The NRA's big guns

Meet the 10 biggest obstacles to gun reform legislation.

By Jake Tapper

Aug 12, 1999 | Poll after poll indicates that most Americans -- including most gun owners -- agree with Janet Reno about one thing. "It is common sense, pure common sense, to ensure that guns are only in the hands of those who know how to safely and lawfully use them and have the capacity and the willingness to do so," the attorney general said after the recent shooting at a Los Angeles-area Jewish day-care center.

But judging by their foot-dragging on new gun-control measures, our representatives in Washington seem to think that they represent a slice of America consisting entirely of Charlton Heston's bungalow.

That Congress continues to slay any and every gun law -- no matter how popular, incidental or seemingly reasonable -- is a tribute to the gun industry's powerhouse of a lobby, the National Rifle Association.

The NRA's superpowers originate in its wallet -- the group donated $1.6 million in PAC contributions to candidates for federal office last election cycle alone. From 1991-98, the NRA gave nearly $9 million to candidates, parties and PACs, all the more impressive compared with the relatively paltry sum ($146,000) offered up by Handgun Control Inc., Washington's largest anti-gun lobby. (Full disclosure: I worked for Handgun Control for six months in 1997.)

For the NRA, as for other big political contributors, money is leverage. The senators who voted against a recent measure that would have required background checks at gun shows received an average of $10,500 from pro-gun groups, while those who voted to close the loophole received, on average, closer to $300.

The sizable coffers also allow the NRA to present a united lobbying front on Capitol Hill. The NRA spent $2.25 million on lobbying in 1998 alone -- cash that allowed the interest group to employ 10 full-time lobbyists in addition to the six lobbying firms it keeps in its holster on retainer.

But it's overly simplistic to argue that the NRA rules with its wallet alone. The NRA has a mobilized and active grass-roots membership it claims to be 3 million strong. These are largely single-issue men (and some women) who write millions of postcards, attend town meetings and candidate forums and vote. As a result, they command attention from their representatives.

Money and membership are significant bullets in the NRA's Uzi, but there's more to it than that. Lost among all of this financial and electoral clout is the fact that the NRA's allies in Congress happen to agree with the NRA's hard-line stance on the Second Amendment.

Staunch NRA advocates have held the House leadership's feet to the fire in the face of the new push for gun restrictions on Capitol Hill, according to Kristin Rand of the Violence Policy Center.

She says House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., "is a problem, but he's not a true believer. Hastert has at least made some conciliatory statements. He's sent signals that he's sympathetic to a compromise on some of these issues. He's in no way an NRA stalwart. I suspect that if he didn't have [Whip Tom] DeLay and [Majority Leader Dick] Armey and [Rep. Bob] Barr tugging him so far right on this, Hastert would probably have let the amendment [closing the gun-show loophole] go."

Here, however, are the true believers -- in order, a list of the NRA's 10 best friends in Washington.

Next Page: The big guns

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