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How NRA’s true believers converted a marksmanship group into a mighty gun lobby

By Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz,January 12, 2013

(Page 5 of 6)

The NRA is now headquartered outside the Beltway, in Fairfax, and, according to its 2010 filing with the IRS, has 781 employees and 125,000 volunteers. Annual revenue tops $200 million. It’s a tax-exempt, “social welfare” organization with the self-described mission “to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, to promote public safety, law and order and the National defense.”

LaPierre received $960,000 in compensation from the NRA and related organizations, according to the 2010 documents. Kayne B. Robinson, executive director of general operations, was paid more than $1 million. Chris Cox, head of the ILA, made $666,000. NRA President David Keene, a longtime conservative activist who was elected in 2011, is unpaid.

Last election cycle, the NRA spent about $20 million on federal election campaigns, according to Opensecrets.org. It has endowed a professorship at George Mason University (the Patrick Henry Professorship of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment). It’s a prodigious publisher of newsletters and glossy magazines, including American Rifleman, which in 2011 reported a paid circulation of 1.8 million. The NRA has a weekly TV show (“American Rifleman Television” on the Outdoor Channel) and a satellite news service, NRA News. The Web site is as slick as they come (as it loads on the screen, the site informs the visitor, “The full NRA experience requires a broadband connection”).

Beyond the financial muscle, the NRA has people power. The NRA can inundate local, state or congressional offices with phone calls via a single action alert to the membership.

Cleta Mitchell, an NRA board member, says, “Obama famously referred to people who ‘cling to guns and religion.’ He was right. We do. And we are proud of it. This is about abiding principles, and people take action when they think someone or some group is taking away precious values.”

Grover Norquist, the influential tax activist and an NRA board member since 2000, believes that gun-control advocates fail to recognize that their efforts are viewed by many gun owners as a message that says, “You don’t like me.” That message blots out all other efforts to communicate, he says. And no one, he says, votes for a candidate simply because that candidate is in favor of gun control. Millions of voters, however, will vote against a candidate on that single issue, he says. He thinks Democrats’ efforts to pass new gun laws will backfire.

“The D’s keep coming back to this. This is so visceral to them,” Norquist says. “Again, it’s an expression of contempt for Middle America. They don’t like you and yours and don’t think you should be in charge of the capacity to take care of yourself. They know they can’t do this for you, but they’ve hired these nice people to draw chalk outlines of your kids, and that’s supposed to make you feel better.”

William J. Vizzard, a retired ATF official who is now a criminal justice professor at California State University at Sacramento, says the NRA is not trying to be like other Washington organizations seeking to influence legislation.

“The NRA is a populist lobby,” he says. “They get support when people are mad and stirred up. They want the attention. They’re not interested in fixing things. They want to stir things up, and the more they stir things up, the more members they get and the more money they make. What do they gain by compromising? Nothing.”

In the fall of 2009, Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, convened a gun conference that brought police chiefs and law enforcement officials to Washington from around the country. Wexler also reached out to the NRA. The NRA representative remained largely silent, and at the end of the day Wexler sensed that the NRA had showed up merely to say no.

“They were not willing to accept what police chiefs who deal with shooting and firearms every day were saying,” Wexler says. “It was like, we don’t really care what you’re saying because this is what we think. The NRA has a preconceived idea about what should be done. And that is nothing.”

The NRA keeps track of gun-control supporters and makes lists. The NRA compendium of “National Organizations With Anti-Gun Policies” includes AARP, the AFL-CIO, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — just from the A’s on the list. (Toward the end of the list is The Washington Post.)

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