TALLAHASSEE - The National Rifle Association has an enemies list. One way or another, you're probably on it.
By name? No. Fewer than 300 celebrities, national figures and journalists rate individual billing on its Web site. (Having failed to make Nixon's list, I am chagrined at not being on the NRA's either. Maybe this will fix that.)
But the likelihood is high that you, like me, belong to or support at least one of the 142 organizations that the NRA faults as "anti-gun."
Among them: The AARP. The AFL-CIO. The American Medical Association. The American Bar Association. Common Cause. The League of Women Voters of the United States. The National Education Association. The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. The National Council of La Raza. The National Council of Negro Women. The National Council of Jewish Women. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Unitarian Universalist Association. The U.S. Catholic Conference. The YMCA of the U.S.A.
If you buy Hallmark Cards, shop at a 7-Eleven store, have Blue Cross health insurance, eat Ben & Jerry's ice cream or Sara Lee cakes, wear Levi's jeans or use a Sprint telephone, you're favoring your business on one of 44 national corporations whose gun control politics significantly perturb the NRA.
The NRA is, of course, entirely within its rights to have its lists.
However, the organization's attitude toward lists is somewhat inconsistent.
The NRA's Florida arm is asking the Legislature for a law that would make a felon of anyone and everyone - private citizens as well as police or other government workers - who makes and keeps any list of privately owned firearms or their owners.
The bill (HB 155) provides for exceptions, such as the NRA's own membership lists, the state's list of people licensed to carry concealed weapons, and records pertaining to stolen guns - but for no more than 30 days after the weapon is recovered.
What's left? Mainly, to stop local police from keeping records of guns that make their way through pawn shops. Everything else that goes through a pawn shop goes, by law, into a state database in Tallahassee. Two years ago, however, the gun lobby cowed the Florida Department of Law Enforcement into erasing guns from that database after 48 hours. Now they're out to hobble local law enforcement as well.
When my colleague Steve Bousquet asked the NRA's Marion Hammer two years ago why police should track pawned TV sets but not guns, she answered, "Televisions don't have constitutional protections."
I don't recall ever hearing of a television set being used to rob, rape or kill someone, as firearms frequently are. But to the gun lobby, the greater danger lies in letting the government know which citizens own what guns. It harbors a paranoid fear of confiscation, one of the classic paranoias in American history.
A little touch of paranoia is not necessarily a bad thing. As James Madison put it,"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties." But I think the NRA is barking up the wrong tree. Gun confiscation would be such a fool's errand as to be the most remote of dangers. The so-called Patriot Act is a very clear and very present "experiment on our liberties." If John Ashcroft has his way there's more to follow. (To their credit, many NRA members oppose the Patriot Act.)
Democracies aren't subverted overnight. They die of the cumulative effect of a thousand cuts. Always, some external danger is the pretext for the destruction within.
What is most troubling about HB 155 is the phony history the "whereas" clauses cite as a pretext for criminalizing the keeping of lists. Supposedly, Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler both used gun registration "to confiscate firearms and render the disarmed population helpless. . . ."
Historians whom I consulted scoff at this. According to Dr. Cristoph Strupp of the German Historical Institute in Washington, Hitler actually liberalized Germany's gun laws, except for Jews and other "enemies of the state." But, he added, it would be "basically naive" and "a-historical" to think that owning guns "would have made any difference in their fate."
"There was virtually no resistance in Germany not because there weren't guns but because there was no will to resist," explained Dr. Nathan Stolzfus, an associate professor of history at Florida State University. "The clear majority in Germany received Hitler as he presented himself. . . ."
Dr. Louis A. Perez, a University of North Carolina professor of history who formerly taught at the University of South Florida, said that upon seizing power Castro actually distributed guns to the Cuban population, reversing course only when street crime became a problem.
If guns are ever confiscated in America, it will happen only long after we have surrendered other freedoms, as willingly as the Germans did, on some false altar of national security. And once again, it would be too late for guns to make a difference.
