
) me on this one?