Feature Story
By Dick Dahl

When the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and a group of individuals launched a "Stop the NRA" campaign in October with a call for volunteers to request inclusion on an NRA blacklist, organizers hoped for 10,000 names. Today, according to Brady president Michael Barnes, the goal is 100,000.

The "blacklist" received broad publicity after the New York Times' Bob Herbert revealed its existence in an Oct. 13 column. It lies deep within the NRA's website, with an ostensible purpose of letting members know who their enemies are on the gun issue. Had the list contained solely the names of a few strongly pro-gun-control lawmakers and organizations, its existence would hardly qualify as news. But as Herbert pointed out, and as thousands saw for themselves after reading about the list and digging through the NRA site to find it, the list was jarring for its very breadth.
The vast size of the list and the veritable All-American roster of widely admired people and organizations on it raised eyebrows. Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Nicholson, Madonna, and Vinnie Testaverde were on the list. So were the St. Louis Cardinals, the Sara Lee Corporation, and Hallmark Cards. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children's Defense Fund, and the National Education Association were listed. As was the YWCA. In all, it extended to 19 pages.

The "Stop the NRA" campaign, (www.stopthenra.com), had just begun, with a focus on fighting the gun lobby's efforts to shield the gun industry from lawsuits and to allow the 1994 assault-weapons ban to expire next September when it reaches its 10-year sunset date. When the NRA blacklist story broke, the campaign created a new website, www.nrablacklist.com, to let people sign up and request inclusion on the NRA list. According to Barnes, the campaign reached its goal of 10,000 names within three days. They set a new goal of 25,000, then 50,000, and now 100,000. He said that as of Dec. 17, more than 85,000 people had signed up.

Barnes says he hopes that the NRA list illustrates how extremist an organization the NRA really is. "The St. Louis Cardinals? Sara Lee? The YWCA? I would think that an NRA member would look at the list and say, 'These are our enemies?'"

"It kind of hit a nerve," said Joe DePlasco, a partner at Dan Klores Communications of New York City, which is handling the campaign. "I think it helped people see that the NRA is an extraordinarily extremist organization that is pushing legislation that is out of the mainstream."

In addition to the NRA blacklist project, Stop the NRA will be unveiling another venture on a separate website very soon, DePlasco and Barnes said. Neither would be very specific about it, but indications are that it will provide a more pointed critique of how the NRA operates.

In attacking the NRA, the people behind the campaign have set their sights on a formidable target. Proclaimed the most effective lobbying force in the country by Fortune magazine, the NRA has been succesful in pushing its agenda in many statehouses, and it has a firm grip on Congress, the White House, and even the Justice Department. And now, in one of its boldest ventures, the NRA says it is looking to buy a TV station -- and then declare that it should be treated as a news organization and therefore exempt from spending limits in the campaign-finance law.

"I think they've become more brazen," says Tom Mauser, a gun-violence-prevention activist who has had encounters with the NRA since his son, Daniel, was killed in the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colo. in 1999. "I think they feel that because of 9/11 and because of George W. in the White House that now is their time."

Mauser's continuing conflict with the NRA began only weeks after his son was killed. He sent a letter to NRA president Charlton Heston, asking for answers to a variety of questions, such as why the NRA fought attempts to outlaw the TEC-9 semi-automatic firearm that killed his son.

"I was repeatedly told by staff there that that my letter would be responded to and it never was," he says. "So I went to their headquarters" (in Fairfax, Va.) "in the summer of 2001 and asked them, `May I please get a response to my letter?' And rather than respond to me, they had me arrested. It's funny, though; they were willing to speak to the media there, but they weren't willing to speak to me. So it wasn't like they were too busy."

The NRA called the police to remove Mauser, who was charged with criminal trespass. He was booked and released on bail, but when he returned for a preliminary hearing a few months later, charges were dropped.

Mauser has remained active on the issue, though, and currently is a board member of Colorado Ceasefire. He's disappointed by recent developments in his home state, where the NRA finally managed to push through a bill to allow Coloradoans to carry concealed handguns. But he says there are more battles ahead. And he thinks the NRA can be beaten.

The first step, he says, is to bring issues out into the open as much as possible. "The NRA is best when they're working in legislative halls because it's only that many people they have to affect through money and intensive phone calling," he says. The NRA's record on matters that are taken to the people via ballot initiatives, he points out, has not been good. In recent years, ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon produced strong public support for closing gun-show loopholes, and in 1999 the NRA suffered an embarrassing defeat when it pushed for a ballot initiative to create a concealed-carry law in Missouri, but lost -- despite outspending opponents on the measure by a 10-to-1 ratio.

Second, he says, if activists want to defeat the NRA they must do a better job of framing their arguments in terms that might gain greater public support. "So in the case of the assault-weapons ban, what I plan to do in Colorado is talk individually about weapons that have been banned, particularly one of those that was used in Columbine, the TEC-9, and ask the question of our Colorado senators and representatives, 'Do you think we should continue manufacturing this weapon?' And if I can get an answer on that one, then I'll move on to the AK-47. And people will see it and understand it at a gut level."

While the "Stop the NRA" campaign will be arguing that the NRA's opposition to continuing the assault weapons ban is an extremist position, it also may be broadening its message to suggest that the NRA is extremist in general. "What people don't appreciate with single-issue organizations, whether it's the NRA or some other one, is that their money is used to support a whole host of very conservative programs. It's the people they support. Maybe you're not interested in guns, but you may disagree with the people they support on a variety of issues. The guns are a cover for their political beliefs. It gives them a cover under which they can pursue, for the most part, a very conservative agenda."

Barnes is hoping that as the campaign moves forward, it will broaden its attention from specific issues like the assault-weapons ban to a fuller understanding of what the NRA is about. "I think there will be opportunity to do some education about the nature of the NRA -- that it's not just a sportsmen's group, but that it's a radical, extremist, political organization."

This article is published by Join Together (http://www.jointogether.org) - a national resource for communities working to reduce substance abuse and gunviolence based at the Boston University School of Public Health.
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December 2003