On Friday, Donald Trump is due to become the first president since Ronald Reagan in 1983 to address the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association. If Trump’s speech in Atlanta registers a fraction of the impact of Reagan’s, it will mark another milestone in this Indian summer of gun rights.
For the past several years, the NRA has advanced a radical agenda of unlimited freedom as the birthright of every American, and the vision is passing into law.
For decades, a Supreme Court ruling declaring that the Constitution supports the individual right to own a gun was the holy grail of firearms activism. That was achieved in 2008, but already a decision described by Justice John Paul Stevens as “a dramatic upheaval in the law” feels hesitant by today’s standards of “campus carry,” adrenalized “stand your ground” laws, and the NRA’s current campaign to make concealed-weapon permits as acceptable across the states as drivers’ licenses.
In the world of the gun, extreme is becoming the new normal. This revolution may not have been possible without the “special bond” forged between Reagan and the NRA in 1983.
The NRA then had recently reorganized around a militancy untypical of its first century of existence, centering on a newly individualistic reading of the Second Amendment. It was led by a group of activists so averse to compromise that they had been collectively fired by the old guard in 1976, only to stage a dramatic takeover in 1977, remaking the organization in their own image.
Out went the sober mission statement of “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” In came the second half of the Second Amendment, etched in oversize splendor at the entrance of NRA headquarters: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The bit about the “militia,” the “state” and the need for it to be “well regulated” was omitted.
Gun rights revolution
That a revolt became a revolution owed more than a little to Reagan. The NRA had endorsed him over Jimmy Carter in 1980, the first time it had officially supported a candidate for the White House, and a grateful President returned the favor with startling verve.
Looking back at the 1983 speech, what is striking is not just the flattery, the praise, the repeated effusions of “I believe in you,” it is the mastery with which a commander in chief elevates domestic gun rights into the wider mission of national security, peppering his prepared remarks with hushed asides about progress in the Middle East, foiled drug-running operations and the menace of communist espionage.
Reagan established a perfect parallel between American innocence (“It isn’t America that attacks and occupies other countries”) and the innocence of the law-abiding citizen, slandered by gun control fanatics: “Don’t they understand that most violent crimes are not committed by decent, law-abiding citizens?”
The President placed the armed citizen on a sacred continuum that included George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and a modern, under-equipped military. “If they can put their lives on the line to protect our way of life, then, by golly, we can give them the weapons,” he protested, honoring his audience as collaborators in statecraft. The same applied at home: “As we crack down on criminals,” he continued, “we’re trying to move forward on another front: to reform the firearms laws which needlessly interfere with the rights of legitimate gun owners like yourselves.” With shades of Teddy Roosevelt, he went out of his way to praise a civilian outfit such as “Arizona’s Sun City Posse, a group which has had great success roping in the bad guys.”
Applause interrupted Reagan’s delivery no fewer than 30 times. When he deftly remarked it is not the government that creates the right to bear arms, the crowd roared and the Phoenix Civic Plaza rattled to the sound of cowboy boots striking the ground. It was a master class. The “nasty truth,” the President continued, in cool, realpolitik mode, was that gun control doesn’t work. It punishes only those who obey the law.
Far better to get tough on “career criminals” and trust honest people to use weapons wisely. “Locking them up, the hard-core criminals, and throwing away the key is the best gun-control law we could ever have,” he quietly thundered. “We will never disarm any American who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and harm.”
This was more than anyone had expected. For Harlon Carter, executive vice president and architect of the new militancy, Reagan’s speech was a stunning vindication. And he needed it. As a young man, Carter had been involved in a vigilante killing, his conviction for murder overturned on a technicality.
The incident at once embodied and embarrassed the logic of righteous gun ownership, and he initially wouldn’t comment on the story when it broke in The New York Times. Other NRA leaders were infamous for unfounded speculation that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been killed as part of a plot to advance gun control. Such was the world Reagan entered in 1983. The take-home from Phoenix, wrote Joan Burbick, was that “the NRA was not the breeding ground of gun nuts. It was the fountain of freedom, legitimized in its politics by the President of the United States.”
‘Celebration of freedom’
This year’s convention, billed as a “celebration of freedom,” continues this tradition of gentrified radicalism, with 80,000 of the NRA’s 4 million-plus members expected to attend. Self-defense, we will be told, is America’s “first freedom,” and one that guarantees all others. But the real question is whether the opposite is now true.
Do gun rights smother more basic rights? For conservative politicians troubled by gun violence, does the NRA’s zeal to elevate the Second Amendment place a controlling hand upon the freedoms of expression secured by the First?
In 2000, Trump criticized Republicans for slavishly walking “the NRA line” on gun control, only to reverse his stance in 2015 with an unqualified commitment to “protect and extend the rights of law-abiding gun owners.” Having previously supported the ban on assault rifles, he now offered his approval for a weapon “used by tens of millions of Americans.” Is Trump a footnote on Harlon Carter’s old threat that “no politician in America, mindful of his political career, would want to challenge our legitimate goals”? Or is he a true believer?
As in 1983, there is an element of payback for support rendered in the general election. But the reluctance of either George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush to grace the event reveals something about the significance of a president standing shoulder to shoulder with the gun lobby. The former famously resigned from the NRA in 1995 when Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president then and now, referred to federal agents as “jack-booted thugs.”
Trump’s appearance at the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action is a tangible moment in America’s investment in firearms. As Reagan proved better than he knew: In the gun’s restless pursuit of legitimacy, words are also weapons.