The NRA believes that it can reach police officers with the message that “gun control is not crime control.” In Texas last month, the NRA developed and circulated an ad calling for new prisons, a cause dear to Texas cops. The NRA also publishes The Badge, a newsletter that covers police matters, circulated free to 145,000 officers and agencies around the country. The organization offers college scholarships to the children of police officers who are members of the NRA and has introduced a $25,000 life-insurance policy for officers killed on duty.
But has the damage been too severe to repair? The divisive issue has not simply been the NRA’s advocacy of the unhampered sale of handguns, so often used in robberies. The organization alienated police officers in the ’80s when it opposed legislation banning the sale of armor-piercing bullets, a danger to cops wearing bulletproof vests. And as foreign-made machine guns increasingly became the weapons of choice in big-city street wars, the NRA opposed any effort to curb their import and sale. “These battles made the NRA look like a fringe element way off on the right,” says DeLord.
Some of the NRA’s tactics have already backfired. Last summer the organization supported an opponent of gun control for the presidency of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, which has a membership of 230,000. The NRA admits to publishing a flattering profile of the candidate in The Badge, but it denies incumbent FOP president Dewey Stokes’s charges that the NRA financed lavish parties for his opponent at the national conference in Pittsburgh last August. In the end Stokes won by nearly a 3-1 margin. “They spent a lot of money to influence the election,” he says, “and it got some of our members upset.” In another controversial move, the NRA helped establish an entirely new police brotherhood last year. Growing out of an existing group of police officers within the NRA, the Law Enforcement Alliance of America in Falls Church, Va., has already recruited 15,000 cops. Opponents call the LEAA a “straw group” for the NRA, but the gun lobby says the charge is untrue. “We’ve given them some seed money,” says Jim Baker, an NRA spokesman in Washington, “but the LEAA stands on its own hind legs.”
Many police officers believe that the LEAA will become the key weapon in the NRA’s new strategy. “The NRA is going to have its straw groups say ‘We represent the police,’ to confuse the issue and the legislators,” says DeLord. One thing seems certain: it will take a lot of resistance to make the NRA back off. “We have been behind the eight ball,” says Baker, “and we’re trying to rectify that.” But ultimately neither the NRA nor the police will determine the future of gun control. It’s largely in the hands of people like George Hennard, who killed 23 people at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, last fall-and an American public sickened by so much bloodshed.
