The powerful gun lobby hopes to galvanize activists going into the 2012 election season. | AP Photo
PITTSBURGH — Liberals are frustrated with Barack Obama for not aggressively pushing gun control, but you wouldn’t know it from the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting.
With no clearly preferred Republican candidate among the 70,000 people who descended on the convention center here this weekend, Obama’s name came up more than any other.
Leaders of the powerful gun lobby talked as if the president had declared an all-out war on the Second Amendment. The dire rhetoric is intended to galvanize activists going into the 2012 election season, despite huge legislative gains last November and significant progress advancing their agenda at the state level.
“In Barack Obama, we have a president who is more opposed to gun ownership than any in our history and who still believes he’ll prevail,” said conservative activist David Keene, the NRA’s incoming president. “Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama, his minions in the Justice Department, his allies in the Congress, and his friends in the media would take our guns if they could and they will if they can.”
The NRA’s renewed anti-Obama focus resonates because many conservatives aren’t enamored with anyone running.
“It’s a potent message,” said Frank Tenerovich, a 71-year-old retiree who lives in the Pittsburgh suburbs. “He’s anti-gun enough that he could take us down the tube. He’s anti a lot of things that I’m for, but that’s the one that scares me the most.”
The NRA has nearly 4 million members, and a large opening exists for the candidate who can win over someone like Tenerovich. He lamented the weakness of all the Republican candidates as he roamed with his grandson around the cavernous convention center exhibit hall to check out the booths of gun makers.
Obama resisted calls for stricter gun laws after the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in January, ignoring a push from his left to broach the issue in his Tucson memorial speech or during the State of the Union. More than two months after the shooting, he wrote an op-ed calling for a “new discussion” about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals (http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_011e7118-8951-5206-a878-39bfbc9dc89d.html).
White House officials (especially veterans of the Clinton administration) remember the lessons of 1994, when Democrats lost the House after pushing an assault weapons ban, and 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost swing states with high rates of gun ownership.
A fear of the wrath of gun activists explains Obama’s effort to blur his differences with John McCain on the issue in 2008, why he signed bills in 2009 that allowed visitors to carry guns into national parks and on board Amtrak trains and why he bent over backward in his March opinion piece to stress that he believes the Second Amendment “guarantees an individual right to bear arms.”
NRA leaders tell gun owners to pay attention to the president’s deeds, not his rhetoric. He may not be overtly hostile, they acknowledge when pressed, but he’s definitely anti-gun. They point to his record in the Illinois state senate, where he backed bans on handguns and semi-automatic weapons. They criticize the two justices he appointed to the Supreme Court: Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
Keene accused the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) of harassing gun dealers and suggested that Obama supports a coming United Nations treaty that would “weaken or gut” gun rights.
Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s longtime CEO, fussed about a botched ATF sting operation that allowed American guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, an episode he used Saturday to call for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder.
Speakers referred to those “who he’s surrounded himself with,” including conservative bogeywomen Hillary Clinton and Janet Napolitano.
NRA executives have no plans to back a candidate before the nominee is determined. They see a competitive GOP nomination process as beneficial to the extent that it results in helpful one-upmanship, with candidates trying to outdo each other’s on-the-record promises.
“One of the great things that’s going to happen in this process is that candidates are going to sort themselves out,” said Glen Caroline, director of the grassroots division in the NRA’s political arm. “Many gun owners are going to have preferences throughout the way and are going to be working and volunteering for and supporting different candidates, which is fine because the larger [the] presence we as a community have in any campaign, we can raise issues of awareness on the Second Amendment, we can get commitments from candidates, all with the understanding that it’s healthy to go through a nominating process.”
Caroline made the comments during a two-hour seminar for 60 activists Saturday afternoon. The group swapped war stories and traded lessons learned from the last campaign about mobilizing volunteers to turn out gun owners in swing states like New Hampshire.
The NRA saw huge legislative gains in those 2010 midterms. They picked up an additional 26 allies in the House and seven in the Senate.
This includes Democrats: In his speech at the convention here, for example, West Virginia freshman Sen. Joe Manchin touted his opposition to Obama’s “anti-gun” nominee to lead the ATF.
With a Republican House and essentially a pro-gun working majority in the Senate, Obama couldn’t pursue legislative gun control even if he tried.
Activists, though, legitimately see gains over the last decade as fragile.
Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, noted that the Supreme Court decided the landmark District of Columbia vs. Heller case by a vote of 5 to 4.
“What if he appoints just one more anti-gun justice to the U.S. Supreme Court and we go from one-vote victories to one-vote defeats for generations to come?” he asked thousands of receptive gun owners. “My friends, praying for the health of five Supreme Court justices is not a strategy you want to stake your freedom on.”
Cox said there’s no budget for 2012 political spending yet, and that it will depend on how much they can raise from members. He pointed to the 2000 election as a point of comparison - he said the NRA spent about $40 million.
Many Republicans were lukewarm about John McCain’s nomination in 2008. The Arizona senator championed anti-gun causes during his maverick phase, and the NRA gave him a lifetime C+ rating in 2004.
This year, almost all the serious top-tier candidates have solid ratings from the group. Cox said it’s easier to look at the records of elected officials than those without experience in public office. He had kind words about the governorships of Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty.
One possible exception is Mitt Romney, who signaled support for the assault rifle ban and the Brady gun control measure during his 1994 run for Senate.
Romney recorded a video greeting that played at an event Friday. Unlike that of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who also sent a recorded video message, his two-minute spiel was not interrupted by applause or cheers.
James Wallace, the executive director of the Gun Owner’s Action League in Massachusetts, complains about Romney’s actions during his time as governor. In 2003, for example, he raided the Inland Fish and Game Fund to balance the budget.
During an interview, Wallace wouldn’t rule out backing Romney later in the cycle, but he said he’s looking for “somebody new and fresh” who “means what they say.”
“Gun owners have a long memory,” he said. “Our people are just frustrated that there’s not someone out there solid, consistently giving the message we want to hear.”
Of those who traveled to Pittsburgh this weekend, Huckabee received the most positive response. He described himself as a proud gun-clinger, attacking Obama’s statement at a campaign fundraiser three years ago that people cling to guns and religion because they’re bitter. But Huckabee running remains an open question, and it might be too late for him to put together a winning team.
Sarah Palin was the star of last year’s annual meeting in Charlotte, where she talked about her life membership in the NRA and once having a baby shower at a gun range. This year, the former Alaska governor was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t mentioned in speeches and didn’t even send a video greeting, as many less-significant political figures did. Many gun owners still like her, but most have written her off and few think she could win.
In his speech at the meeting, Newt Gingrich suggested he’d sign an executive order on his first day as president to change the way the Justice Department prosecutes gun crimes and that he would instruct the State Department not to give in on gun issues at the United Nations or abroad.
“They’re now developing a stealth strategy in which they combine anti-gun judges with anti-gun treaties,” he warned of the Obama administration. “They will then try to strip us of our rights by judicial fiat.”
Many activists have decided to take a wait-and-see approach. In interviews, several said that they’ll be leery of candidates who simply make bombastic promises.
“I can’t even pick a candidate that I think is viable yet,” said Sean Maloney, an election volunteer coordinator for the NRA in Ohio and a practicing criminal defense attorney. “Everybody’s going to be ‘pro-gun.’ Everyone wants to court the vote. … So you’ve got to watch out for that.”
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