Gunfight My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America by Ryan Busse

Author:Ryan Busse [Busse, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

TUPPERWARE PARTY

DESPITE SARA’S COMFORTING REMINDER THAT I COULD “stop pretending,” my problem was that I chose to stay inside an industry that required someone like me to be good at pretending. The angry reaction to my advocacy made me realize that I was witnessing a growing move toward radicalization. Much of it was subtle, but there were important public events that highlighted the slide too, and I should have seen it coming well before my epiphany in 2004. I had even been witness to many of those events, including at the NRA convention two years earlier.

“You are why Al Gore isn’t in the White House!” Wayne LaPierre yelled to the packed ballroom of nearly five thousand people at the 2002 NRA convention in Reno. I was there along with Leslie, Allen, Dwight, Bobby, Gibbs, and the rest of Kimber’s growing team. Even Darrell made it. Every other industry leader was there too, and many of us listened closely as the crowd applauded at the power that the NRA had wielded in the 2000 presidential election.

The NRA had, in fact, played a central role in that contentious election. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, and in a harbinger of the 2016 and 2020 elections, Charlton Heston embarked on a sixteen-city tour through America’s presidential battleground states. Heston’s NRA events were passionate and raucous precursors to Donald Trump’s furious MAGA rallies. Attendees held up signs like “Gore Communist Scum,” and Moses spoke openly about finding a rope so that he could form a lynch mob for Democrats. The cultural fervor combined with Heston’s celebrity to form powerful and emotional events. The crowds swelled and swooned, and soon more people attended NRA rallies than Gore’s own campaign events. In one of them, Moses highlighted the power of the NRA and offered a prediction: “Some papers have said if Gore loses those swing states it will be because of the NRA’s effort.”1

As I watched in Reno, I thought about how far the organization had come in just three years. After Columbine, this big annual convention had been canceled; the only events were a few business meetings and the resulting protests. Back then, the mood was much different. The industry faced potential waves of new gun regulations, a traitorous Smith & Wesson CEO, and reactions to what was then America’s deadliest school shooting. But by 2002, many of those concerns had dissipated, and the atmosphere in Reno was celebratory. Because of W’s big electoral win, there was even talk about passing a law to make the municipal lawsuits go away too.

LaPierre felt the energy surge, and so could Jim Baker, the organization’s longtime lobbyist and resident Washington insider. Baker, a dead ringer for John Slattery’s character Roger Sterling in the AMC series Mad Men, wore tailored suits and dined in the finest restaurants. He was a smooth old-school lobbyist with a huge Rolodex who worked in the halls of Congress as the director of the NRA Institute of Legislative Action (NRA-ILA). Baker made no bones about being a partisan, but he also had a reputation as a dealmaker.

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