Oh, how he yearns for that big bright American dawn, when he`s up with his gun, all set to meet the guys from the office, and maybe a few
congressmen, and head out to the shore and get hunkered down in a duck blind
–the congressmen, too, because all guys are equal on a duck hunt, that`s democracy in action–and your head is lowered so your face won`t reflect the light, and you sniff the sour-salt smell of the sea, and you get that surge of adrenalin as the quacking gets louder. . . .
Or maybe you`re up in Maine for grouse hunting, and you`re out behind a nice dog, among the sugarbush maples, and you`ve got a quality gun, and you`ve reloaded your own ammo because it gives you a little pleasure to do that. Or maybe you`re in the mountains, with a pack on your back and a horse beneath your butt, riding into the base camp, where you`ll rise at daylight and go shoot an elk, just one, since you may have a license to shoot only one, but the pleasure of glassing other elk–ah, that`s the pleasure of a hunt.
Warren Cassidy goes on like this for a few minutes, a man`s man lost in reverie, with the face of a doctor on a daytime soap opera, and suddenly you realize that you are tapping into the beating heart of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Cassidy is considered the No. 2 man, the linchpin of the lobbying juggernaut, but there are no thoughts about gun control that can rival what he feels inside, deep down where the juices churn and the passions burn.
And since, in his words, the ”social planners or elitists” want to disarm the hunter under the guise of gun control, the NRA has no choice but to fire back. And it`s happening. On July 8, the Senate, goaded by the NRA, took aim at the 1968 federal Gun Control Act and made it look like a paper target ripped with lead from a .22 snubbie. Score one for the all-American lifestyle. Let the editorial writers scream, said the NRA. What do they know about drawing a bead on a bird? How do they think meat gets into cellophane in the first place?
It just drives the NRA helmsmen crazy when people call them kooks. It`s true they`re trying to roll back the act of `68 because it curbs the interstate sale of guns, and it`s true they want to win back that precious constitutional freedom, but if the elitists could only see what regular folks the NRA people are, then maybe nobody would want to pick on their guns anymore.
You take a guy like G. Ray Arnett, the executive vice president and, as such, the man in day-to-day charge of the NRA, one of President Reagan`s
”rhinestone cowboys” brought in to work under James G. Watt at the Department of the Interior, a man who decorates his office with the carcasses of creatures he has bagged along life`s rugged road, a blunt fellow who said gun control ”is like having sex with a condom–it gives you a false sense of security.”
The NRA, founded in 1871 by some Union generals who thought their boys had been outshot by Confederate riflemen, has been on a crusade to shed its bad-guy image lately. Hence, the ”I Am the NRA” ad campaign, launched in 1982 and plastered all over the national magazines, showing decent Americans with their guns. Correction: decent Americans with their LONG guns. Because it took the NRA more than two years before it felt comfortable enough to show an unholstered handgun in one of the ads. But they did it. A woman detective now is holding a snubbie with a two-inch barrel.
Think of it: The NRA, of all groups, felt compelled to tiptoe up to the handgun, just because those national magazines might object to the ads. That`s how the press is, Cassidy said.
But c`mon, Arnett said, a mountain of flesh in shirt and tie, what`s wrong with loving guns in the first place? A fellow like him, born 61 years ago on a military post, has been around guns forever. His kinfolk, too. He was just raised up in it.
Everywhere he turns, the timid types are taking over. Look what happened on the TWA plane hijacked to Beirut. A hostage told ABC that he was using the bathroom and noticed that one of the terrorists had left his gun behind. Did he seize the opportunity? Nope. He gave the gun back to the terrorists. This incident has been burning up the gun-loving grapevine. A pal of Ray`s just wrote to him, fulminating against cowardly ”grass-eaters,” to which Ray replied, ”Ain`t that the pits!”
Well, you hear Ray talk like that, and you figure that maybe a few facts and figures might ruffle his feathers. So you cite FBI statistics showing that of the 18,673 American murders committed in 1983, 44 percent were committed with handguns. But he laughs off the numbers.
”I don`t play the statistics game,” he said, ”because I`m not smart enough to remember them all. . . . Statistics are like a bikini bathing suit: They reveal what is interesting, but they hide what is vital.”
