Gun Crazy

is a Boston-based magazine writer. Lake Charles, Louisiana Guns fill the carpeted hallway of the event center at the L'Auberge du Lac Hotel & Casino here, at the Outdoor Writers Association of America's (owaa) seventy-ninth annual conference. On a folding table sit a half-dozen Browning rifles, engraved and gleaming on a white tablecloth. Next to it, a table sponsored by Smith & Wesson holds enough handguns to drop a mammoth, including James Bond's Walther PPK, Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, and the even larger .500 Magnum, which weighs four and a half pounds, sports an eight-and-three-eighths- inch barrel, and reigns as the most powerful handgun in the world.For all the firepower, however, the gun drawing the biggest crowd of hunters, sport-shooters, and outdoors writers on this rainy spring morning is a beat-up Winchester shotgun with electrical tape around the muzzle. "It kicks like a bastard," admits Austin Dorr, the gun's owner, who nevertheless used it to break the world record in trap shooting in 1967--taking down 995 out of 1,000 clay pigeons. "I didn't even realize it at the time," he coolly recounts to a crowd of onlookers. "I knew I broke a lot of targets. But I just got in my truck and went home." With salt-and-pepper hair under a Yankees cap and the odor of cigarettes on his breath, Dorr is a local celebrity at this conference, which skews heavily toward the hook-and-bullet crowd. The 79-year-old Korean war vet and lifelong Republican still drives his pickup to New Hampshire every year on the first day of deer-hunting season. "Nobody will ever take my gun," he says. "If they do, I'll be stretched out, and they can grab it." Despite the tough talk, however, Dorr is no friend to the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has asked him to join many times. Get him going, and he'll tell you that the gun-lobbying group has lost its way with too extreme a focus on protecting the Second Amendment. "It's not concentrating enough on things that matter to me," he says, "like conservation." In fact, Dorr is here at the conference as chair of a new organization called the American Hunters and Shooters Association (ahsa), which bills itself as a more "moderate alternative to the NRA." The group has tapped into a small but growing minority of hunters and sportsmen who feel disgruntled with the NRA's support of conservative lawmakers who, they say, vote against their best interests. Judging from the reception at the conference, there are more Dorrs out there than one might expect. This growing rift among hunters represents perhaps the best opening in years for liberals and moderates to blunt the effects of the gun lobby on the national level. For decades, the NRA has used its power to rule by fiat in Southern and Western states, which are filled with constituents who might vote for Democrats except for fear that the national Democratic Party wants to take away their guns. In the 1994 midterm elections, it helped swing race after race to conservative Republicans. A decade later, it succeeded in painting John Kerry as an anti-gun zealot, contributing to his loss in crucial states like New Mexico, Nevada, and Iowa. Over the years, however, the NRA may have overplayed its hand in its increasingly hard-line stance against gun control. The NRA's tack to the right started with the so-called "Cincinnati Revolt" of 1977, in which a vocal wing of NRA members broke with the organization's stance on banning so-called Saturday Night Specials--small, easily concealed handguns. Since then, the NRA has systematically challenged any legislation that smacks of gun registration, and it has pushed for unfettered access to all types of guns and ammunition. One of the casualties was Jim Smith, an NRA board member during the 1980s who headed the group's hunting and wildlife committee and is now editor of Muskie Magazine, an angler's publication in Arizona. Smith says his insistence on endorsing candidates who supported strong wilderness protection--though not necessarily gun access--caused friction on the board and led to his ouster. "I was told this is a single-purpose organization," he says between sessions at the owaa conference. Increasingly, however, hunters are viewing environmental issues as part of their own cause. "What good are the guns if we have nowhere left to hunt--if there's no more habitat?" asks Dave Stalling, Western field coordinator of Trout Unlimited and former president of the Montana Wildlife Foundation, pulling on a bottle of beer in a hospitality suite at the conference after hours. A hunter of big-game species like elk and mule deer, Stalling has worked to protect wilderness lands in Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico. Though he has tried to enlist the NRA in his effort, so far he has received no word from the organization. Indeed, many of the pro-gun politicians who receive the NRA's "A" rating, including California Representative Richard Pombo and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, have been among the most aggressive in opening up public lands to extractive industries. And members of Congress like Senator Larry Craig, who has been actively pushing logging in Idaho forests, and Representative Don Young, a proponent of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, are on the NRA's board. NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam defends the NRA's push for more roads into public wilderness areas. "Most hunters don't have the luxury to take two weeks off to trek across wilderness areas to hunt," he says in a telephone interview. "We believe there needs to be habitat preservation and make sure there are animals to hunt. However, that needs to be balanced with the needs and interests of hunters for access." But that sentiment seems to be at odds with the majority of hunters. In the latest hunting survey in Field & Stream magazine, 41 percent