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7/10/2016 AWeekofGunViolenceDoesNothingtoChangetheN.R.A.

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A WEEK OF GUN VIOLENCE DOES NOTHING TO


CHANGE THE N.R.A.S MESSAGE
ByEvanOsnos,JULY8,2016

Wayne LaPierre, of the National Rifle Association, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March.

I n the language of todays National Rifle Association, an armed society is a polite


society. The aphorism, borrowed from the science-fiction author Robert
Heinlein, is the inspiration for one of the N.R.A.s most popular T-shirts, which
bears the word COEXIST, spelled out in brightly colored ammo cartridges and guns.
To promote the shirt ($17.99), the N.R.A. store says that Heinleins quote
emphasizes the independent, tolerant nature of gun owners in a fun and thought-
provoking way.

It is a vision at the heart of the modern gun movement: the more that society makes
the threat of violence available to us, the safer we will be. In forty-eight hours this
week, the poisonous flaw in that fantasy has been exposed from multiple angles: on
Tuesday, two police ocers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fatally shot a black man,
Alton Sterling, while trying to arrest him. Some reports say that, before police
arrived, he was openly carrying a gun, which, under the makeshift patchwork of
American gun law, would have aorded him more legal protection, not less.
Louisiana is one of the forty-five states that allow residents to carry firearms openly
in public, and though Sterling was a convicted felon (and therefore probably
ineligible to obtain a concealed-carry permit) police could not have known his
criminal record before investigating him. It was absurd not to ask whether a white
man, exercising his right to open carry, would have been approached dierently.

The next day, during a trac stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a police ocer
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The next day, during a trac stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a police ocer
fatally shot a black man, Philando Castile, who, according to his girlfriend, Diamond
Reynolds, was licensed to carry a concealed firearm. According to Reynolds, who
was in the car and broadcast the aftermath on Facebook, Castile had told the ocer
that he was carrying his gun, but when Castile reached for his license and
registration, he was shot. In the hours that followed, as America turned, once again,
to the ritual of mourning the killings of black men by police ocers, the N.R.A. was
silent. Its ocial Twitter feed, which often draws attention to cases of police
questioning gun owners for exercising the right to carry, said nothing, even as the
silence became conspicuous. (@CoolJ90: @NRA care to come to the defense of a
man murdered by police who had a license to carry his weapon?)

For critics of the N.R.A., it was an awkward exposure of what is usually left unsaid:
the organization is far less active in asserting the Second Amendment rights of black
Americans than of white ones.

On Thursday, the politics of race, guns, and security exploded in a horrific attack on
law enforcement. While protesters in Dallas marched in the name of Black Lives
Matter, denouncing the latest killings, a sniper ambushed police, killing five and
wounding seven others, along with two civilians. In a stando, a suspect was killed
by a police bomb. Dallas police later identified him as twenty-five-year-old Micah
Xavier Johnson. In his statements to police, they said, he wanted to kill white
people, especially white police ocers. Three other suspects reportedly were in
custody.

In turning guns on police, the Dallas ambush scrambles the usual polarities of gun
politics. For more than two decades, the N.R.A. has maintained a facsimile of
respect for law enforcement, reflexively announcing its devotion to warriors and
heroeseven as it has pushed to relax laws that police routinely describe as a
threat to the safety of their ocers and the public. Last year, under lobbying pressure
from the N.R.A., the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms abandoned an eort
to stop the sale of armor-piercing cop killer ammunition that authorities have tried
to ban for thirty years.