There are a whole lot of ways to kill a man, he countered, so don`t go picking on the gun. Take the time, back in his oil days, when he was out in a country-western dance bar in Mojave, Calif. He went there with a buddy, who took his wife along. Well, the fellow got full of a little beer. Then somebody came over to ask the gal to dance–just some little ole Okie who saw a pretty girl–and Ray`s buddy blew his top and ran the guy off.
Anyway, the wife tells her man to go apologize to the Okie, and he finally goes over there. The Okie sees this monster coming at him, and he moves off, with the big guy in pursuit. The Okie finally pushes Ray`s buddy away. ”Wait a minute,” the husband says, ”I just came over to apologize.” He says he`s sorry, goes back to his wife, takes her dancing and drops dead on the dance floor. Turns out the Okie had stuck him with a pocketknife when he pushed the guy away.
Arnett took over the NRA in January, succeeding his old friend Harlon Carter, a hard-liner nicknamed ”Bullethead” by his foes. Cassidy took over the lobbying arm in 1982, replacing a man who was so hard-line that Harlon Carter was compelled to fire him.
Cassidy`s manhood credentials are in order. He displays an autographed picture of a renowned hunting pal. This pal has the right attitude. When he was 4, his 6-year-old brother killed his 2-year-old sister with a shotgun. But did his father banish guns from the home? No way. His father taught proper use instead. Needless to say, Cassidy loves to hunt antelope with this fellow. Fellow by the name of Chuck Yeager.
The thing is, Cassidy said, you don`t stop tragedy by disarming the innocent. Take the time he was serving as mayor of Lynn, Mass., in the early
`70s. (That`s when the gun lobby first took note of him; he was always on TV, talking tough to the public unions.) The Lynn beaches, he said, had drownings every summer. So what was he supposed to do, close all the beaches and deprive all the swimmers in the process?
So you try a question of your own. You cite John Hinckley Jr., who bought his gun in a Texas pawnshop. Didn`t he boast in a poem that guns gave him
”pornographic power”?
Cassidy is known around Washington for being fast on his feet. ”You mean to tell me a nut like that wouldn`t figure out how to put some gasoline inside an empty bottle, light it and chuck it at the president`s car?”
Cassidy is quick, but a judge in Virginia is slowing him down right now. Here he is, an ex-marine who grew up in New England plinking tin cans and shooting rats with a .22 rifle, who always packed a PPK or a Smith & Wesson .38 when he walked the Boston streets at night (”I exuded some
confidence”), yet now there`s this judge in Virginia, where Cassidy lives, who refuses to grant him a permit to carry.
Judges approve permits in Virginia, and he`s stuck with one who insists there`s no reason to carry a concealed gun.
”There is a basic, innate right of self-defense,” he said. ”The primary human drive is air hunger, isn`t it? Ahead of water, ahead of sex, ahead of anything else. Air hunger. Which means survival, breathing. No man can pass a law which said you don`t have a right to keep breathing.”
And what about Arnett`s freedom to breathe?
Well, that darn `68 law, the one the NRA is trying to weaken, makes it illegal for a fellow like himself to buy a gun over the counter when he`s not in his home state. He`ll be on the road, and he`ll see a gun that he wants to add to the 200 others he keeps at home, yet he can`t buy it. He must have it sent to a licensed dealer in Virginia. Then he has to leave work, go pick it up in person and fill out some papers.
”It`s an inconvenience,” he fumed. ”It takes 10 or 15 minutes to do the transaction once you get there.” Although the Senate voted to lift the ban on interstate sale of guns, the measure still must clear the House. One of these days, Arnett will get that whole law in his crosshairs.
He means it, too. He`s already got an M-1 rifle leaning against his file cabinet, an 18-century muzzle-loader propped atop the Zenith TV, a shotgun zippered up by the door, a box of rifle ammo holding down papers on his desk, a beaver pelt on his couch, a skinned bobcat on his floor and now he`s admiring a gun that appears in a new NRA magazine.
”Look at the scrollwork on that rifle,” he said. ”It`s as pretty as any picture you`d ever see. That`s just scrumptious work.” He ran a finger down the page, and his voice was as soft as butter. It was the voice of love.