of respondents felt that "shrinking wildlife habitat" was the number-one threat to hunting--compared with just 25 percent who named "anti- gun legislation." Two-thirds of respondents, in fact, supported an increase in taxes to acquire public lands--unheard of, given the notorious anti-tax sentiment of the libertarian West. The poll also revealed a more moderate stance on gun control, with two- thirds supporting background checks for gun sales and opposing the use of assault weapons for hunting. Some hunters might even welcome restrictions as a way to improve the image of gun owners. "If the police say we should ban Tech- 9s and cop-killer bullets, that's good enough for me," says James Williams, a software product manager from Atlanta who owns five guns and hunts several times per season. By not supporting these positions, says Williams, the NRA hurts the image of gun owners. "There should be more outreach to non-gun owners to show that, just because someone owns a gun, they are not crazy," he says. Views like these have emboldened opponents of the NRA, such as the leaders of the ahsa. "The NRA is worrying about law enforcement taking away your guns. At the same time, you look at what is happening with conservation," said Executive Director Bob Ricker at a press conference announcing the new group at owaa's April gathering. "We think it's a bait and switch." A former NRA general counsel and lobbyist for the firearms industry, Ricker says there's room for a group who stands up for hunters' Second Amendment rights while still supporting "common sense restrictions"--for example, restoring the federal ban on military- style assault weapons. Already, the group has raised $600,000 toward its goal of $1.2 million to weigh in on elections. The ahsa isn't the only one looking to capitalize on the discontent among hunters and sportsmen. Some candidates for races in November are already staking out moderate gun control positions, taking heart from the recent governor's election in Virginia in 2005, in which conservative Democrat Tim Kaine--who resisted calls to roll back Virginia's landmark legislation to limit gun sales to one per month--beat NRA-endorsed candidate Jerry Kilgore despite repeated attacks by the gun lobby. A similar test case is the close Senate race in Missouri between right-wing incumbent Jim Talent and centrist Democrat Claire McCaskill, a former prosecutor who has staked out a middle ground on gun rights. Most election-watchers are betting the race will hinge on discontent over Talent's strong opposition to stem-cell research, which shows how little the gun issue may factor. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, seem to be making room under the tent for gun owners. Party Chairman Howard Dean has declared a policy of leaving gun control up to states, with Democratic leaders New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada publicly professing their stance against restrictions on gun ownership. But, these inviting gestures aside, winning over gun owners from the NRA might not be that easy. The ahsa, after all, almost didn't make it to the conference here. A week before the event, the group's attendance was nearly scuttled when some owaa members threatened to resign if the ahsa was allowed to join. At an emotional board meeting a few days later, an eleventh-hour compromise was worked out in which the group would be allowed to participate. Still, many conference participants seemed skeptical of the new group. Jack Ballard, a slow-talking Montanan who hunts big game like elk, deer, and mountain goat, says he's worried about the policies that ahsa professes, such as mandatory child-safety locks and background checks in private transactions. "If this organization is seen as one willing to compromise around the edges of the Second Amendment, then I don't think they have a future," he says. The ahsa has already been attacked as a front group for the Democratic Party and demonized on pro-gun blogs as "the enemy in camouflage." It's an easy charge to make: The group's president, Ray Schoenke, was once a Democratic candidate for Maryland governor, and the group's nonprofit foundation president, John Rosenthal, is a Boston real estate developer who served a stint on the board of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Rosenthal insists he has been wrongly painted as someone who wants to ban guns, pointing out that he owns two shotguns himself and quit the board of the Brady Campaign in 2004 over its extreme gun-control stance. "There's been a one-sided discussion: You are either for banning guns or unlimited access," says Rosenthal. "You could prevent the majority of gun deaths with relatively simple solutions to keep guns out of the hands of kids and criminals." If the ahsa can overcome its image problems, it will have a rich field to draw from--according to research the organization commissioned, 44 percent of gun owners think the NRA is "too extreme in their political views." And, while the NRA has four million members, estimates on the number of gun owners in the United States range upward from 20 million. "Even if we just get 5 percent," says Schoenke, "that's one million." It's too early to say whether those hunters and shooters who see more gray in the Second Amendment will gain enough ground to make a difference politically. As wedge issues go, however, guns lack the religious intractability of gay marriage and abortion. If enough hunters like Dorr are able to stake out a middle ground on conservation and gun control, then they could dramatically reshape election politics in the West. "The NRA is powerful, but they are not all-powerful," says Pat Wray, a Wisconsin bird-hunter and popular outdoor columnist. "I get hundreds of letters from people who have quit the NRA or who, like me, are in the NRA but looking for something different. All of those gun owners are ripe for the picking."

By michael blanding