After each high-profile public massacre in recent years, the N.R.A. and its allies
have deployed a reliable strategy: deflect criticism from the basic problemthe

unqualified availability of military-grade weaponsby fixating on technical details


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unqualified availability of military-grade weaponsby fixating on technical details


that serve their political ends. After the massacre in San Bernardino, they
emphasized that, despite strong gun laws in California, the killers had legally
purchased some of their gunsas if that proved that gun regulation is useless, and
so society shouldnt bother. After the slaughter in Orlando, in an eort to defuse
attempts to impose stricter regulations on AR-15s, the military-style rifle used in
San Bernardino and many other attacks, gun-rights advocates fixated on the fact
that the Orlando killer did not use an AR-15. (He used a similar military-style rifle,
produced by Sig Sauer.) It was, in retrospect, an especially shortsighted strategy: by
drawing attention to the broader range of weapons that are widely available to
civilians and capable of inflicting mass harm, gun-rights advocates inadvertently
aided their opponents by making it newly evident that banning AR-15s alone would
not solve the problem.

The Dallas ambush will be harder to explain away. There is much still to learn about
the guns involved, but early videos appeared to show a man executing a police ocer
using a military-style rifle, which has proved to be especially deadly for American
police. The Violence Policy Center, a gun-safety group, noted that, in 2014, the most
recent year for which information is available, one in five law enforcement ocers
slain in the line of duty were killed with an assault weapon. The centers executive
director, Josh Sugarmann, said in a statement, Responsibility for this lethal assault
falls directly at the feet of the gun industry, which designs, markets, and sells the
military-bred weapons necessary for such attacks. They must finally be held
accountable.

The Dallas ambush has also exposed an uncomfortable fact for the gun-rights
movement: for decades, even as it maintains its abstract tributes to law enforcement,
it has embraced a strain of insurrectionist rhetoric, overtly anti-government activism
that endorses the notion that civilians should have guns for use against American
police and military. In a 1995 fund-raising letter, the executive vice-president of the
N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, called federal law-enforcement agents jack-booted thugs,
and suggested that in Clintons administration, if you have a badge, you have the
governments go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens. In
Texas, where the police ambush occurred, an open-carry advocate last year urged the
killing of state legislators if they do not approve a more relaxed policy. (They better
start giving us our rights or this peaceful non-cooperation stu is gonna be gamed
up . . . We should be demanding [Texas legislators] give us our rights back, or its
punishable by death. Treason.) At the annual N.R.A. convention last year, the board
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7/10/2016 demanding [Texas legislators] give us our rights back, or its
punishable by death. Treason.) At the annual N.R.A. convention last year, the board
member Ted Nugent said, Our government has turned on us. Stopping short of
calling for violence, he urged members to focus their ire on the bad and the ugly.
He said, Its a target-rich environment. If it was duck season, thered be so many
ducks, you could just close your eyes and shoot em.

The consistent failure of our politics to take reasonable steps to prevent guns from
getting into the wrong hands makes it dicult to predict with any confidence that
even the slaughter of police ocers will alter the frozen politics. But it may have a
subtler eect, causing gun owners to reconsider whether the N.R.A. truly has the
countrys best interests at heart. More than a hundred million Americans live in
households with guns, but many remain largely uninvolved in gun politics. The
N.R.A. has between three and five million members, which means it represents only
a sliver of American gun owners. Moreover, even among its members, many are
unconvinced, I and others have found, by the belligerent rhetoric; they own and love
guns for a variety of reasonsfrom sports to hunting to self-defenseand they
overwhelmingly support reasonable steps to prevent innocent people, civilians or
police, from being killed by gunfire.

On Friday, after hours of silence, the N.R.A. issued a statement from LaPierre, who
had authored the jack-booted thugs letter. This time, he expressed the deep
anguish all of us feel for the heroic Dallas law enforcement ocers who were killed
and wounded, as well as to those who so bravely ran toward danger to defend the
city and the people of Dallas.

The N.R.A.s explicit call fora more armed society reveals the lie behind its homage
to coexistence. By directing rage against the government, by preventing politicians
from heeding the overwhelming demands of their constituents for broader
background checks, by endorsing Donald Trumps plan for mass deportations and
bans on Muslim immigration, the N.R.A. has assembled a volatile case against the
idea of coexistenceand then disavows the result when it explodes.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a sta writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign aairs.

MORE: GUNCONTROL NATIONALRIFLEASSOCIATION(N.R.A.) DALLAS

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