The NRA by Frank Smyth

Author:Frank Smyth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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Charlton Heston resigned from the NRA in 2003 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He died at the age of eighty-four in the spring of 2008. “It’s a lot easier to play a leading man than it is to be a leading advocate like Charlton Heston,” fellow NRA board member and actor Tom Selleck had said in a video tribute five years earlier at the NRA annual meeting in Orlando.

Heston’s appearance in the 2002 film by Michael Moore, Bowling for Columbine, where Moore surprised him with a photo of a six-year-old girl, Kayla Rolland, shot dead by a six-year-old classmate in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, seemed to tarnish his image with some. But to the leadership and activists within the NRA and countless other conservatives, Heston’s legacy is intact.

The Clinton-era assault weapons ban expired on schedule in 2004. It achieved mixed results in terms of curbing either gun violence or mass shootings across the nation. The use of assault weapons in crimes did in fact drop in six cities examined in one U.S. Department of Justice–funded study carried out at the University of Pennsylvania, with the decline attributed largely to a reduction in the use of assault pistols. But the same study concluded that “the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small.” A Rand Corporation study similarly found “inconclusive evidence” for the ban’s impact on gun violence.

As we have seen, however, because of the way the law defined assault weapons, the ban backfired: the gun industry produced equally powerful weapons that were not covered by the legislation, leading to a record rise in assault-rifle production by the late 1990s, even as the ban was still in effect. The NRA incorporated AR-15 rifles into its “high power” shooting competitions, helping to make their possession, transport, and use ubiquitous, and this had both political and legal ramifications. Writing about the National Matches at Camp Perry in 2001, the American Rifleman (using the AR-15’s nickname) reported that “the ‘Black Rifle’ is becoming more and more common in the hands of both military and civilian shooters.”

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