Gun Crusaders

The NRA's Culture War

Scott Melzer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780814764503
• eBook ISBN: 9780814795972
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Social Sciences

Gun Crusaders is a fascinating inside look at how the four-million member National Rifle Association and its committed members come to see each and every gun control threat as a step down the path towards gun confiscation, and eventually socialism. Enlivened by a rich analysis of NRA materials, meetings, leader speeches, and unique in-depth interviews with NRA members, Gun Crusaders focuses on how the NRA constructs and perceives threats to gun rights as one more attack in a broad liberal cultural war. Scott Melzer shows that the NRA promotes a nostalgic vision of frontier masculinity, whereby gun rights defenders are seen as patriots and freedom fighters, defending not the freedom of religion, but the religion of individual rights and freedoms.

PART I
Defending Guns, Defending Masculinity

1

Frontier Masculinity, America’s Gun Culture, and the NRA

On Sunday morning in Reno I caught an early bus to attend the NRA Women’s Breakfast. As we approached the convention center, we passed an adult cabaret eager to drum up some convention visitor business. Missing an apostrophe, a neon sign out front announced something I can neither confirm nor deny: “NRA Partys Here.” After getting off the bus, I struck up a conversation with a member also on his way to the breakfast. Floyd is an affable Texan in his sixties, wearing dark-blue jeans, tan boots, a thin dark-striped white button-down shirt, and an NRA hat. A friendly Texas drawl spills from his white mustache-covered mouth. Floyd said he figured he would go to the breakfast because nothing else was going on at that time and he wanted to “check out what they’re doing.” As we walked to the breakfast and talked about the NRA, guns, and hunting, he excitedly recalled shooting his first spring turkey eleven years ago and shooting another not long before coming here to Reno.

Floyd and I found the right room and sat at a table full of women. Roughly one hundred people, about a quarter of them men, filtered through the breakfast buffet. Several corporate sponsors of guns and gear had banners hanging on the wall, and a portion of the video Hunting with the Women of the NRA played on a large screen, on mute, in the back of the room. At our table sat three women in their fifties, including Kathy, a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and Tracy, a ranch owner from Texas. They were heavily involved in “Women in the NRA” programs, as both were panelists in the session that would follow on women, hunting, and shooting. In an attempt to break the ice, Floyd shared a joke about a caveman and cavewoman: “The cavewoman’s dragging a kill by its tail and holding a big club. The caveman says, ‘I’m supposed to be the hunter and you’re supposed to be the gatherer.’ The cavewoman replies, ‘It was standing on something I wanted to gather.’” Everyone politely laughed, but as he broke eye contact with Tracy, I saw her face sour in disgust.

Floyd continued, undeterred, but only dug a deeper hole for himself. “In my experience,” he said, “women are okay with the hunting, but they don’t like to dress the kill.” The women at the table, all experienced hunters, promptly disagreed. When Floyd asked if they have enough women instructors for women’s hunts and training, Kathy said they never have enough women instructors. Floyd offered his services, though I began to sense that he was more interested in meeting single women than increasing women’s interest in firearms. This was an NRA-sponsored event focused on building women’s participation in the organization and in hunting and shooting, yet here was an older man reminding everyone just whose gun culture and gun group it is. With few exceptions and throughout their respective histories, the gun culture and the NRA have been led by conservative white men. True, a handful of women have played key roles in the gun culture and the NRA, and many more have been less celebrated participants, but full acceptance in either requires assimilation into frontier masculinity. Adopt the culture’s values, beliefs, and in most cases hierarchical power divide between women and men, or expect to be marginalized by those men.

Event speakers informed us that this Women’s Breakfast, only the second ever held, brought in $10,000 for the women’s endowment, a tiny drop in the NRA bucket and evidence that even assimilation does not necessarily lead to enthusiastic acceptance. NRA leader Wayne LaPierre appeared toward the end of the breakfast to show his support, but clearly women are not the NRA’s target audience. This is not surprising, as General Social Survey data reveal that women’s gun-ownership rates have hovered at a consistently low rate of 9–11% ever since 1980.¹ The weekend meetings and gun show drew more than forty thousand people, and most of the sessions I attended in small rooms and large auditoriums were standing-room only. The Women’s Breakfast, and the session that followed, “Hunting and Shooting with the Women of the NRA,” however, did not enjoy strong turnouts. Some of the women from the breakfast, including Floyd, spilled over into this next session. There were only about sixty people, evenly divided between women and men.

