I don't think the TNR and many of our liberal brethren get it.

Here's a quote from the article.

"'If the police say we should ban Tech-9s and cop-killer bullets,
that's good enough for me,' says James Williams, a software product
manager from Atlanta who owns five guns and hunts several times per
season."

While I really like hunting and sport shooting, those are only the
secondary benefits/reasons of owning a firearm. The Second Amendment
wasn't part of the Bill of Rights to guarantee hobbyists their chosen
pastime.

As a great liberal once said.

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against
arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now
appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be
always possible." Senator Hubert H. Humphrey

Well, if you'd like to drop the New Republic a line, here's there
letters to the editor section email: letters@...

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060904&s=blanding090406

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE NRA.

by Michael Blanding
Post date: 08.30.06
Issue date: 09.04.06
Lake Charles, Louisiana
uns fill the carpeted hallway of the event center at the L'Auberge du
Lac Hotel & Casino here, at the Outdoor Writers Association of
America's (owaa) seventy-ninth annual conference. On a folding table
sit a half-dozen Browning rifles, engraved and gleaming on a white
tablecloth. Next to it, a table sponsored by Smith & Wesson holds
enough handguns to drop a mammoth, including James Bond's Walther PPK,
Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, and the even larger .500 Magnum, which
weighs four and a half pounds, sports an eight-and-three-eighths-inch
barrel, and reigns as the most powerful handgun in the world.
For all the firepower, however, the gun drawing the biggest crowd of
hunters, sport-shooters, and outdoors writers on this rainy spring
morning is a beat-up Winchester shotgun with electrical tape around
the muzzle. "It kicks like a bastard," admits Austin Dorr, the gun's
owner, who nevertheless used it to break the world record in trap
shooting in 1967--taking down 995 out of 1,000 clay pigeons. "I didn't
even realize it at the time," he coolly recounts to a crowd of
onlookers. "I knew I broke a lot of targets. But I just got in my
truck and went home."

With salt-and-pepper hair under a Yankees cap and the odor of
cigarettes on his breath, Dorr is a local celebrity at this
conference, which skews heavily toward the hook-and-bullet crowd. The
79-year-old Korean war vet and lifelong Republican still drives his
pickup to New Hampshire every year on the first day of deer-hunting
season. "Nobody will ever take my gun," he says. "If they do, I'll be
stretched out, and they can grab it." Despite the tough talk, however,
Dorr is no friend to the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has
asked him to join many times. Get him going, and he'll tell you that
the gun-lobbying group has lost its way with too extreme a focus on
protecting the Second Amendment. "It's not concentrating enough on
things that matter to me," he says, "like conservation."
In fact, Dorr is here at the conference as chair of a new organization
called the American Hunters and Shooters Association (ahsa), which
bills itself as a more "moderate alternative to the NRA." The group
has tapped into a small but growing minority of hunters and sportsmen
who feel disgruntled with the NRA's support of conservative lawmakers
who, they say, vote against their best interests. Judging from the
reception at the conference, there are more Dorrs out there than one
might expect. This growing rift among hunters represents perhaps the
best opening in years for liberals and moderates to blunt the effects
of the gun lobby on the national level.

or decades, the NRA has used its power to rule by fiat in Southern and
Western states, which are filled with constituents who might vote for
Democrats except for fear that the national Democratic Party wants to
take away their guns. In the 1994 midterm elections, it helped swing
race after race to conservative Republicans. A decade later, it
succeeded in painting John Kerry as an anti-gun zealot, contributing
to his loss in crucial states like New Mexico, Nevada, and Iowa. Over
the years, however, the NRA may have overplayed its hand in its
increasingly hard-line stance against gun control.
The NRA's tack to the right started with the so-called "Cincinnati
Revolt" of 1977, in which a vocal wing of NRA members broke with the
organization's stance on banning so-called Saturday Night
Specials--small, easily concealed handguns. Since then, the NRA has
systematically challenged any legislation that smacks of gun
registration, and it has pushed for unfettered access to all types of
guns and ammunition. One of the casualties was Jim Smith, an NRA board
member during the 1980s who headed the group's hunting and wildlife
committee and is now editor of Muskie Magazine, an angler's
publication in Arizona. Smith says his insistence on endorsing
candidates who supported strong wilderness protection--though not
necessarily gun access--caused friction on the board and led to his
ouster. "I was told this is a single-purpose organization," he says
between sessions at the owaa conference.
Increasingly, however, hunters are viewing environmental issues as
part of their own cause. "What good are the guns if we have nowhere
left to hunt--if there's no more habitat?" asks Dave Stalling, Western
field coordinator of Trout Unlimited and former president of the
Montana Wildlife Foundation, pulling on a bottle of beer in a
hospitality suite at the conference after hours. A hunter of big-game
species like elk and mule deer, Stalling has worked to protect
wilderness lands in Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico. Though he has
tried to enlist the NRA in his effort, so far he has received no word
from the organization. Indeed, many of the pro-gun politicians who
receive the NRA's "A" rating, including California Representative
Richard Pombo and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, have been among the most
aggressive in opening up public lands to extractive industries. And
members of Congress like Senator Larry Craig, who has been actively
pushing logging in Idaho forests, and Representative Don Young, a
proponent of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, are on
the NRA's board.