This follow-up session presented the hunting video from the breakfast but with the volume turned on. After a woman shoots a pig, she and her hunting partner, Sue, head over to see if it’s dead. Sue has her partner nudge the pig from behind with her foot, while Sue keeps the rifle on it. She wants to make sure the pig is dead, because “you don’t want a mad pig in your pocket.” Later, during the question-and-answer period, audience members wanted to know how they could encourage more women to become involved in hunting and shooting. One woman said that the women she knows are more interested in firearms for self-defense. Several men offered their support for increasing women’s involvement in shooting, with Floyd joking that he would be happy to help out but he’s “just a man.” Kathy, one of the session panelists, as well as our breakfast companion, responded that they needed men, too. To Floyd’s delight, she told him it would be great if he helped out as an instructor.

All the women at this session referred to one another as “ladies” or sometimes “girls,” which held true for the entire weekend. Kathy told a couple of entertaining “lady” stories during the session. She was not raised around hunting but was introduced to it when she met her husband. Before her first outing she bought a new outfit, not realizing “I’d be spending the day in a ditch picking up dead birds!” The audience laughed knowingly—a man would never wear new clothes to go hunting! Despite the session’s focus on shattering myths about women and hunting, gendered roles were not seriously challenged.

Kathy related another story about a “lady” coming to her ranch to hunt. The woman had recently purchased a Glock pistol, and she telephoned Kathy and said: “I got a Glock, let’s go kill something!” Kathy reeled in the new gun owner, starting her off with lessons using long guns. Another panel member, an editor for the NRA’s American Hunter magazine, followed Kathy, offering his views on increasing women’s presence in the magazine. He said that neither women nor men want to read articles “pandering” to women, such as “Jane likes to shoot and hunt. Jane hunts deer.” His readers, he said, “are mostly good ol’ boys” and they would stop reading the magazine if it included those kinds of stories. Instead, he incorporates women’s presence into the magazine with pictures of women hunting or stories written by women who have technical advice to share.

Talking about gender in such a direct manner is not typical of the NRA. Although hunting, shooting, and gun rights activism are dominated by men, the NRA prefers to think of itself as a gender- (and race-) neutral organization. This attitude is consistent with their broader politics, which leans toward a libertarian approach to individual rights and responsibilities. When the American Hunter editor mentioned that several higher-ups in the magazine’s chain of command were women, he didn’t pause before explaining that they were hired not because of “quotas” but because they were “the most qualified applicants,” the best available. Preferential treatment is an anathema to frontier masculinity, even when it is for individuals who have been historically marginalized or discriminated against. The philosophy of treating people differently, especially based on group affiliation, is the antithesis of the kind of freedom that NRA members fight for and revere as the bedrock of the American frontier—individual rights and responsibilities. At one point, Kathy told us that she had learned ten two-letter words from a politician: “If it is to be, it is up to me.”

This do-it-yourself attitude is the basic philosophy of most NRA members. Need protection? Buy a gun and learn to shoot. Not earning enough money to make ends meet? Work harder. Can’t afford child care or health care? Don’t expect the government to bail you out. Freedom and self-reliance are indivisible. A country whose citizens have to rely on the government for personal safety or basic needs is a country that is lazy and apathetic, and ultimately undemocratic. This frontier masculinity ideology promoted by the NRA is rooted in a U.S. gun culture historically confined to white men. In many ways the gun culture has been exaggerated, but regardless of whether it was real or constructed afterward to sell stories and products, it continues to shape American culture and masculinity. Guns, masculinity, and freedom are intertwined and still resonate with Americans today, long after they were combined by Europeans and their descendents to take over, explore, and control the country. The NRA was founded and later attracted a large membership only after the frontier had closed and the gun culture became mythologized in popular media. More recently the previously apolitical NRA underwent a political revolution when the gun culture, gun rights, and frontier masculinity were threatened in the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s NRA claims to defend not only gun rights but also frontier masculinity.

What Guns Mean

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” NRA members, sharing their frontier masculinity philosophy, will confidently tell you that this wording clearly conveys that individuals have the right to bear arms. Gun control advocates, however, are convinced that militias are the centerpiece of the amendment, and that the federal government has every right to regulate guns. In 2008, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision sided with the NRA view, calling gun rights an individual right while still allowing some forms of gun control.² This book does not attempt to enter into this debate but instead focuses on what the NRA’s interpretation of gun rights means to NRA members, how the organization’s views on gun rights relate to their broader political views, and the connections the NRA stance on gun rights have to U.S. history and contemporary culture and politics.