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam defends the NRA's push for more roads
into public wilderness areas. "Most hunters don't have the luxury to
take two weeks off to trek across wilderness areas to hunt," he says
in a telephone interview. "We believe there needs to be habitat
preservation and make sure there are animals to hunt. However, that
needs to be balanced with the needs and interests of hunters for
access." But that sentiment seems to be at odds with the majority of
hunters. In the latest hunting survey in Field & Stream magazine, 41
percent of respondents felt that "shrinking wildlife habitat" was the
number-one threat to hunting--compared with just 25 percent who named
"anti-gun legislation." Two-thirds of respondents, in fact, supported
an increase in taxes to acquire public lands--unheard of, given the
notorious anti-tax sentiment of the libertarian West.
The poll also revealed a more moderate stance on gun control, with
two-thirds supporting background checks for gun sales and opposing the
use of assault weapons for hunting. Some hunters might even welcome
restrictions as a way to improve the image of gun owners. "If the
police say we should ban Tech-9s and cop-killer bullets, that's good
enough for me," says James Williams, a software product manager from
Atlanta who owns five guns and hunts several times per season. By not
supporting these positions, says Williams, the NRA hurts the image of
gun owners. "There should be more outreach to non-gun owners to show
that, just because someone owns a gun, they are not crazy," he says.
Views like these have emboldened opponents of the NRA, such as the
leaders of the ahsa. "The NRA is worrying about law enforcement taking
away your guns. At the same time, you look at what is happening with
conservation," said Executive Director Bob Ricker at a press
conference announcing the new group at owaa's April gathering. "We
think it's a bait and switch." A former NRA general counsel and
lobbyist for the firearms industry, Ricker says there's room for a
group who stands up for hunters' Second Amendment rights while still
supporting "common sense restrictions"--for example, restoring the
federal ban on military-style assault weapons. Already, the group has
raised $600,000 toward its goal of $1.2 million to weigh in on elections.

The ahsa isn't the only one looking to capitalize on the discontent
among hunters and sportsmen. Some candidates for races in November are
already staking out moderate gun control positions, taking heart from
the recent governor's election in Virginia in 2005, in which
conservative Democrat Tim Kaine--who resisted calls to roll back
Virginia's landmark legislation to limit gun sales to one per
month--beat NRA-endorsed candidate Jerry Kilgore despite repeated
attacks by the gun lobby. A similar test case is the close Senate race
in Missouri between right-wing incumbent Jim Talent and centrist
Democrat Claire McCaskill, a former prosecutor who has staked out a
middle ground on gun rights. Most election-watchers are betting the
race will hinge on discontent over Talent's strong opposition to
stem-cell research, which shows how little the gun issue may factor.
Democratic leaders, meanwhile, seem to be making room under the tent
for gun owners. Party Chairman Howard Dean has declared a policy of
leaving gun control up to states, with Democratic leaders New Mexico
Governor Bill Richardson and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of
Nevada publicly professing their stance against restrictions on gun
ownership.

ut, these inviting gestures aside, winning over gun owners from the
NRA might not be that easy. The ahsa, after all, almost didn't make it
to the conference here. A week before the event, the group's
attendance was nearly scuttled when some owaa members threatened to
resign if the ahsa was allowed to join. At an emotional board meeting
a few days later, an eleventh-hour compromise was worked out in which
the group would be allowed to participate. Still, many conference
participants seemed skeptical of the new group. Jack Ballard, a
slow-talking Montanan who hunts big game like elk, deer, and mountain
goat, says he's worried about the policies that ahsa professes, such
as mandatory child-safety locks and background checks in private
transactions. "If this organization is seen as one willing to
compromise around the edges of the Second Amendment, then I don't
think they have a future," he says.

The ahsa has already been attacked as a front group for the Democratic
Party and demonized on pro-gun blogs as "the enemy in camouflage."
It's an easy charge to make: The group's president, Ray Schoenke, was
once a Democratic candidate for Maryland governor, and the group's
nonprofit foundation president, John Rosenthal, is a Boston real
estate developer who served a stint on the board of the Brady Campaign
to Prevent Gun Violence. Rosenthal insists he has been wrongly painted
as someone who wants to ban guns, pointing out that he owns two
shotguns himself and quit the board of the Brady Campaign in 2004 over
its extreme gun-control stance. "There's been a one-sided discussion:
You are either for banning guns or unlimited access," says Rosenthal.
"You could prevent the majority of gun deaths with relatively simple
solutions to keep guns out of the hands of kids and criminals."
If the ahsa can overcome its image problems, it will have a rich field
to draw from--according to research the organization commissioned, 44
percent of gun owners think the NRA is "too extreme in their political
views." And, while the NRA has four million members, estimates on the
number of gun owners in the United States range upward from 20
million. "Even if we just get 5 percent," says Schoenke, "that's one
million."

It's too early to say whether those hunters and shooters who see more
gray in the Second Amendment will gain enough ground to make a
difference politically. As wedge issues go, however, guns lack the
religious intractability of gay marriage and abortion. If enough
hunters like Dorr are able to stake out a middle ground on
conservation and gun control, then they could dramatically reshape
election politics in the West. "The NRA is powerful, but they are not
all-powerful," says Pat Wray, a Wisconsin bird-hunter and popular
outdoor columnist. "I get hundreds of letters from people who have
quit the NRA or who, like me, are in the NRA but looking for something
different. All of those gun owners are ripe for the picking."