Jeff Cooper, first elected to the NRA Board of Directors in 1985, mapped out some of these connections while holding a Colt .45 and thinking about its use on the frontier and by the U.S. Army. “‘Just to hold [a Colt Model “P”] in your hand produces a feeling of kinship with our Western heritage—an appreciation of things like courage and honor and chivalry and the sanctity of a man’s word.’”³ NRA leader Wayne LaPierre then asks,

What is the “gun culture”? The answer depends on your point of view. To millions of Americans, especially those who own firearms, the term refers to America’s traditional bedrock values of self-reliance, self-defense, and self-determination. To others, most of whom dislike firearms and do not own them, the term is a pejorative. Participants think these outsiders use the term to distinguish themselves as the culturally elite, ruling the national media as moral superiors to the nation’s gun owners.⁴

Regardless of one’s position on the Second Amendment, guns are a visible part of American culture.

Even if you don’t own and admire them like NRA members do, guns are part of our lives: those around us either own or use them, and news and entertainment media include them in their coverage. Moreover, there are countless gun metaphors in our everyday language: “Don’t be gun shy”; “I’m calling the shots”; “Better stick to your guns”; and “Shoot first, ask questions later.” These four gun metaphors relate to American manhood and may be interpreted to mean, respectively, “be fearless,” “be in charge,” “be independent,” and “be aggressive.” Psychologist Robert Brannon identified these as the four building blocks of American masculinity. First and foremost, “No Sissy Stuff” (boys and men must never do anything that appears weak or feminine); second, “Be a Big Wheel” (real men have power and control over others); third, “Be a Sturdy Oak” (be stoical and emotionless, relying only on oneself for strength); and, fourth, “Give ‘em Hell” (men who are aggressive and take risks will be rewarded).⁵

It is not a coincidence that the language of guns and that of masculinity overlap. “At both symbolic and practical levels,” sociologist R. W. Connell says, “the defense of gun ownership is a defense of hegemonic masculinity.”⁶ Similarly, NRA members’ devotion to guns and gun rights is intricately tied to a frontier version of masculinity. Their ideas about freedom and guns are rooted in a combination of mythologized gun culture and mythologized masculinity. Guns and masculinity have long been inseparable.

Frontier Masculinity and the Gun Culture

Guns are a part of U.S. culture, but is there a gun culture? For the first 250 years of their history on U.S. soil, European colonists and their descendants largely relied upon an agricultural economy, coupled in part by a continuous “frontier expansion.”⁷ Firearms, frontier expansion, and violence were common in 17^th-, 18^th-, and 19^th-Century America, as whites clashed with indigenous populations.⁸ Native Americans and African slaves were largely forbidden from possessing firearms in early colonial America. However, many indigenous groups obtained firearms through trade with competing European colonizers.⁹ Whites relied on firearms to hunt for food and wage war. The mythologizing of firearms in U.S. history, however, soared with the Revolutionary War. “With the Revolution, the gun was virtually enshrined as our historic symbol of freedom.”¹⁰ Firearms, and especially stories regarding the citizen-militia, are fundamental building blocks of U.S. independence for many Americans. The Founding Fathers worried about standing armies leading to government tyranny, and though the militia had mixed success over the years, the Founders explicitly emphasized the militia’s importance when writing the Second Amendment. But, like other freedoms solidified in the Bill of Rights, Second Amendment rights were originally only extended to white men.

American citizens dramatically increased their westward expansion during the 19^th Century. Historians have noted that guns were decisive in whites’ “winning of the West and the conquest” of Native Americans.¹¹ The frontiersmen who fought against Native Americans from the 1800s through the 1880s symbolize dominant culture narratives of the West—independent, brave, and virtuous white men fighting against the “savages.”¹² While many men headed west in search of fortunes and a new life, others remained in rapidly growing cities.

The Industrial Revolution permanently changed the United States. As late as the mid-1850s, roughly 90% of white American men owned their own farm, shop, or small crafts workshop. However, industrialization and urbanization forced many of these men to sell their labor for pay. The term “breadwinner” was coined in the early part of the 19^th Century, capturing men’s new family responsibilities. Later the term would be tied to men’s success in the new public sphere.¹³ By mid-century another new term emerged, “self-made man,” linking manhood and economic success, and providing an early cultural solidification of the American ethos. That ethos is a shorthand summary of everything the United States is supposed to represent and provide: opportunities and success for anyone willing to work hard. It was risky for men to navigate the new market-based economy, but a hard-working, self-made ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Defending Guns, Defending Masculinity
• Part II Talking Guns, Talking Culture War
• Part III Committing to the NRA, Committing to the Right
• Appendix: Studying the NRA
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author